Is Nails On A Chalkboard Frisson

At a pupil business firm party in London some time in 2001, a boozed-upward stranger started talking to Thomas J Toll well-nigh a radical performance-art slice he'd heard nearly, one in which 'some guy licked the walls of a gallery for three days straight until his tongue was bleeding'. Information technology turned out that Price was the 'some guy' and that it was his claret and saliva that had accrued on the walls of that gallery.

And then a 20 year-former student at the Chelsea College of Art, Cost had booked a gallery space at the schoolhouse for a durational performance piece that was intended to get an invisible installation by the end, the only rest being the imperceptible coating of his saliva on the walls. Visitors were invited to stop by and gawp at the action through a gossamer sail of plastic. People did come to watch, and as Price stooped and craned his neck to brand contact with the wall, daubing a wet flannel as he moved along, his rima oris full of the iron gustatory modality of claret (he hadn't anticipated the bleeding) he recalls clearly, with anguish, the sounds of carousal that came from the surrounding studio spaces: 'There I was trying my hardest—mentally and physically I'm wearied—and people around me are laughing. And I but thought: This is my life.'

Thomas J Price, 2021. Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke

The artist's 2001 performance, 'Licked'

The performance was titled 'Licked'—the past tense intended to direct the viewer to the action of a body that had passed through the space. This was two years after Tracey Emin's blood-stained underwear was exhibited at the Tate as part of her installation 'My Bed,' and six years later on Franko B's cleansing bloodletting in his performance 'I'1000 Not Your Infant.' The previous yr Cost had seen 'Sonic Smash,' the Hayward Gallery'south big grouping show devoted to sound art, which had opened his eyes to the possibility that art could be an thought or an feel. Those were the halcyon days of the YBAs, who helped pave the way for working-grade artists to make it in an art earth that had long been rigged in favor of the few. 'Licked' resonated with the YBAs' signature shock tactics, only as Cost explains, he was less interested in provocation than in exploring the unconscious. 'Licked' was conceived equally an expression of presence in absence, of being in a room merely not being seen, also as a demonstration of a deep desire to connect, to become literally a part of a place and its concrete, material history. Although it is the but performance work that Cost has fabricated, it constituted a breakthrough, and has continued to shape his work and thinking to this solar day.

Twenty years later, I'm watching the video documentation of 'Licked,' and information technology still emanates a gut-wrenching power. It takes me back to my own experiences in 2001, as an bad-mannered fifteen-year-old, growing upward every bit a mixed-race adult female in a shithole in the southwest of England; an entirely different world from Price's babyhood spent in southeast London, where he was exposed to fine art from a young age and was well acquainted with galleries and museums. And however 'Licked' taps into something we shared: a desire to be believed. Watching Price lick walls is an excruciating sensation, similar nails on a chalkboard. It'south the way that the rhythm of the unproblematic, repeated gesture becomes stronger and more emphatic as he breaks down, depleting himself. Information technology'southward an effective metaphor for the crisis of the human status—what Camus meant by the dialectic of absurdism, that the more desperate we are in searching for meaning, the more we discover there is none. In its raw, sensual urgency 'Licked' is an attempt to bridge the unbearable void between language and meaning, to find a visual class for the subliminal.

'[Price's sculptures] are Duboisian representations of misrepresentation, psychological portraits of the white psyche.'

In Somerset, 'Thoughts Unseen' presents two decades of works by Price. Photo: Ken Adlard

The serial of figural sculptures Price has fabricated since 2013, 'Network' (2013), 'Within the Folds' (2020) and 'The Altitude Within' (2021) now installed in Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, monumental in scale and stature but equally intimate in feeling as 'Licked,' are frequently misread as the very thing they critique: the harmful stereotyping and persistent profiling of Blackness men. But these are not representations of athletes, as they're often misinterpreted. They are amalgams fatigued from the essentially abusive images of people of colour in the public realm, a history that reaches back to ancient statuary. They are Duboisian representations of misrepresentation, psychological portraits of the white psyche. For united states of america, the others, they are also affirmations, allowing the states to imagine what information technology would exist like to inhabit space neutrally without the frisson of deviation that fizzes around our bodies when we footstep into white-ascendant spaces. They are nuanced statements nearly simply existence. While information technology's incommunicable to ignore the politics inherent in whatsoever figurative piece of work seen within a systemically racist society, to view depictions of people of color simply through the prism of race reflects the same issue of endemic racism. In fact, when Price is most explicit about racism, it'due south in his abstruse works, the luxurious polished bronze 'Ability Object (Section 1, No 1)'—a directly reference to the police's power to terminate and search any person they suspect of carrying unsafe or prohibited items—in other words, the ability to detect threat in abstruse form. The overly large, lumpen ridiculousness of the sculpture parodies the Modernist sculptures of white male artists, reimagined from the knowing perspective of someone who has experienced the malevolence of objectification.

Though Price hasn't returned to operation, performativity—exposing by showing the moments where the mask drops—remains important in all of his works. In his stop-motion 'Man' series (2005 – 2012), he explored the inner workings of the soul that surface in the eyes; each film portrays a male protagonist, a head moulded in plasticine, the merely move beingness the blinking and shifting eyes. Each of these men is in one case again a blended, generically titled by number, but they are based on Price's observations of existent men when they weren't enlightened of being watched: a hotshot gallerist spied in his office, staring into infinite; a gentleman lost in thought while eating on the jitney. With his intense focus on facial expressions, middle movements and the emotions they evoke, Cost digs deeper into the subconscious, suggesting that 'freedom is to not have to pretend,' equally he puts it.

'When he asks in his sculptures 'What if, instead of celebrating excellence, we acknowledge the ordinary?' he turns the grand gesture of the monument on its head.'

Thomas J Toll, Ability Object (Section 1, No.one), 2018 © Thomas J Price. Photo: Damian Griffiths

I see Price as aligned with feminist ideals, in that his works reflect the emancipatory outcome art can accept. In his focus on the construction of male identity, his work is anti-patriarchal as well as beingness anti-imperialist, and he has recently begun to work with women figures, too. When he asks in his sculptures 'What if, instead of jubilant excellence, we acknowledge the ordinary?' he turns the k gesture of the monument on its caput. The statue gains the ability to exist liberated from its by, 'non having to be something spectacular in order just to be seen equally marginally valuable, or marginally okay,' as Price says. They are indeed sometimes spectacular in their size: the 12ft bronze sculpture kickoff installed in Somerset, 'All In' (2021) towers in a higher place the viewer, but in doing and so it does not propose that dominating space is a solution to being understood. In their making, the sculptures speak partly in the language of sculpture's past. Price employs the classical arts and crafts of lost wax casting, whereby molten metallic is poured into a mold made with a wax model that melts and drains away. But the pieces function as something beyond markers of craft and career and monumentality.

The vitality in the piece of work lives in its attention. In a highly networked globe of crossed wires and mixed messages, pithy captions and comments, truncated texts and disembodied voices, Price'southward piece of work tries to re-establish human contact and context. In 'From the Basis Upwardly' (2016), a 26-minute dual-screen video work in which Price tends to his shoes, from Nike trainers to leather dress brogues, he acknowledges that in a consumer-lead, material culture, such objects have a talismanic quality. The repetitive, meditative issue of cleaning and lacing shoes evolves into a meditation on the ways in which we create value for ourselves inside the oppression. For me, the footwear can also be coded, signaling classism and racism. Past dismantling the conventions of advice, the subliminal messages, signs and symbols, Price renders the machinations of lodge visible to all. In because him, another existentialist thinker comes readily to mind, Italo Calvino, who wrote that 'everything can change, only non the language that we carry inside us, like a world more than sectional and final than 1's mother'south womb.' Price's entire body of work reflects profound empathy for people who must numb their truth in club to survive, and in doing then it comprehends that language inside.

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Thomas J Price'south get-go exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, 'Thoughts Unseen,' is in Somerset, 2 Oct 2021 – three Jan 2022. View 'Thomas J Price: Witness' presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem, at Marcus Garvey Park NY, 2 October 2021 – 2 Oct 2022.

Source: https://www.hauserwirth.com/ursula/34935-frisson-difference-sculpture-thomas-j-price/

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