(link)
Has Price gone "painting"? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels everyone was only speaking of conceptually despite Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on. Because Painting we believe is interminable, mysterious, whereas the vacuum-form is a product and thus taken as limited, understandable. Painting instead is held at a permanent distance of an oracle. Products we believe are empty. And Price with all his Rorschach tricks (ultra-HD videoing of Squid chromatophores as an almost explicit version of the both the inky comic character and psych test) attempting cultural products as the same enigma.
Which here Price's fascination with images: the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic. It will produces something alien, mysterious. Halter is right to bring up Gulliver's Travels in relation to Price, the book intended as a spoof of travelogue's desire for exoticism that also came at time when access to scientific technology like microscopes had become common, travel and tech magic depleted into something for parody. We'd been keen to be left with a joke, but when this tech eventually obsolesces into banality, we should prepare for simply being left with abstractions, hands clutching inkblots.
See too: Seth Price at 356 Mission, Seth Price at Stedelijk Museum, Seth Price at Museum Brandhorst
