Walead Beshty

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)."

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."

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."

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."

Walead Beshty (born London, UK, 1976) is a Los Angeles–based artist and writer.

Beshty has taught at numerous schools including University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of the Arts; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Art Center College of Design, Pasadena; and the MFA Program at Bard College.

Beshty has exhibited widely in numerous institutions and galleries around the world.

Beshty is visiting faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

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.

Beshty earned a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College in 1999, and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art in 2002.

"Games aren't constituted with a particular outcome. Games are constituted by the rules that are used ... It isn't whether or not it produces one sort of outcome, but how all these rules react to one another and how it defines a set of relationships. In that same way, I don't think of any particular object as being particularly significant. It's much more the system that generates it."

"Art itself has the potential to democratize aesthetics and reimagine aesthetic production as communal, available and non-hierarchical. I like the idea of demystifying aesthetics by communicating that we can all make aesthetic objects; it's not simply for those with capital or power."

"Objects have no meaning in themselves, rather they are prompts for a field of possible meanings that are dependent on context … That is, objects facilitate certain outcomes to arise that are not wholly predictable. These interactions accumulate over time, thus the meaning of an object is ever evolving."

" … you can't produce negatively, production is an active, cumulative process."

"I'm not interested in a grand definition of a particular medium—some sort of ontological construction—but in the particular expression of a set of relations within specific contexts. I think I'm most interested in the translation of abstract ideas—from abstraction in general to the materially specific. I'm very sensitive to abstractions, but I don't want to traffic in them."

"I only try to not conceal the process, make it available; I don't look to reveal it. I simply try to make work that considers how it materially came into being, whose appearance is directly and transparently linked to that coming into being. I think that viewers can engage with work on multiple levels; I don't want to teach a lesson or provide a recipe, but I actively try not to conceal. Power works by concealing how it functions, by enforcing a ritual, naturalizing it. This makes the means through which power functions camouflaged, and power itself sublime. I try to avoid this as much as possible, and part of this is to situate the production of the work in a public or common structure, one that is accessible, ubiquitous, instead of tacitly claiming artistic inspiration or selfhood as a justification for a work"

Although Beshty is most known for his work in photography, his bodies of work span a large variety of media including sculpture, painting, installation, and video.

In regard to medium distinctions, he has emphasized that he "tr[ies] to consider each body of work on its own terms, discretely, so terms like 'sculpture' or 'photography,' in their broad sense, don't really enter into [his] thinking … "

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 2005, Beshty began production of his first photogram works based on a possible yet undocumented series of work by Lázló Moholy-Nagy.

This generated images with "large washes of color … superimposed over them" 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, and has been shown in exhibitions worldwide including in the 2008 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

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.

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."

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."

In 2009, the works were featured in Altermodern: The Tate Triennial.

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.

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.