Real Talk - Seventeen

13^th January – 13^th February 2010

Seth Price
Aleksandra Domanovic
Marjolijn Dijkman
Samuel Beckett

A riff on the themes explored in his solo exhibition Versions, as much as a show of ‘influences’, Oliver Laric presents Real Talk – a basement space group show featuring works by Seth Price, Aleksandra Domanovic, Marjolijn Dijkman and Samuel Beckett.

Seth Price’s Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance (2003) is a composition of visual and audio elements purportedly abandoned by the artist during the production of other works. Sound and voice-over are interlaced with images culled from advertising, corporate reels, amateur home pages and video games. Via this method Price explores a concatenation of themes ranging from the history of experimental cinema to the social naturalisation of violence. Rejected or Unused Clips, Arranged in Order of Importance operates as an indexical challenge to artistic discrimination (where the difference between that which is cut and that which is used in a work is temporarily inversed). Equally, by centralising the idea of ‘importance’, Price raises the question of coherence between the disparate elements that make up his film.

In Aleksandra Domanovic’s Anhedonia* the audio content from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) (a film with next to no incidental music) is superimposed onto stock still and moving images from the Getty Images archive. On a semantic level, the fixed score or code of Annie Hall (as a well known and appreciated movie) is reordered. Using the original soundtrack of the film as a script, Domanovic swaps one layer of visual information with another. In doing so she produces a new object, one that oscillates between literal sense and allegory (while on occasions also being totally obtuse). In essence the possibility of Domanovic’s re-ordering is facilitated by the existence of such a thing as the Getty archive; an imposing glut of information (with over 70 million still images and 30,000 hours of stock footage) that is indicative not only of an ultimate excess at the level of the contemporary image, but also of the capacity of those such images to stand in as ‘over-interpretations’ of any given situation (here Annie Hall).

Marjolijn Dijkman’s Wandering through the Future (2007) is an hour-long compilation of cinematic depictions of the future. On route through time we encounter a multitude of projected scenarios involving natural disasters, utopian/dystopian cities, viruses and clones. The result is a film that is as much a confrontation with the possible destiny of the human race as it is a dérive through the apocryphal imagination of science-fiction cinema.

Quad (1981) is a movement play described simply by its author Samuel Beckett as “[a] piece for four players, light and percussion”. Quad follows a strict geometric code – four individuals shifting around a defined area according to a set pattern and accompanied by percussion. A sort of geometrical mime, Quad evokes a world of emotionless ritual and repetition where people go through prescribed movements that are, in effect, meaningless.

*In psychoanalysis, anhedonia is determined as an inability to experience satisfaction from normally pleasurable life events. Allen had intended it to be the original title of Annie Hall, before realising how difficult marketing a film with that title would be.