Techno posthuman curated from a future: the art of Elizabeth Price

I've just been to the Baltic and seen Elizabeth Price's video triptych (my designation of the three works). I loved it/them. The pieces spoke to me in ways I'm still going over in my head and trying to piece together. That in itself is very satisfying: I like artworks that grab me 'behind' my conscious thinking and which I then have to think over and ruminate on to unpack the experience.

It seems to me that the description of Skye Sherwin captures it well:

post-human worlds that seem dedicated to the preservation of museum rarities, pound-shop tat, designer appliances and modernist furniture, all glimmering with a cold allure. The objects have taken over: these groomed rooms bear no trace of people's lives. Our guides to these worlds take the form of a vaguely threatening "we" that speaks through disembodied captions popping up silently on screen, as techno rhythms pulse or choirs call out in numb harmonies. (from: Artist of the week 147: Elizabeth Price | Art and design | guardian.co.uk:)

I  am  finding it hard not to see some theology in one thread of this collection. I suspect the artist would be intrigued or horrified to discover a theologian relating to it so. But I found the central piece 'Choir' seemed to counterpoint the eternal matters referenced in the cathedral quires of the first part of the video with the fire-destroyed consumer goods of the second part. It seems to me that there is a comment somehow on the bonfire of the vanities that is consumer culture. This ironic look at consumer culture seems to come through in the trio of works. As if the putative view from the posthuman future manages to radically relativise consumer values in a way that is akin to the transcendent perspectives that we (try to) connect with in theology.

In Choir, according to the interview with ms Price, there is a gesture which connects the various parts: a piece of sculpture in a quire and a gesture made by one of the evacuees of the Woolworth's fire and a dancer in the disco footage. but the more enduring images in terms of arrest and memory are of the plans, the rectilinear rooms within a room of the quire, the furniture store and the fire-experiment forensic room.
I just found it hard not also to be hearing in my head 'our God is a consuming fire'.

Ms Sherwin says she likes Price's " fevered User Group Disco, which imagines a museum where we're told monsters still exist." So do I like it. Though, as I recall, we weren't so much told that monsters still exist so much as that monsters had not all been eliminated. In the follow-on context of the video, the transhuman-futurist perspective was redolent of Alien; almost making the present world of domesticity look like a place that could harbour the beasts that remove us (Prometheus?). Perhaps, in this way, there is a warning...

I found the collection and composition also very witty. I laughed out loud at various points: I loved the ironic and satirical juxtapositions and commentaries. -Again, I'm assuming that I'm reading it something like aright. I think I might enjoy this artist's sense of humour in real face-to-face encounter.

What else am I unpacking? The borg-like voice and typographic presence (often speaking in corporate-advertising soundbites as if phrases have been picked up as the basic building blocks -a Star Trek Next Gen allusion, perhaps) The shiney metals and 60's visual styling which along with the upbeat music somehow comes over all Pearl and Dean cinema advertising -thus increasing the sense of been sold too. Then there is the poignancy of the cars which seem to be designed for all sorts of things that they will never, at the bottom of the see, 'experience'. If that's not a study in Qohelethic vanity, I'm not sure what is.

Despite my usually-better half reckoning it 'arty farty nonsense', I'm hoping to return to ponder further before it moves out of the Baltic.