Still from “The Woolworths Choir of 1979,” Elizabeth Price, 2012. Image accessed at http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/944×531/p012dcm7.jpg

Great to see that a video artist has been awarded the Turner Prize: Elizabeth Price. This small snippet of her piece, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012) intrigues me. I’d love to see it in its entirety as an installation.

It’s difficult to know anything about the composition from what little can be seen online, but it speaks well of the piece that I’m immediately inspired to start piecing together and thinking over a couple recurring thematic motifs: the legibility/illegibility of emotive gesture and the commodification of femininity (in terms of news reportage of the tragedy, but also the erotics of girl groups). I imagine the snaps and clicks that seem to regulate the images as the sounds of these concepts locking and interlocking.

I’m also happy to see an artist who has been given this kind of platform valorize public art funding and stress the importance of keeping complex visual experience open to as wide an audience as possible.