Walead Beshty: A Diagram of Forces

December 2011. See the entire magazine online here

Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid

21 June – 30 October

By George Stolz

One of the various ongoing series in Walead Beshty’s exhibition consists of large photographic prints originating in undeveloped film that has been stowed in checked luggage during the artist’s travels. The film, although sealed in lightproof boxes, is sensitive to airport scanners’ X-rays, so that when printed it yields unforeseen abstractions, cool and serene and generally reminiscent of colour-field painting. According to the exhibition literature, this series, entitled Transparencies and begun in 2006, forms part of Beshty’s programme of exploring the interstices in the infrastructure of the contemporary art world – farflung travel across national borders (as well as through X-ray scanners) being a requisite interstice in any successful artist’s practice today. Additionally, Transparencies references the topical issue of the intrusiveness of surveillance, while deftly incorporating elements of chance and collaborative participation in the creation of an authored art object. 

In other words, in Transparencies, as in all of Beshty’s work, we are dealing with well- constructed conceptual undergirdings that dovetail quite nicely with contemporary artworld modes and concerns. That the individual works in the series – large framed sheets of coloured photographic paper – do not in themselves bear out such undergirdings is understood as beside the point: in conceptually framing these works as such a series, Beshty is availing himself of the technique of seriality, which often recurs to or even aims for repetitively reductionist imagery within component parts precisely as a way of attaining an overall meaning greater than their sum. Meaning in serial work is cumulative meaning – accumulation across a span of works, a span of time, a span of perception, a span of thought (interstices included). This is why serial works are able to employ such reductionism – it is also why serial works generally require development. What if On Kawara had only produced date paintings for a few dates? What if the Bechers had shot just a few water towers? Not that every series must be so open-ended or obsessive, but for a serial work structured on imagery of this calibre  to be successful, some sort of critical mass must be attained. 

Such critical mass seems lacking in Transparencies, and a similar lack seems to pervade the photographic ‘series’ of A Diagram of Forces, such as Industrial Pictures (2007–), a series of portraits of individuals who compose Beshty’s particular corner of the artworld: collectors, dealers, curators, receptionists, art handlers, framers, etc. (That this comes off as a bit coy is a separate issue.) And yet another series – American Passages (2001–) – is rather jarringly dedicated to photographs of empty shopping malls across the United States. Any of these projects might have developed – or indeed might develop – over time; but in this single exhibition, where they feature so prominently, the resulting effect of jumping from one partially developed grouping to the next is one of scattershot disjunctiveness that only undermines Beshty’s laudably well-conceived and well- articulated programme. 

The exhibition’s three-dimensional works, while structured on similar concerns, are noticeably more successful in arranging a mutually enhancing marriage between concept and object. For instance, in FedEx (2008–), glass cubes are shipped from exhibition venue to exhibition venue and inevitably but unforeseeably damaged en route by their handling. Here the operative conceptual strategies and references (including the Duchampian) are incorporated into rather than attributed to the individual works, and the cardboard shipping crates are ingeniously used as wonderful ready-made pedestals. This, in short, is the difference between showing and telling.