Seth Price

Untitled Film: Right

Electronic Arts Intermix, ongoing

If a show hangs in a forest and nobody sees it, is it art? “The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution,” wrote Marcel Broodthaers. To drive home his point, the Belgian conceptualist converted his house into a fictional museum in 1968, with empty crates, postcards of 19th-century paintings and—at the opening and closing—a moving truck parked outside. The vehicles of distribution are more streamlined for Seth Price, but, like Broodthaers, Price has a thing for dispersion.

The 33-year-old artist’s second solo show has three venues: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art and video distributor Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Films, paintings (via digital downloads), prints, vacuum-formed objects and text all put in an appearance; Spaulings will also host a launch of Price’s new book. At EAI, you need an appointment to screen the new video, Digital Video Effects: “Editions.” The ten-minute visual mix-tape is compiled from his earlier works, though Price rattles the authorial “his” by including clips appropriated from Martha Rosler and Joan Jonas. (In a fitting twist, Rosler’s footage was lifted from television commercials.) A partial inventory of imagery: dancing cats, grated cheese, civic violence, Richard Serra, video-game audio effects and a roiling ocean.

If it sounds convoluted, it is. But it’s also funny, disturbing, visually engrossing in places (humdrum in others) and highly ambitious. Say what you like about theory hijacking contemporary art, but most New York galleries are having a market-driven, middlebrow moment and we need all the intelligent resistance we can muster. Is it problematic that Price is resisting in two of the commercial art world’s most fashionable boutiques? Maybe. Then again, Broodthaers put his museum up for sale at an art fair. As Philip K. Dick wrote, “To fight the empire is to be infected by its derangement.”

The form that most interests Price is ephemeral: the moving image and its migration from film to videotape to that mecca of dispersion, cyberspace. Along the way, he topples aesthetic hierarchies. Digital Video Effects: “Editions.” has been transferred to 16mm for Untitled Film: Left. at Spaulings, converting an unlimited edition into an “original” source. The ocean, which appears briefly at EAI and Spaulings, rolls for 15 minutes in another 16mm work, Untitled Film: Right., at Petzel. Not a drop of saltwater was involved—the dark sea is constructed completely from code. It’s a five-second, computer-generated clip, which Price purchased online and repeated 150 times for the film. Real or not, the ominous ocean, which shifts colors like a chameleon, is totally captivating—a black-light Caspar David Friedrich, with the viewer standing in for the lone figure.

The most provocative image in Price’s first show, at Spaulings in 2004, was the one you couldn’t see: Stacks of black compact discs each contained a video still, retrieved from the Internet, of an American hostage in Iraq being beheaded. At Petzel, that invisible image materializes in the form of its doppelgänger: Caravaggio’s 1597 painting of David brandishing a sword in one hand and the severed head of Goliath in the other. The dark scene is reproduced in nine etchings on black paper that line the gallery walls, each titled after an internet address where a photo of the painting is posted.

In the Spaulings show (the first in the gallery’s new space which, until five months ago, housed a brothel), Price exhibits two rectangular vacuum-formed pieces—one silk-screened with handwritten notes. It’s a clever idea—a vacuum, like cyberspace, is absent of matter and lending it form embodies a paradox. But the objects are visually inert; looking for clues in Price’s notes is what’s engaging. Here, his self-referential project runs the risk of becoming a closed system like Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail—the alchemical symbol for mercury, an element that disperses in futility if it isn’t restrained.