Elizabeth Price’s “Dexterous Facility”: An Anarchival Impulse?

This article has been peer reviewed.

From Abby Warburg’s art project Mnemosyne Atlas¹ to art documentaries such as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953), film montage has provided conceptual itineraries for museums and collections, with juxtaposition creating new imaginative knowledge of the past. In the more recent cinematic turn of the 1990s, in which first gallery films and then projected installations crowded the art world, it seemed as if roles were reversed, with museums providing reflective/reflexive spaces for thinking about the history of cinema.² Gradually though contemporary moving image artists have strayed back into museum collections and archives, re-organising, remaking and renovating the past; notable examples include Peter Greenaway, Isaac Julien and Camille Henrot, with juxtaposition superseded by conjunction, alluding to spatio-temporal dimensions.³ In this essay I consider how Elizabeth Price’s work fits within these past and present histories of moving image artists in the archive. 

Since roughly 2005, across more than a dozen moving image installations, Price has been invited into archives on the premise that she will scrutinize architecture, artefacts, documents, drawings and plans. Her objects and subjects may be diverse but when it comes to putting together her installations Price’s signature move recurs. In the editing, at a key unifying point during the unfolding of her percussive montage, there is a moment when something goes awry and we find ourselves in a twisted or skewed universe set off-centre from the itinerary we appeared to be taking. As I will discuss, often this twist is facilitated by a literal or figurative flick of the wrist. At the point at which the twist or skew occurs, we stray from the standard collections towards elements such as advertising copy for women’s make-up; musical performances; news footage; digital records of relics; and the patterns for men’s ties and carpets. I will argue that in Price’s work what makes obscure traces into a new collection is a “dexterous facility” as a chorus of administrators puts it in the two channel installation A Restoration (2016). Price’s dexterous facility is as attentive to the social and political histories of the making of gesture as it is to the roles and responsibilities involved in the gesture of making – which can be taken in this context to include collecting, archiving and displaying.

Price’s montage leads us away from the archives that invited her in to their collections, but what does it lead us towards? There are several answers to this question; in order to explore them I will focus upon three representative installations: The House of Mr. X (2007, single screen 20mins) The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012, single screen 20mins) and A Restoration (2016, two channels, 15mins). Whilst it is not named in the video itself The House of Mr. X is based in the Stanley Picker House on Kingston Hill, London. The house was designed and built in 1968 by architect Kenneth Wood and commissioned by Picker to display a significant collection of 20th century art, including works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Jacob Epstein. The video is set up as if it is a guided tour using photographs of the house. A choir’s hand claps and finger snaps accompany the images, along with a silent narrator, whose “textual voice”⁴ is present through on-screen text. These aural and textual hosts conspire together to lead us away from the surface appearances of an art collection, towards neglected feminine histories.

At The House of Mr X (2007). Installation view at the exhibition A Long Memory, The Whitworth, Manchester, 2019-2020. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

The tour takes us through an anonymous, architecturally stylish house (officially belonging to Mr. X whom the choir, in melodramatic fashion, calls Mr. Blue). The visuals, largely photographs, draw attention to lustrous surfaces and luxurious materials. The text offers precise fine art catalogue-like descriptions of the architecture and artworks: “adjacent chromed steel dining chairs by Mies van der Rohe, the mechanics of youth by Barry Walton in bronze, Lamorna by Dennis Mitchell, on a Marcel Bauer occasional table and on the lacquered wood table by Vico Magistretti, untitled by Xavier Corbero, in polished Belgian marble.” Following these descriptions, we experience the twist, as the narrator continues “…afforded first, like all these things, with the proceeds of Transatlantic cosmetic brands Outdoor Girl, Mary Quant and Miners.” 

The House of Mr X. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

The text now begins to describe make-up products: “the softest shades in every finish, Matt, Pearlise and Brilliant Glaze.” Thus, we become aware that Price has created “a kind of locale that is ideological”⁵ in which we are invited to compare two visual “economies”: the art market and make-up marketed to women. In this case the twist that occurs juxtaposes high (by implication masculine) culture with feminine culture; worlds that we would assume to be far apart. Descending from the discerning decorum and reserved vocabulary of art we find ourselves hailed, as Louis Althusser would have it,⁶ as consumers and persuaded to indulge in the most modern, muted, glossy, glimmery makeup series. Acting like an art collection, the series promises to help us transcend the wrinkles of time. 

The House of Mr X. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

The House of Mr X. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

In The Woolworths Choir of 1979 Price constructs a fabric of relations that includes even more twisted associations, as hand claps and finger snaps actually materialise in the footage itself. The single channel video combines three elements, the first is an illustrated lecture on the architecture of a gothic church choir/quire: “this is a choir, also known as a quire,” featuring the same textual voice as in The House of Mr X. The second element is degraded video footage of several girl bands including the Shangri-Las singing Out in the Streets (1965), and the third concerns news clips of a fatal fire at a branch of Woolworth’s in Manchester in 1979. Grey scale archival illustrations, models, and contemporary pictures and photos of choirs/quires, are combined with flickering and fragmented video footage of performances, and black and white on location interviews and eye witness images. Once again then, we experience different visual economies.

The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012). Installation view at the exhibition, Here, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2012. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

While the twist in The House of Mr X was figurative and revealed an ideology, in The Woolworths Choir of 1979 it is literal and it instead leads us “inside a system of ideas”⁷ regarding the creation of a religious space. The tour of the choir/quire that opens the video takes in the different areas of the church. Descriptions of the various kinds of carvings: tracery, trefoil, quatrefoil and ogee, echo the technical language for art collections in The House of Mr X. Then, on the floor of the choir the textual voice points out sepulchral effigies, “whole human figures which lie recumbent but with an animated attitude, the greatest expression confined to a conspicuous twist of the right wrist.” Throughout this description Price intercuts footage of the effigy with that of the Shangri-La’s syncopated dance moves, as if populating the choir/quire with this chorus of dancers/singers. Finally, she invites a second audience in through sound and image editing that percussively repeats the twisting hand movements. The effect of the editing is such that we perceive the gestures as haunting the news footage from the Woolworths fire. Played repeatedly, we see the fleeting raised hand of an eye witness, who is referring our gaze upwards. The witness declares “we know how it went up,” as they point to where the second floor tragedy took place. Thus, Price contorts the choir/quire such that it becomes a place for witnessing and re-enacting the story of a tragedy.

The Woolworths Choir of 1979. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

A Restoration combines the strategies already described, thereby achieving both the highlighting of an ideological locale and an introduction to a system of ideas. It consists of a 15 minute, two channel video installation drawing on the archives of The Ashmolean museum’s second Keeper, archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941). Evans was responsible for excavating the Minoan palace complex at Knossos on the island of Crete. The House of Mr X featured photographs of the rooms and collection, while The Woolworths Choir of 1979 made use of diagrams and books. Building on these two, in A Restoration evidence takes the form of Evans’ collection of drawings, plans, photographs and artefacts. Additionally a textual voice, described as “the administrators,” combines these elements with digitised photographs of objects (especially decorated ceramics) from the Ashmolean’s collections. 

A Restoration (2016). Installation view at the exhibition Life Inside an Image Monash University, Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2016. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

The chorus of administrators, who both “talk” as narrators and “write” text on screen, adopt strategies to keep their repetitive work interesting, thus:

Through conscientious attention to its repetitive procedures, we have developed a dexterous facility, at the keyboard, with the mouse – and this has permitted a slight, but expressive variation in the flows of our work. From time to time we neatly extend our middle fingers a little further than is necessary. We flex our wrists, roll our thumbs, and discretely copy selected files into another location. 

As with the seamless linguistic hinge in Mr. X, which teleports us from the world of art to that of makeup, and the uncanny afterimage of the raised hands in The Woolworths Choir, which entangle popular music performance and social tragedy, the administrators’ disruptive hand flex provokes a twist that places us on a forked path. In this case, whilst we may have expected to learn about Evans’ restoration of Knossos, instead two other fictional spaces are fleshed out by the administrators. Both spaces place emphasis on elements that would be overlooked by institutions intent upon preserving and reconstructing the past. The first space is, obtusely, organic: a garden, imagined via the many flowers and plants decorating the ceramics. The garden is described through language and shown in editing that dances and flows in lively ways: “Graphic foliation has put forth bold new leaves on the stem’s ancient design … sepals and petals unfurl in novel symmetry and shapely filaments sprout, all with the swift glide of a loaded nib.” 

A Restoration. Courtesy of Elizabeth Price Studio.

The second space imagined by the administrators is more complex, and even perverse. Evans’ purpose was to restore a ruin, a task that fits the preservative ideology of the archive. Yet by contrast, the administrators instead fixate upon broken things such as clay figures which, they observe, “may have been formed and some might have been fractured to make a contract,” they go further in their gesticulations, pin-pointing how “if these things were broken they were broken not for the sight of the break – but for the sound, for its sharp percussive alarm, announcing a change, in the law, of the world.” A Restoration ends with a rumble, followed by clattering sounds of breakage rising to a crescendo, which signals Price’s successful excavation of existing collections to uncover ideas that simply find no place in the archive.

In sum, across these three installations, Price’s dexterous facility for twisting, contorting and warping histories brings other stories, memories, and events to the fore. These other stories are ones which do not exist in official places for collection, cataloguing and remembering, they exist instead in mediated forms: television, film and video footage, photographs, language and gesture, or else they have to be invented by thinking of the collection otherwise. These stories are peripatetic, ephemeral and even unrecorded, and they require montage, association and imagination to bring them to our attention.

Ironically then, despite Price’s repeated prestigious invitations to work in and with archives and collections the resulting works, with the other stories that she brings to our attention, are anarchival. They are anarchival first in a literal sense, because they have not and cannot be archived. Archein means “to begin” but also: “to be the first, to lead something or somebody.” Archos stands for the origin, the beginning; but it also refers to the leader. The kinds of firsts, and origins that archives preserve cannot accommodate the feminine consumer culture of make-up, the fleeting gesture of a witness to a tragedy or the restoration of the sound of clay figures breaking to make a contract. Because they challenge our sense of the codes and conventions of the collectible, Price’s stories are anarchival in a second sense. Close to twenty years ago, in 2004, Hal Foster discerned an archival impulse at work internationally in contemporary art. In a throwaway comment Foster also admits that because this tendency is “concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces” perhaps “anarchival impulse”⁸ is the more appropriate phrase.  

Adapting Foster’s inflection, Price’s stories are definitely obscured when viewed through the orderly and evidential lens of archives and museums, which is why they require an associational twist to be revealed. One way of thinking of this twist is provided by Siegfried Zielinski, who has also written on the anarchival. He asserts that the prefix an- when placed in front of archive “unhinges the latter” and he throws out the archive’s emphasis upon an ordered classification and taxonomy, using the term to describe a practice that follows a “logic of plurality and wealth of variants, and that is particularly suited to handle events and movements; that is, time-based sensations.”⁹ Clearly Price’s sensual evocation of make-up colours, reactions to the scene of a tragedy and sounds of breaking fit Zielinski’s parameters.

Once we consider the possibilities of the anarchive we can begin to better understand the contradictions of Price’s practice: it begins with visits to and intense study in archives, yet she uses what she finds – the expert images and descriptions of art works in a house museum; photographs of a medieval choir/quire with its intricate parts; an archaeologist’s drawings – to transport us to other stories that do not, indeed could not exist in archives. In the resulting installations actual material objects from the archive are nowhere to be seen, and instead Price presents us with their mediated traces, traces which lead us not back to the collections themselves but instead to a parallel universe, consisting of histories, events or, in the case of A Restoration, complete mischievous fabrications.

On the one hand, the archive or collection is central to Price’s practice, and to an extent she puts it to use in these three films: The House of Mr X recreates a visit to a collection for which we have an expert guide to show us around, who knows all the right language to use to describe the art. The Woolworths Choir begins with a mock academic lecture on the medieval choir/quire in churches, using published photographs and diagrams as evidence of its ritual elements. While A Restoration exposes us to the cataloguing process for a collection. Thus, Price makes use of the expectations we have for the usage of collections and the work that is involved in their assemblage and maintenance. 

Yet on the other hand, Price’s attitude somewhat challenges the codes and conventions surrounding collections, accordingly, she has said: “I’m not trying to tiptoe in and out of the archive and I’m not intervening.”¹⁰ Here we can return to and re-examine the way she foregrounds the lexicon of words and phrases, intonations and modes of address that constitute a system. Most frequently, Price distils these systems down into dense descriptions. In our three examples we can think of descriptions such as in The House of Mr X: the “adjacent chromed steel dining chairs.” In The Woolworths Choir of 1979 we encounter the technical terms for the decorative elements of the quire “each row is elevated in succession … they are decorated with foliate carving with tracery based on the trefoil,” while in A Restoration, in Arthur Evans’ plans we encounter clay channels and chutes, dwellings and chambers, even as the administrators’ flexed wrists “gathers all the fauna into clusters and set out groves and arbours.”

Price’s adoption of the language from various visual economies reiterates and reinforces a system; in such a way she responds to the Foucauldian definition of the archive as, effectively, the sayable. In Foucault’s words the archive: “is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” It also “reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and the transformation of statements.”¹¹ With Foucault’s understanding of the archive in place – as governing that which is sayable – we can return to my opening observation that, at some stage in her work things go awry, with a twist (often of the wrist, or a click of the fingers or mouse). 

The twist plays an important part in what Price’s montage leads us towards. For we can think of Price’s manoeuvre as bringing the rules of the archive to bear upon anarchival objects, events or even sensations. Price invites us in to the archive, the house museum, the choir/quire, Knossos rather than staging her encounters outside it for a reason, it is because that invitation sets up a particular disposition. We expect to be looking at many different objects, we expect to be guided, by wall text or labels, as to how those objects hold particular values and have been saved, if you like, as indexes to particular histories that are perceived to be important.  

In Price’s installations as we find our way slowly with an air of interest and studiousness through the (an)archive, we can imagine opening drawers or encountering displays. And in Price’s (an)archive what we find, perhaps in a bottom drawer or less prominent display cabinet, are artefacts from the linguistic history of the advertising of makeup. In one drawer: “Miners are for moderns” in another “your face is your inheritance, treasure it with time machinery” in a third, the phrases “muted colours … the softest shades in every finish for lip shine glossy as lacquer.” Separated out as these phrases are, as if they were specimens, in our studious mood we may pause to consider the values they imply and their place in a history not merely of advertising and consumer culture, but more widely of visual description.  Similarly, to give another example, in a drawer containing the terms: “foliate carving, tracery and trefoil” we may find the phrase “we know how it went up” and maybe we pause to conjure the gestures that could have accompanied this declaration.

Hence, by following Price into the archive and interrogating her use of what she finds there, we have discovered that the space of the archive orients us – to scrutinize and be aware – in particular ways. What Price does is place anarchival elements in front of us in that space, so that we treat them through the same disposition. Yet again though, we find that there is more to be said about Price’s manoeuvre. Because in following an itinerary led by the sayable we leave behind us, at the threshold, hanging in the door, the key to our entry: her formal and spatial strategies. These will form the final part of my analysis and discussion.

Foucault’s exploration of the sayable, or of ideological systems that inform and restrict what can be enunciated, offers an effective way of conceiving of the inside and outside of the archive. Yet in order to consider Price’s formal and spatial strategies we need to enter the realm of the seeable in the context of moving images in art spaces. There are several different ways of thinking about the visual equivalent of the sayable: the seeable. It can be approached via questions around who is allowed to look and who is looked at – in other words, the gaze; it can form an entrance into aesthetic debates about visibility and invisibility and the limits of visuality, and it can open up towards the question of representation and who has and has not been subject to it. These are all areas familiar to film studies scholars. Yet with the added dimension of the seeable when moving images inhabit art spaces, we also need to consider the dispositives of display that are a key part of galleries and museums. To do so, we can consider some examples beyond the work of Price.

My first example comes from filmmaker turned installation artist, Peter Greenaway. In the early 1990s, before he began making meandering installations for museums, Greenaway was invited into various archives to curate collections; three examples will suffice. In 1991 he created the exhibition The Physical Self from the collections of the Boymans Van Beuningen Museum and 100 Objects to Represent the World held in the Semper Depot and Hofburg Palace, to celebrate 300 years of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1993 the exhibition Some Organizing Principles at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Swansea included a selection of Greenaway’s own paintings, alongside 800 historical artefacts borrowed from the rural and industrial museum collections of South Wales.

Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self (1991). Exhibition view at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, 1991. Courtesy of Peter Greenaway.

Overwhelmingly these three examples show how Greenaway understands the museum to offer a space for a certain theatrical kind of display. Accordingly, he creates a grand mise-en-scène by, for example, working with his regular costume designers: Ben van Os and Jan Roelfs to set and dress the galleries. David Pascoe writes that The Physical Self exhibited Greenaway’s obsession with the materiality of art and examined, with precision, the relationship between the representation of the body and the role of the museum.¹² Exhibits relating to the human figure were arranged in a strict chronological order, from conception, through the stages of youth and adulthood, culminating in senility. Greenaway also mixed in objects and artefacts created for the intimate touch of the human body – hand and mouth utensils, glasses and objects and images that exhibited the subtle traces of the human body, such as thumbprints. Drama derived from the way in which each trace was picked out with the beam from a powerful spotlight.

For Greenaway, then, what is seeable in the museum is a kind of simultaneity, with the multiple displays acting almost like multiple screens or theatrical stages. A decade later, this multiplicity will be better served thanks to the improvement of projection technology, facilitating the multi-screen installations of Jane and Louise Wilson, Stan Douglas and, our second example, Isaac Julien.

Through lighting and staging, Greenaway creates an itinerary for his visitor viewer involving moving and stopping, not unlike how he structures his films’ narratives. For British artist Isaac Julien, flânerie through museum collections takes place on screen via fictional characters who invite us to explore, taking us, via artworks, from one historical moment to another in a fluctuating – that is, irregular and varying – way. Julien’s multi-screen aesthetic  has been put to use across a number of collections, with examples including Wilberforce House in Hull, devoted to the history of slavery; the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, a house museum of artefacts collected by the eccentric architect of the Bank of England whose fortune resulted partly from the slave trade, and, in Baltimore, the Walters Art Museum and Great Blacks in Wax Museum. 

As these examples may indicate, Julien is particularly interested in histories of the black diaspora. He explores the museum space as a politically contested site in which the archive functions as a repository for colonial histories. Julien’s starting point is very much with what can be seen and he contrasts private desires and fantasies with more public histories. For example, The Attendant (1993) sets the scene for several museum-films to follow. It uses paintings and other art from the museum as inspiration for the sexual fantasies aroused in a middle-aged black male museum guard – or attendant – by a young white male visitor. Much of the action takes place after closing time. As the guard paces the galleries, a huge 19th century painting titled Slaves on the West Coast of Africa by the French artist François-Auguste Biard comes to life, its melodramatic scene of a white master bending over a dying black slave transformed into an up-to-date, leather clad sadomasochistic grouping. Seven years after The Attendant, Vagabondia (2000) joins Baltimore (2003), forming a kind of trilogy of multi-screen installations taking place in museums, all of which take the broad terrain of black histories as their background. In each, Julien’s interest is in re-inhabiting these museum spaces with fantastic and desiring figures to create imaginary narratives out of existing images and artefacts.

Isaac Julien, Baltimore (2003). Installation view at Espace 315 – Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2005. Courtesy of Isaac Julien Studio.

On screen and in frame then Julien’s strategies are similar to those of Price. He starts from what is there, from the sayable. When he enters the archive we can also imagine him opening drawers, what he adds to them is the private lives of the supporting characters he finds in paintings and artefacts. While Price accomplishes this with a twist, Julien’s manoeuvre involves the crossing of various histories and characters, that is also a crossing out.¹³ This crossing relies particularly upon a fragmented spectatorship, divided between anything from two to nine screens. Crucially, what Julien adds produces combinations of imagery that alter the studious attentive disposition that I attributed to how we are oriented in the archive. We observe, but we are also called upon to feel and lose ourselves, experiencing the sensuous pleasures offered by Julien’s sumptuous tableau and desiring figures. But in addition, what he wants to make seeable is a history interconnected by racism, as spatialisation allows him to criss-cross the stories he finds in the archive with others from the black diasporan past, to thereby complicate the segregated, setting apart of the archival.

Somewhat combining Greenaway’s and Julien’s approaches, is Camille Henrot’s single screen installation, Grosse fatigue (2013) created during a Smithsonian artist research fellowship program. Like Greenaway, Henrot honours the accumulative impulse of the archive – or the many drawers – as she digs into its vast collections to pull together such objects and specimens as animal skeletons and carved figurines, with footage she shot in offices and collection storage rooms. Like Julien, she is fascinated by an associational shape for thought, yet unlike him Henrot frames the collection in relation to the computer desktop, opening and closing windows to simulate the intensive acts of searching for knowledge, answers to questions and distraction from boredom that we all undertake in that vernacular space.

Camille Henrot, Grosse fatigue (2013). Courtesy of the artist, Silex Films, Mennour (Paris) and Hauser & Wirth. © ADAGP Camille Henrot.

Grosse fatigue has been described as a Wunderkammer of and for the Internet era, and it certainly asks us to think about the relations between the display cabinet and desktop space. Henrot characterises her structuring of the video as “an experience of density itself,”¹⁴ a comment that appears ironic given the consistent emphasis on surface that we associated with the desktop. In light of Henrot’s words, the seeable appears to be compromised in her installation by the endlessness and chaotic array of images.

To summarise this detour through three examples: in the 1990s, before the current renaissance of artist moving image in galleries, when Greenaway enters the archive, he is interested in the possibility of simultaneity, of seeing things in the same space and making connections. A decade later, Julien has at his disposal the spatiotemporal multilinearity of gallery films and installations. His itinerary is associational, drawing into relation histories that may have been segregated by the archive. Finally, a decade ago, drawing not from cinema or installation art but from the newest dispositif of the desktop, when Henrot enters the archive she is paralysed by the endlessness of collecting, which compromises the seeable, creating a chaotic assemblage of images.

Simultaneity, relationality and assemblage; these are the aesthetic priorities we discover in the artistic moving image practices of Greenaway, Julien and Henrot. What art spaces add to the seeable for these moving image artists, Price included, is the capacity to create connections across disparate material. For Greenaway, these connections include museum collections and his own mise-en-scène; for Julien, the black histories that have been collected in museums and imagined scenarios for black male desire; for Henrot, images and artefacts to be found in collections and those appearing on desktops; for Price, the various archival objects and the anarchival traces that her twisted detour reveals. Yet in contrast to Greenaway, Julien and Henrot, Price’s representation of the archive is heavily mediated. Unlike Greenaway, she is not interested in displaying actual collections in the space of the installation, in fact any sense of the physical materiality or presence of what she finds in collections is absent. Unlike Julien, she does not re-enact scenes using real bodies, instead everything present is copied: photos of a house collection; pages from a book on the gothic choir/quire; drawings from Evans’ collection. Finally, unlike Henrot, the seeming endlessness of collections does not compromise the sayable, instead, the volume of artefacts Price discovers allows new statements to arise out of the patterns that accumulate. 

To close this discussion of Price’s twisted anarchival impulse it feels appropriate to recreate the experience of standing in the space she creates. Because only by experiencing her work can its acoustic and phenomenal impact be conveyed. Visiting the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand one cold crisp June day in 2018, I make my way downstairs to an underground gallery, home to A Restoration. Here, in the climax to the video, I find that everything is breaking. As photos of damaged and ruined objects appear and disappear on the image-track, a dense soundtrack weaves throbbing electronic melody with the sound of an automated female narrator whose words appear as the textual voice, amongst other automated voices in the background. “We have built,” the voice proclaims, “a space that is shaped like a lovely cochlea – that spiral shaped cavity of the ear.” With a deep vibrating crash and then a tinkle, cups fall from tables. The two channels go black, leaving on screen the text “that spiral shaped cavity of the ear,” for just a few seconds before photos reappear. At such moments, Price’s contribution to Zielinski’s idea that the anarchival is particularly suited to handle events, movements and time-based sensations is most apparent. In the dark, confronted by a rising crescendo of soundtrack that is then paused by a black screen, I am most aware of my own cochlea, throbbing from stimulation. 

Hence, we discover a few final contortions brought about by Price’s “dexterous facility”, or, the twist by hand. Across examples from Warburg, Resnais and Marker, Greenaway, Julien, and Henrot we are led on itineraries through the museum and archive that move us via strategies of re-combination, re-contextualisation, simultaneity, relationality and assemblage. In comparison, in Price’s installations we find a layering of itineraries, taking us from external institutions to proximate bodies. First, archival spaces are re-created through photographic copies of one sort or another. Second, percussive sound and image editing warp these spaces – a house museum, a choir/quire, a Greek temple – into a kind of locale that is ideological. Third, absent bodies are returned to these spaces in the form of those “hailed”¹⁵ by the advertising language of make up, those united – in their dancing or pointing – via a conspicuous twist of the wrist and those taking part in aural contractual arrangements, sealed by the sound of breaking. The final space is reserved for viewers.

For us Price’s installations build a space for reflection upon how social and political histories are hiding in the archive, and how we may need to relentlessly pursue the faintest of visual and sonic traces in order to bring them into view.

Endnotes