Walead Beshty

Walead Beshty Selected Correspondences 2001–2010

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Walead Beshty Selected Correspondences 2001–2010

Walead Beshty Selected Correspondences 2001–2010

fig. 6 Fold (60º/120º/180º/240º/ 300º/360º directional light sources), July 3rd 2009, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, Ilford Multigrade IV MGF.1K Black and white fiber based photographic paper 55 x 113 inches Image: Fredrik Nilsen

fig. 7 Installation view of Altermodern: The Tate Triennial 2009 Tate Britain, London February 3rd – April 26th 2009 Image: Sam Drake, Tate Photography

fig. 8 FedEx® Tube ©2005 FEDEX 139752 REV 10/05 SSCC, Standard Overnight, Los Angeles-New York trk#798875634687, February 15 –18, 2008, International Economy, New York-Basel trk#862119054788, June 5–11, 2008, International Priority, Basel-Los Angeles trk#799396800994, October 20–22, 2008, 2008 – Laminated Mirropane, FedEx shipping box, accrued FedEx tracking and shipping labels, silicone, and metal 38.25 x 6 x 5.5 inches Image: Fredrik Nilsen

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surface or from the folding or curling back of the surface itself. The Transparencies, to the contrary, 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. To the extent that the resulting forms (the bisected colored fields) are generated by means of their circulation through and between nodes of travel and transport (the global circulation of bodies, commodities, and, more generally, value), this group of works equally echoes the mode of production of Beshty’s FedEx box sculptures (figs. 7– 8), which take shape through the accrued deformations incurred in their rough handling by a global, and ubiquitous, shipping company (their equally bureaucratic titles similarly record all their comings and goings). Cameraless photography and the generation of form through circulation: the Transparencies represent a synthesis of or point of articulation between two apparently discrete nodes of Beshty’s work (photograms, FedEx sculptures) over the past three to four years. 4 The Transparencies appear completely abstract—surfaces articulated through an economical grammar of elements, fields of decomposing color criss-crossed by what at times could pass for contrails—while being bluntly concrete, displaying the dumb index of their own passage through space. They are intensely referential without relying on depiction, scanning a singular public site and security apparatus; and yet they refer to little more than the sheer receptivity of a surface, its blank and pure potentiality.

The Transparencies are not, according to Beshty, abstractions. He has always been loathe to speak of any of his recent work, be they photograms or “transparencies,” in these terms. Perhaps this is because the word “abstraction” places us too far inside the framing edge, thrusting us into a pictorial space that is radically discontinuous with the milieu within which the work hangs, intervenes, or intrudes. And because the word “photography,” in turn, is always ghosted by a drive to reinvent the medium-based divisions of the arts, even if these media are no longer defined by some ontological stuff but by different logics of signification (the conventional signs of painting opposed to the indexical marks of analog photography). 5 To be sure, these works are rigorously non-compositional, their visual fields generated not by artistic decisions or aesthetic considerations but as the fallout of their touchand-go contact—and the resulting damage—with force-fields constructed for the purpose of examining bodies and cargo, with a view to their controlled, monitored movement through space. These works are equally resonant of the radical experiments with materials and media conducted within the most ambitious tendencies within the European entre-deux-guerres avant-gardes, feeding off of their ambition and exactitude while pursuing different ends. This distance Beshty takes from both the idea of abstraction and the medium of photography as a defined field is a foil to recent curatorial attempts to do for photography what the mid-century formalism of Greenberg did for painting: abstraction as a means for exhibiting and confirming the essential properties of the medium. Photography as it is deployed in Beshty’s practice is instead one operation among others in what we can almost call the political economy of art, a strategic field composed of logics and vectors of production, distribution, circulation and consumption, but also with the delicate questions of class and taste—all seen not as contingencies to be pragmatically dealt with in the margins, but as the basic parameters of an expanded field of artistic activity to be taken up and worked through, out and on. The Transparencies in particular originate from, and seek out, the larger political and social logics this expanded field of art moves within.

They do not depict or analyze these logics so much as slyly confront them, inserting themselves into them, siphoning off their energy and power and, like the simplest of machines (a recent Beshty exhibition title refers to “pulleys” and “cogwheels” 6 ), redirecting that energy along unexpected, and unpredictable, trajectories.

Calling these works Transparencies seems, on Beshty’s part, a brutally reductive gesture. If “transparency” refers to the type of film used in the making of these images—with an additional notation as to the precise brand and model of film—such a title seems to collapse the work onto the flat, objective support on which they are inscribed. Beshty’s titles however often hover between title and caption while hinting at instructions; between a proper name, a body of information to be processed, and notes indicating how comparable works might be produced by someone besides

Travel Pictures 2006 / 2008

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Travel Pictures [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in mulitple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006] *Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000, 2006 / 2008

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Travel Picture Rose [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in mulitple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006] *Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000, 2006 / 2008

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Travel Picture Marshes [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in mulitple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006] *Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000, 2006 / 2008

Scenes from TschaiKowskistrasse 17 2001– 2006/2008 36

(Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR) [Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Irak in Berlin, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)] 1968–2003 [1949–1990]), 2001– 2006/2008

Scene #35: June 6, 2001 (Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR) [Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Irak in Berlin, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)] 1968–2003 [1949 – 1990]), 2001–2006/2008

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Scene #20: May 29, 2001 (Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR) [Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Irak in Berlin, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)] 1968–2003 [1949– 1990]), 2001–2006/2008

Scene #17: June 6, 2001 (Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR) [Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Irak in Berlin, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)] 1968–2003 [1949 – 1990]), 2001–2006/2008

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Scene #21: March 24, 2006 (Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR) [Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Irak in Berlin, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)] 1968–2003 [1949– 1990]), 2001–2006/2008

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Scene #55: March 27, 2004 (Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR) [Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Irak in Berlin, Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)] 1968–2003 [1949– 1990]), 2001–2006/2008

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Transparencies 2006– 70

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Transparency (Negative) [Kodak Portra 400NC Em. No. 4071: December 5–December 9, 2007 ORD/MIA MIA/ORD]

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Transparency (Negative) [Kodak Portra 400NC Em. No. 51341: May 8–May 18, 2008 ORD/LHR LHR/IAD IAD/JFK LGA/DCA DCA/ORD]

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Transparency (Positive) [Fujichrome RDPIII Provia 100F Em. No. 04991: February 25–March 4, 2009 LAX/JFK JFK/LAX]

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Transparency (Negative) [Kodak Portra 400NC Em. No. 0291: February 25–March 4, 2009 LAX/JFK JFK/LAX]