Seth Price

Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2006

Zurich, Kunsthalle Zürich, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Josh Smith, Kelley Walker, 2006, p. 36, installation view

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although it fails to convey the fluorescent quality of the green apparent of the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a minute speck of superficial media accretion to the upper left edge towards the left corner. There are a few scuff marks in isolated places, which are inherent to the artist's working process. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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A post-conceptual artist concerned with the strategies of information and image dissemination, Seth Price has forged a multi-disciplinary practice that encompasses internet-circulated video, sculpture, sound, music and written texts. He engages in the art of appropriation though which the ephemera of consumer society is sampled to investigate issues of cultural production and recirculation. Composed of vacuum formed PVC, rope and fluorescent signage ink, Nailed to the Wall (Lascaux Horse) is archetypal of Price’s Baudrillard-inspired practice, and telescopes the issues surrounding the production and distribution of art itself.

This particular work was prominently shown in the company of Price’s peers Wade Guyton, Josh Smith and Kelley Walker in their seminal exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2006. Exhibited leaning against the wall, instead of nailed to it, this piece was accompanied by other similar works printed with the same motif sampled from the Palaeolithic artwork that adorns the famous Lascaux caves. Discovered in 1940 in Southwest France, these caves preserve one of the first instances of visual culture known to the history of art, dating back to between 17,000 and 15,000 BC. Aside from those exhibited in Zurich, this image recurs in a number of Price’s works, including the written piece Was Ist Los from 2003, in which the motif of the horse is serially repeated as a printed pattern. For Price, this motif is a powerful summation of his artistic aims owing to the true origin of the source image: Lascaux II. Lascaux II is a replica of the caves that were built in 1983 for tourist visits in an attempt to preserve the art in the original sites. In reference to Lascaux II Jean Baudrillard has commented that “it is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial” (Jean Baudrillard, Sheila Faria Glaser, trans., Simulacra and Simulation, Michigan 1994, p. 9). For Price therefore, the Lascaux II horse is a perfect art historical simulacrum ripe for sampling and reappropriation.

Printed onto vacuum formed PVC, the paleolithic outline of a horse is reduced to a stamp like register in lurid green ink. The use of vacuum-forming calls into question the role of packaging within today’s consumer society, which has become an underlying topic throughout Price’s oeuvre and is specifically mentioned in his publication Notes on this Show (2006). Packaging usually functions as both a protective outer casing for objects when they are distributed, as well as forming part of an object's display, used for advertising in the stimulation of consumer desire. Packaging has thus evolved from simply a protective function to forming an intrinsic part of product design. By appropriating the material and processes utilised in commercial packaging, Nailed to the Wall (Lascaux Horse) serves to confront commodity fetishism by ironically juxtaposing the distinctly hand crafted form of a prehistoric, galloping horse with a mass-manufactured synthetic polymer.

Working across a broad range of media – which to date has included sculptures, video, paintings, books, prints, music and music videos, vacuum-formed reliefs, and even a clothing line designed in collaboration with designer Tim Hamilton – Price’s work redefines the concept of appropriation to challenge the framework of contemporary art. Using innovative materials and technology, Price asks us to question the consumerist society that we live in by using the packaging that we would usually throw away to create a visually appealing, thought provoking and permanent work of art.