Multimedia artist Luther Price, 58, dies
Luther Price, a multimedia artist and prolific experimental filmmaker known for his haunting, often transgressive work — as well as for never revealing his real name — died June 13 at his home in Revere, Massachusetts. He was 58.
His death was announced by Callicoon Fine Arts, his New York representative, which did not give the cause.
Price’s films were distinguished by his use of found footage and his unusually hands-on approach. His themes were variously domestic, sexual, autobiographical and always visceral, even when his work was abstract. His styles ranged from expressionistic to quasi-documentary. Some of his films explored his childhood and featured members of his family, especially his mother (or, sometimes, the artist himself dressed to resemble her).
The throughlines were fragmented narratives, startling juxtapositions and suggestions of physical decay, often combined to nightmarish effect. Price’s best films were never less than gripping.
Lia Gangitano, the independent curator who gave Price his first solo exhibition in 1999 at Thread Waxing Space in SoHo and another in 2014 at Participant, a nonprofit space she founded on the Lower East Side, wrote in an email, “Luther Price made films that aren’t like anyone else’s. They inspire devotion. He embraced a particularly unapologetic set of working-class values and pushed his chosen medium to its limits to produce an uncompromising and cyclical view of bodily, familial and societal damage.”
Price was probably best known for “Sodom” (198889), a Super 8 film that combined excerpts from gay pornographic films (discarded by X-rated bookstores in Boston) with footage from biblical epics, set to the intonations of a Gregorian chant played backward.
He created the illusion of intersecting films — and bodies — by using hole punches to excise tiny circles of celluloid from individual frames and replacing them with other images. It was a painstaking technique even for an artist who had studied jewelrymaking in art school. Multiple images jumped feverishly back and forth, almost as if the film were trying to escape the projector.
“Sodom” was criticized alternately for being immoral and for denigrating gay people. But it made Price’s reputation, heralded the rising attention to queer cinema and has come to be seen as a gay classic, even though it was initially rejected by some gay film festivals.
Over the past three decades, Price’s films appeared regularly at festivals in cities across the country and abroad, including in San Francisco, New York, Toronto and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. There were screenings devoted to his work at the Museum of Modern Art and the Kitchen in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.
Price was not the first filmmaker to manipulate celluloid, but he did so with a heightened emphasis on the psychological darkness of both spectacle and everyday life. Ed Halter — cofounder of Light Industry, an alternative film center in Brooklyn, and an organizer of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, which included Price’s work and helped bring it to the art world’s attention — called him “Brakhage after punk,” referring to the influential experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage (19332003) and his relatively formal alterations of film, while introducing his films at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 2012.
Presented without benefit of titles or credits, often with a soundtrack of clacking projectors or sprockets, Price’s films rarely let viewers forget the mechanical nature — the objectness — of film. Through trial and error, he learned to clean up his worked-over celluloid so it could be screened without ruining projectors or falling apart. Many of his films existed only as what he called “handmade originals.”