Walead Beshty

The series of large-format photographs documents an abandoned Iraqi diplomatic office located in former East Berlin, itself vacated to the West by the German Democratic Republic in 1990. Before photographing the site, Beshty's unexposed film was damaged by airport security X-ray machines while traveling to Berlin. Having discovered this, he proceeded to use the film and pass it through the scanners once again on his return journey. This generated images with "large washes of color … superimposed over them"[8] of a site "denatured of its sovereignty and exposed to the elements," The set of nine works was first shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2006,[9] and has been shown in exhibitions worldwide including in the 2008 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.[10] In 2012, the artist hole-punched the original nine negatives from the series, and prints of these works, under the title Travel Pictures, were shown alongside the original series at Thomas Dane Gallery in London.[11]

Following the concept of the Travel Pictures series, Beshty began traveling with unexposed 4 x 5 transparency film in his luggage, thereby exposing the film to the high-powered airport X-ray scanners. In his essay on Beshty's work for the book Walead Beshty: Selected Correspondences 2001–2010 (Damiani Editore, 2010), Jason E. Smith describes the Transparencies as "consist[ing] of grainy, virtually monochrome fields of degraded color (lavenders, pinks, plums, scarlets, turquoise; but also steely grays and charcoal blues) bisected edge-to-edge by either white bands that evoke shafts of soft light or, inversely, deep graphite grays resembling cast shadows … The Transparencies ... originate in the very public, transitional space of the international airport, a very specific form of public space saturated with techniques of surveillance, monitoring, and scanning, and an in-between space situated in the intervals between sovereign states and their relatively unambiguous juridical frameworks."

In 2009, the works were featured in Altermodern: The Tate Triennial. In a dialog with the exhibition curator Nicolas Bourriaud published in the exhibition catalog, Beshty comments on the conditions of the airport and air travel, stating, "In this constellation of forces, the x-ray has pride of place, delineating the edge between the 'real' world, and the siteless limbo of air travel. Its accidental discovery in the late 1800s fits seamlessly into modernity's fascination with transparency: the desire to capture the minutiae of movement (cinema), to turn objects into surface (photography), to see inside (x-ray)."[12]

In 2005, Beshty began production of his first photogram works based on a possible yet undocumented series of work by Lázló Moholy-Nagy.[13] Recalling a conversation with Moholy-Nagy's grandson, Beshty describes the hypothesized Moholy-Nagy photograms as "a series of works using nothing more than crumpled photographic paper … The works were logically deduced to have most likely been made in 1921," yet no record of such a series existed at the time. Through this conversation, a title was also hypothesized for the works, "Abstraction Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light." Beshty's photograms, individually titled "Picture Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light," were made by exposing crumpled black and white photographic paper to light.

Subsequent black and white and color photogram series have been produced using similar processes, which Beshty describes as "multiple tracings of a three-dimensional object on the field of the photograph. The resulting photograph is both a depiction of the photographic paper and the paper itself, as the paper casts an image of itself onto itself through the exposure process."[14] In response to the photogram works being described as abstract, Beshty states that "Any standard, lens-based, figurative photograph is necessarily 'abstract' in the technical sense of the term. Since this separation of sign and signified does not exist in my works, they are never true abstractions, regardless of their appearance. This type of art object should be referred to as 'concrete' and 'literal,' as the viewer is always presented with the referent and the image at the same time. They are concrete photographs (with a lower case 'c'), not abstract or pictorial photographs."[15]

In more recent series, including the Color Curls and Black Curls, Beshty exposes color photographic paper to cyan, magenta, and yellow, "use of this system of color describes the field of all possible colors in the interaction between the primary subtractive colors." The unexposed paper is "curled" onto a metal wall in total darkness and kept in place with large magnets. The paper is then exposed to the colored light by a horizontal enlarger and processed with a large-format color processor. The final work "is not only the result of the tension between the size of the paper, the confines of the darkroom, and the artist's own body, but also the effects of the architectural infrastructure (i.e., the HVAC system, building vibration, etc.), which is expressed through the registration (or misregistration) of the colors."[16]

First produced in 2007, the FedEx works are made of either laminated glass (clear or two-way mirror) or raw polished copper constructed to the size of standardized FedEx shipping boxes. The works are then shipped to their destination by FedEx's Express service. The glass works are shipped inside FedEx shipping boxes of the same size, which act as both part of the work and a support for the glass portion when exhibited. The glass works are shipped unprotected, so that cracks appear with each successive shipment. The polished copper works are shipped without a standard FedEx box, so that any handling by the courier imprints onto the surface of the work by oxidation. The FedEx waybills, customs documentation, and any shipping stickers added to the box are considered part of the work.[17][18]

Beshty states that he was "initially interested … because they're defined by a corporate entity in legal terms. There's a copyright designating the design of each FedEx box, but there's also the corporate ownership over that very shape. It's a proprietary volume of space, distinct from the design of the box, which is identified through what's called a SSCC #, a Serial Shipping Container Code. I considered this volume as my starting point; the perversity of a corporation owning a shape—not just the design of the object—and also the fact that the volume is actually separate from the box. They're owned independently from one another. Furthermore, I was interested in how art objects acquire meaning through their context and through travel, what [Daniel] Buren called, something like, 'the unbearable compromise of the portable work of art.' So, I wanted to make a work that was specifically organized around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another."[19] The curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud describes Beshty's work more generally in a text included in Beshty's monograph Natural Histories, " … as being made up of images or objects that 'remember' their previous or initial state, that have memorized or archived their course. The FedEx series is an explicit example … the form is literally produced by its incorporation into a system of distribution (FedEx), and through its capacity to record a trajectory."

Beshty produced the first Selected Works pieces as a part of his 2008 exhibition in Los Angeles, Science Concrète. These works were produced by shredding the photographic works that were produced for the exhibition but not included, and the pulp was then molded into "quasi-architectonic forms, from old print boxes and the like … "[20] During the run of exhibition, Beshty shredded the unused works in the back room of the gallery and left them to dry on a large table in the middle of the room. Once dry, the works were added to the exhibition. Since 2008, Beshty has produced the Selected Works as wall panels in various sizes framed in polished copper. He says of the work, "This line of work … reflects the fact that even though I always end up not showing a lot of the work I produce, I still need to account for the discarded pieces in some way. I like to think of the entire process as sort of an ecology in itself, which extends way beyond objects. The final products are not alone important. I feel a need to include the by-products, all of which never make it to the final show, and to figure out a way they can reach the exhibition site."[21]

Beshty's Mirrored Floor works consist of laminated, layered mirrored glass floor panels installed edge-to-edge to cover the entirety of an exhibition space including staff offices. The panels crack and break under the weight of viewers during the course of the exhibition. On the occasion of an early installation of the work, the curator Jacob Proctor noted that the work is "both an instant reflection and a constantly evolving record of traffic and circulation through the gallery at every stage of the exhibition process. It is also a work in progress … Every visitor to the exhibition therefore becomes an active participant in the creative process … what the floor demarcates is a zone in which a circulation of bodies is registered."[22]

Made from mirror-polished raw copper, the Copper Surrogate works are produced to the size of the existing working surfaces and desks of an exhibition venue. The Copper Surrogates replace the existing working surfaces for a period of an exhibition cycle, and the surfaces are used by the staff as they normally would be, "… traces of the manual work performed upon these tabletops registers upon their surfaces as a process of touch … "[23] Once the exhibition cycle is complete, the Copper Surrogates are considered complete and are hung as wall works for exhibition. In a 2014 Artforum review of works from the series, Tina Kukielski notes, "the 'Copper Surrogates' are indexical. In raw polished copper, [Beshty] has found the equivalent of the photograph's light-sensitive paper. But rather than record inscriptions of light, the material registers the elbow grease of the gallery system … actively shar[ing] authorship with the system's necessary and essential producers." Beshty describes the active production of the work as "trac[ing] the immaterial labor of discourse, transaction, and negotiation that occurs across these surfaces, whether between insiders (for example, the discussion between a curator and a gallerist) or with a public (for example the interaction between a gallery receptionist and a visitor to the exhibition). In each of these instances, the meaning of the work is being constructed incrementally in both large and small ways, and is distributed by those individuals who engage across those surfaces."[24]

In 2014, Beshty exhibited large Copper Surrogate works made from 10 x 5-foot standard industrial sheets of polished copper folded equally in half in various angles. Instead of being produced and marked as a desk or working surface, these works were handled by their installers leaving marks from the installation process on their surfaces that differed based on the sculpture's shape, scale, and mass.[25]

Beginning in 2013, Beshty began production on a more than yearlong project that catalogues every used or exhausted object in his studio with cyanotype photogram prints on discarded papers, cardboard, wood, or any other cellulose-based material culled from his studio. The materials contain "private correspondences, interactions with the museum, and so on. Every detail—personal, professional, everything—is actually in the work itself, and what's more, it is what it is. It's debris, it depicts debris; it's a work, it depicts making a work." The resulting piece was installed in 2014 on the 90-meter long wall of the Barbican Centre's Curve gallery from ceiling to floor. The last month of the project, Beshty produced cyanotypes in residence at the Barbican Centre with discarded items from the venue. Over 12,000 cyanotype prints were produced and presented in chronological order. Beshty states that the work "tells a very broad picture of the different productive forces that are moved through the studio. In that sense, I thought of the studio as … a machine for making a kind of picture … It's a transparent picture. It's a picture that shows exactly how it came into being, everything that was involved, every relationship, both the productive forces in terms of mechanical things—machinery and technology—but also the social relationships. And I think that's particularly important in art as well, that a large part of what makes an artwork is also the social relations between individuals, the people that come together and make something happen."[26] The title for the work was taken from a title proposed in a 1979 lecture by Hollis Frampton "in which he discusses how meaning is opened up when a thing's currency has passed … that dormant things have a great deal of potential."[27]