"The initial effect was visually disorienting yet corporeally grounded. I found myself slowly rocking from side to side, alternating eyes, sensitive to the disruption of my stereoscopic vision, a chance stumble or scrape..." There's something both uncanny and spectacular going on art
LAXART (through May 2, 2009). Walead Beshty has covered the floor of the institutional space with carpet padding, and covered that with mirrored safety glass. As the exhibition progresses, attendees perambulations crack and shatter the surface, turning the vertiginous doubling of space into a kaleidoscope of reflections. Like Asher's installation at the Santa Monica Museum of art, there is a legal disclaimer that entering the show is AYOR (at your own risk).
Beshty presents us with the standard tropes of the White Cube: large-scale chromatic abstract photographs are evenly spaced on two walls; a standard-issue gallery bench is centered in the room. But the conventions of exhibition are radically destabilized by the one surface we physically engage: the gallery floor.
But there's always more than the visual appraisal of Beshty's artistic production; behind it is a clever idea that subtly critiques the neo-liberal model of global capitalism, particularly the transportation conduits of its consumers and their goods. At the last Whitney Biennial, Beshty exhibited glass cubes fabricated to fit exactly in the dimensions of Fed Ex's proprietary-sized boxes. Becoming damaged in transit, the cracked cubes are displayed on the pedestrian plinths of their dented and stickered cardboard containers.
Using a related formula for the fabrication of the framed images at LAXART, Beshty sends the rolls of photographic paper through airport X-ray machines, then develops and fixes the resulting abstractions.
Walead Beshty's Passages Installation View
"It is no revelation that exhibitions have disembodying effects, it was, after all, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace — a transparent modular exhibition hall made of glass sheets and iron beams — that would define their most spectacular qualities, thrusting the term “exhibition” into the cultural imagination*. Footnote: As one critic described it as an “incorporeal space”, another commenting “There is no longer any true interior or exterior”, that the structure had a “perspective so extended” it appeared “like a section of atmosphere cut from the sky”. As quoted in Louise Wyman, “Crystal Palace”, in: Project on the City 2: Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Köln 2001, p. 240."- ibid.
Back when I was getting my undergrad degree, David Hockney did the visiting artist gig at CalArts. He presented slides of Cezanne, Braque, Picasso, and then his photo collages and drawings that used a similar "reversed" perspective. The whole point of the presentation (it seemed to me at the time) was to insert his current artistic production into the art history time line. After Picasso's gestural riffs on cubism, the art historical continuum shifted from issues around visual representation to abstraction. Hockney's agenda was to paint (ahem) himself as the torchbearer of representation right at the time (the 80's) when representation was returning to vogue.
At Tom Lawson's opening at David Kordansky Gallery, Adam Feldmeth remarked on how, like Beshty, Lawson's dual praxis--art and writing--work in service of each other, and in different ways, work to insinuate their practice into their respective artistic milieux.
In reading Beshty on Asher quoted here, it's not difficult to see Passages as homage to Asher's installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, much like Beshty's slide show in the adjoining gallery pays tribute to George Romero. While Beshty's re-flooring of the institution (in both the work and exhibition areas) foregrounds architectural-space-as-institution (much like Asher's 1974 intervention at
Claire Copley Gallery) it falls short of Asher's project in a number of ways. As one reviewer wrote:
"All that stuff on the walls is gone, along with every bit of privacy. Actually viewers don't intend social interaction. They come to look at art. But without knowing it, they are an integral part of the work they see. How unsettling, and uncomfortable." - Sandy Ballatore, "Michael Asher: Less Is Enough."
Artweek 5, no. 34 (October 12, 1974): 16.
There is the relational aspect to Asher's work that Beshty points out in his essay, but fails to activate in Culver City. More importantly, there is Asher's critique of commodification. An essential aspect of Asher's practice is its ephemerality. By not making objects that can be bought or sold, he circumvents the fate of other social-critique artists.
Hans Haacke's 1982 oil painting-cum-installation, Ölgemälde, Homage a Marcel Broodthaers, on display at LACMA's Two Germanys comes to mind. While Haacke's intent may have been a critique the military-industrial complex, the object became a folly of the billionaire-developer Eli Broad; the work's political impact deflates under Broad's cultural hegemony. In a similar way it is possible to picture Beshty's cracked mirrors lining the floor in an art fair booth, essentially creating a glittering vitrine for the easily shipped art-market commodities, signifiers of good taste in contemporary art.
Walead Beshty's Passages Installation View
(on Capitalism's Ruins)
"Benjamin H. D. Buchloh outlined as the core operational logic of allegory, characterized by “appropriation and depletion of meaning, fragmentation, and dialectical juxtaposition of fragments […]” having the effect of “ruins”."- ibid.
In LAXART's smaller gallery, Beshty presents a slide show of defunct and foreclosed shopping malls, a not-so-subtle capitalist critique. The soundtrack that plays over the images comes from George Romero's shopping mall guignol,
Dawn of the Dead. Though I can suss the intentions of the Buchloh-quoting artist, the work comes across as a romantic elegy to these cathedrals of consumerism.
In the above quoted piece, Beshty suggests a new, relational aesthetic reading of Asher's practice, citing his piece at LAICA that hired folks to occupy and engage in conversation in the institutional space, and Asher's engagement of Fairfax High students as part of his exhibition at LACMA. This makes me think of artists who have created artwork that socially engages and activates the people and architecture of the decrepit mall, like
Rachel Higgins' Everything Must Go.
Tom Lawson begins his essay Last Exit: Painting with a quote from David Salle, "...Paintings have to be dead; that is, from life but not a part of it..." In a similar way, Beshty re-presents us with Romero and the mall.
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