Are You Scared To Get Happy?:Elizabeth Price @ Artangel.

Seven months and nine days. That's how long it'd been since I last stepped foot in an art gallery (on March 1st this year I went to see Young Bomberg and the Old Masters at the National Gallery) and it may well be the same amount of time before I visit one again or, with these new Covid-19 restrictions, until I visit one again in the company of friends. 

So last Saturday's trip to see the video art of 2012 Turner Prize winner and former Talulah Gosh member Elizabeth Price in an unnamed gallery on Borough Road between Borough and Elephant and Castle tube stations may prove to be something of a strange blip in a year that's hardly been short of quirk, strangeness, and, despite those in power doing the best to make it not so, charm. If it was a blip it was, thankfully, a quite delightful blip although much of that was down to the company (I went with my friend Vicki) than it was the art.

That's not to say the art was bad. It certainly wasn't. I liked it and Vicki liked it even more. It's just that much as I love and appreciate art now as much as ever, it's not been art that I've missed most in this crazy year. I've missed friends and being in the actual presence of those friends (rather than looking at them from a Zoom call - an experience Whitney Houston may have described as been 'not right but it's okay) shooting the shit, putting the world to rights, and doing our darndest to drink a pub dry.

A mission we, thankfully, failed abysmally at even if we did spend five hours in the pub and just thirty minutes in the gallery. That's not because we rushed round. It's because that's how long the video art was and though our tickets permitted us to stay for a second screening neither of us felt we'd benefit much from that and we'd not seen each other for months and had lots of catching up to do. I thank Elizabeth Price for her art but I also thank her for enabling a get together that likely won't be repeated now until 2021.

The art itself took a while to get going and it took me even longer to get into the swing of it. It was my first time in a gallery wearing a mask and though the air conditioning rendered that completely unproblematic it was still odd to have to maintain social distancing in an arts space. Quite nice really. How many times have you been trying to look at the finer points of, say, a Lucian Freud painting when some oik has shoved in front of you to take a photo? How many times, on the other hand, may you (or I) have been that oik?

In a dark square room three of the four walls were adorned with large screens and on to these were projected three films that played concurrently. Sometimes they jarred with each other, sometimes they played nicely off, and with, each other, and sometimes they appeared as if blissfully unaware of each other's existence. Never did they make a great deal of narrative sense but almost always they were intriguing enough to keep one watching.

Under the umbrella title of SLOW DANS the three films were titled The Teacher, Felt Tip, and Kohl with the first of those three taking up the larger central screen. The Teacher showed slowly morphing and revolving images of patterned dresses worn, I think, by crude mannequins and graphics resembling Rorschach tests or even lava lamps.

Kohl mostly fixated on an image of gently swaying monochrome fronds but was occasionally interspersed with some intentionally retrofuturistic computer generated fonts about superstitions and various other subjects that never really amounted to more than the sum of its parts even though the upside down photographs of disused collieries rendered in stark primary colours were aesthetically pleasing. 

Felt Tip also borrowed the schtick of fetishised fonts but overlaid them on to visions of a computer in a dark room, its rear light providing the focus as surely as a fading taillight on a US highway or a Buffalo Tom tune. A vaguely stentorian narration told of the history of the neck tie and a fairly decent electronic soundtrack gave us a chance to tap a toe and an assistant to come over and have a word in Vicki's ear for taking a photo using a flash.

And that was it. All done. A pleasant, enjoyable, but hardly earth shattering experience and one that, in more normal times, may have hardly been worth writing a blog about it but in these times, these 'during' times, felt like a glass of cold fresh water after a long walk in a desert. The drinks in The Three Stags pub in Kennington afterwards weren't cold water but they went down equally as well as the art and so thoroughly did Vicki and I put the world to right afterwards that it was quite a surprise to wake up and find that Covid-19 is still about and that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are still in power. There will always be diseases and complete and utter cunts in the world (though putting them in charge of countries is just reckless) and it's easy to get bogged down in that. It's good, sometimes, often even, to remember there are things to be positive about. One of those things is art and the human desire and capacity towards creation and another one of things is, of course, friendship. Thanks to Elizabeth Price and thanks, even more, to Vicki.