Elizabeth Price (born 6 November 1966) is a British contemporary artist working primarily in digital moving image who won the Turner Prize in 2012.[1] She is known for short films which explore the social and political histories of artefacts, architectures and documents. Her arresting moving-image works are widely regarded for the interplay of the visual and aural. Finger clicks, claps and samples of vocal harmonies are used to provide rhythms that structure the narration and create urgent, ritualistic undertones. They have been described as ‘rapturous, addictive, virtually artspeak-resistant’,[2] 'mysterious, mesmerising - and utterly original'.[3]
In 2011 Price was awarded Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the University of Oxford and British School at Rome, where she realised The Woolworths Choir of 1979. The video was shown at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead in 2012, in a solo presentation at Motinternational, London the same year and at Tate Britain, in The Turner Prize exhibition, which Price won.[11]
Price was nominated for the 2012 Turner Prize for her solo exhibition 'HERE' at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, where three video works were displayed: User Group Disco (2009), The Choir (2012) and West Hinder (2012).[6][12] The 2012 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain featured her twenty-minute video installation The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (which includes elements from The Choir), for which she was awarded the prize on 3 December 2012.[11]The Guardian art critic declared the "focus and drive of Price's work, the cutting and the atmosphere, mark her out".[13]
Price says her videos take a year to make. She explained "I use digital video to try and explore the divergent forces that are at play when you bring so many different technological histories together... I’m interested in the medium of video as something you experience sensually as well as something you might recognise."[4]
Prior to working as an artist, Price was a founding member, singer, guitarist and songwriter of Indie band Talulah Gosh, known for a series of successful indie singles released on the Scottish label 53rd&3rd, as well as BBC Janice Long and John Peel sessions. She subsequently made several records with Gregory Webster, guitarist, singer and songwriter of the Razorcuts, under the name of The Carousel. ‘I forgot to remember to forget[14]’ was initially released on Price and Webster’s short-lived record label ‘Cosmic English Music in 1990 and re-released by Vinyl Japan along with a subsequent LP ‘abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz’[15] in 1994. Price was also a founding member of the never recorded, all girl group ‘The Katherines of Arrogance’ which included Amelia Fletcher and Eithne Farry of Talulah Gosh along with Jo Johnson (subsequently) of riot grrrl band Huggy Bear.
Notable works
At The House of Mr X (2007)
Single-channel video, 20 minutes duration
At The House of Mr X takes as its subject the preserved modernist home, and art/design collections of a deceased cosmetics mogul. It opens as a visit to the house, proceeding from the entrance through open-plan areas, into every room. The elegant geometry of the spaces, the varied materials of the architecture, and the luxurious modernist furnishings are all attentively documented. The narration - which is provided as a silent, on-screen rolling graphic is derived from various archival materials associated with the history of the house, including architectural specifications; curatorial inventories and the point-of-sale literature for various cosmetics products. As the tour moves through the house, the narration migrates through these sources so that in the final stages, the house and its art collection is described using the vocabulary of 1960s/1970s cosmetics, incorporating the puns and innuendo that hint at gender, sexual and social transformation or fluidity.[16]
In Frieze magazine, Sam Thorne wrote "The measured tones of the archivist are mixed with the fanciful lures of make-up adverts. Flashing over lascivious interior shots, a story of sensual inhabitation is developed as these cosmetics product descriptions - 'Jacobean shade', 'soft-centre candy floss’, 'starkers glow' - are gradually applied to the polished finishes of the house itself, as though it were a face. In the final section, following these transformative temptations of 'pearlise' and 'time-machinery', the viewer is invited to physically blend themselves with the liquid veneers of the house: 'Make silvery gold & viscous trails / A delightful decor/ of lustrous puddles[ ... ] To bloom on the lovely surface."[17] Price refers to this as a ‘profane denouement', a transgression of the domestic ideal in that the house itself seems to have quickened into life and 'inhabits' the guest.'[17]
Redundant consumer artefacts of the late twentieth century are both glamorously featured and satirically analysed in the video User Group Disco. Cheap but extraordinarily decadent artefacts such as pet-food dispensers and necktie-storage systems are rotated, suspended and animated in front of the camera, whilst a series of quotes taken from theoretical texts on art, corporate management and taxonomy, as well as excerpts from gothic and magic-realist literature are cut together to imagine the creation and inauguration of a museum to hold them.[23]
In an ArtReview profile (2010), JJ Charlesworth describes this "One moment didactic, then cryptic, then exclamatory, the streaming over-titles of Price’s videos veer from critical meditation on the politics of art, the history of modernity and the corrupt logic of taxonomy, into passages of apocalyptic, hallucinated exuberance, in which Price’s fetishised, spinning objects – cappuccino frothers, electric wine coolers, executive toys, seventies ceramics – accelerate into a frenzy of anachronistic consumer desire…."[24] Tamara Trodd makes similar observations in an Art History essay (2019): "By materialising the idea of the objects possessing a hidden life, and having them appear to dance, Price’s playful anthropomorphism conjures up exhilarated responses in us. Even as we are made to realise and to fear the forces that slumber in material objects, somehow we are also made to laugh at them."[25]
The Woolworths Choir of 1979 combines, in three well-differentiated parts, a syncopated succession of archive material in an apparently dissonant composition: a textual-visual research into the architectural typology of British Gothic church choirs; fragments of videos culled from internet showing backing vocalists for pop groups; and TV news footage of a fire in the furniture department at Woolworths in Manchester in 1979, in which 10 employees lost their lives…[36]
A step-by-step guide to ecclesiastical architecture, illustrated by archival photographs, diagrams and arcane terminology is gradually interrupted by distorted footage of the sinuous movements of various girl bands, like ghostly apparitions from another world. Echoing this visual transition, the soundtrack segues from isolated, stark finger clicks and handclaps to the explosive and emotive chorus of The Shangri-Las' Out in the Streets. The handclaps return to accompany the final chapter which draws on news footage and witness accounts of a notorious fire in the furniture stockroom of the Manchester branch of Woolworths in 1979.[37]
The sum of the written stories and places produces a repository with different institutional registers, from art history to pop music culture, but also from the truthfulness of news reporting to the evidence of expert witnesses. The whole acquires a rhythm through a brilliant use of samples of other songs… The cyclic repetition accentuates the point of contingency between the three stories: the twisted wrist. But it also accentuates the condition of the body of knowledge of each one of the parts like a social body united through a gesture that becomes radical.[38]
The compelling and actually disturbing The Woolworths Choir of 1979, …is a 20-minute film whose three segments are linked by recurring images of hand gestures and the tight percussive sound of sharp finger-clicking. The hands of trapped victims of a 1979 fire in a Woolworths store in Manchester, helplessly flapping from a window filled with billowing smoke, are juxtaposed with the expressive hand gesturing of singers. Images and sounds echo and complement each other until we reach a pounding and hypnotic crescendo of hands, rhythmic clicking, singing and text.[39]
A work of experimental historiography that, to my mind, not only represents the most precisely calibrated challenge we have seen this century to timebased storytelling and meaning-making, but is effectively a manifesto against orthodox delivery systems of information and knowledge.[40]
The Woolworths Choir of 1979 has been exhibited at The Whitworth, Manchester, UK[21] and Centro De Arte Dos De Mayo, Madrid, Spain[38] in 2019 - at Tate Britain, London, UK[41] in 2018 - at Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia,[42] Canada in 2016 - at The Model, Sligo, Ireland,[43] Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin,[44] Germany and Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto,[45] Canada in 2015 - at The Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany,[46] Franz Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands[47] and the Station Gallery, Tokyo[48] in 2014 - at Musee D’art Contemporain, Montreal, Canada[49] in 2013 - at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK,[50] Bielefelder Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany, MOT International, London, UK and Tate Britain, London.
A previous version of the work CHOIR was exhibited at Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK,[51] New Museum, New York, USA[52] and Collective Gallery Edinburgh.[53]
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