Luther Price

I recently had the chance to see some works by Luther Price at the Whitney Biennial.  Having only seen his super 8 pornographic clown horror piece, I was surprised at the subtle and reflective qualities of the pieces shown at the Whitney.  Each piece was short in length, under ten minutes, comprised of what appeared to be hand scratched found footage from various sources.  Some of the film was actually buried underground, allowing it to collect dirt and begin to decompose.

The theme of cinematic detritus put the work in conversation with Decasia.  In the biennial program book, a curator writes that Luther's cinema is one that "ecstatically embraces its death drive, so as to achieve maximum potency.  The sound/image relationship in the pieces also spoke to this theme.  Though mostly minimal, the sound included noises produced by the projector, again making a self reflexive gesture that exposes the apparatus of cinema and meditates on the mortality of its own medium.  Overall, the distressed collage of found images produced a haunting and beautiful piece, inviting the viewer to consider film as a physical object, each image uniquely scarred by the hand of the artist and by chance encounters with decomposed matter underground.