Dec 2010 Elizabeth Price: sidekick

Thursday 9th December, 6pm, Associates Space, Spike Island

The next reading group will be looking at a chapter from artist Elizabeth Price’s PhD thesis sidekick.

“sidekick is a descriptive text which annotates the incremental progression of a labour-intensive activity. This activity is fairly straightforward: packing tape is wound from the roll upon which it is commercially distributed, onto itself, to form a sphere. I call this sphere boulder. boulder was started in 1996 and is ongoing. It was initiated with a simple task, yet the repetition of this task incited certain material inevitabilities. As the sphere became larger and its surface area increased, the process became slower because the tape had a gradually decreasing relative impact. Each roll added to the sphere lessened the value of the next and after a while the addition of a roll was impossible to detect. At the present moment of time the ratio of time-spent to visible result is so protracted, that it is difficult to perceive the effects of my action. One of the critical problems of this work, has been knowing how to conclude it – the slippage of the labour out of the range of visible cause and effect, has made it difficult to know how to act. I have resigned myself to continuing it indefinitely. sidekick was initiated in 1997. It was started when the boulder began to slow down. It is ongoing.”

Elizabeth Price