Since 2001, New York based artist Seth Price has articulated an ongoing multimedia investigation proposing incompleteness. The present lot, Repossessed Audi/Bronze Custom Job, 2009, is a self-reflexive response to manufactured desire; the sheer banality of the object, in this case a rope, further emphasizes its monochromatic and monolithic shell, which simultaneously implies mass production and the production of art as participating in the circuit of consumption. Repossessed Audi/Bronze Custom Job, 2009, is created through the process of vacuum-forming a knotted rope into high impact polystyrene, which is then painted with acrylic and enamel. The process involves melting a form of hot plastic around a solid object and then allowing it to cool into a rigid mass applied by vacuum to create a single form or a reusable mold. The plastic shell covering the rope becomes a central aspect of the piece, taking partial form of the object encased within. Part of a larger series of vacuumed-formed works, Price’s Repossessed Audi/Bronze Custom Job, 2009, contains the represented object and additionally features a strand of rope affixed to the back of the piece, visibly hanging from the bottom.
His other vacuum-formed works are molds of objects—bomber jackets, enlarged flowers, fists, face masks, and breasts—negatives of physical content, a structured absence. Much like the inverted solid space that defines Price’s silhouette series, the plastic casing that defines Repossessed Audi/Bronze Custom Job, 2009, distracts the viewer from the object within; the result is reminiscent of hard plastic packaging that is used to present and contain a manufactured object. Certainly, the combination of rope and industrial plastic references the transformation of irregular form into rigid geometrical structure and to a further extent the conceptual into commodity. One could suggest that Repossessed Audi/Bronze Custom Job, 2009, references a transformation and conflation of sculpture: elements of Eva Hesse’s No Title, 1970, her latex and rope sculpture absorbed and repackaged by its Minimalist underpinnings. In this way, Repossessed Audi/Bronze Custom Job, 2009, not only revels in commodity consumption but also reveals the hoarding and consuming nature of art historical practices.