Walead Beshty
LA >< ART, Los Angeles, USA
Walead Beshty, Untitled (LAXArt: Los Angeles, CA, March 21 - May 2009) (2009)
In typical Walead Beshty fashion, ‘Passages’ imbues indexical traces with a conceptual heft and aesthetic appeal that is nearly impossible not to find seductive. X-ray lines relay an unexposed film’s transit across borders; a mirrored floor’s expanding web of cracks testifies to the passage of visitors through the gallery; a series of black and white slides bears witness to the demise of the American shopping mall; a billboard (pictured below) on nearby La Cienega Boulevard shows enlarged dust particles from Los Angeles’ notoriously smoggy atmosphere. There are no loose ends here. Yet the overwhelming neatness of Beshty’s presentation establishes an unsettling neutrality around the far more complex realities documented by his work.
Dust (2007-8), stretched vinyl on billboard. Courtesy the artist and LA >< ART.
In the ‘Passages’ (2009) series, nebulous large-scale colour prints confess their trajectory through an airport X-ray machine in the form of blurred lines and hazy irregularities. Echoing the processes of fingerprinting and body scans used in the increasingly politicized zone of the airport, the images are an appreciable evocation of the legislative and ideological transformations of a post- 9/11 world, as felt by every traveller. (The project is an intentional exercise stemming from an earlier accident, when film Beshty had taken of the deserted Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in Berlin was run through X-ray machines during his journey, and later shown at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.) They are also thoroughly charming abstract fields of fading colour: the new systems of corporeal degradation exercized in airports since September 2001, which establish a state of exception as a civic norm, are rendered oddly palatable.
Beshty’s accompanying projects similarly circle around the notion of ‘having been there’: Untitled (LAXArt: Los Angeles, CA, March 21 - May 2009) (2009), a reflective floor of cracked, shatter-proof glass, progressively deteriorates as it is walked upon by visitors, in a reiteration of another of Beshty’s Whitney Biennial installations, where cubes of glass were shipped in standardized FedEx boxes, gathering the marks of their journey as they went.
The slide projection ‘American Passages’ (2001-ongoing) is a black-and-white eulogy to the deserted shopping malls of middle America. Beshty himself likens the series to the late-19th-century archives of Eugène Atget and Charles Marville, who created their photographic records of France’s urban and architectural past on the eve of its disappearance. Beshty’s dissolving slides are accompanied by a distilled version of the soundtrack to the 1979 shopping-mall zombie film Dawn of the Dead.
As Beshty’s emphasis on facticity - his unabashed fetishization of the indexical - becomes increasingly apparent, it becomes less clear as to exactly why he wants us to believe in the unaltered reality of his subjects. If the large-scale photographs in ‘Passages’ take on the airport as a newly important political terrain, it reflects no real desire to inspire political conviction. Beshty recently noted that, ‘The prints are seductive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’d look good over a couch: that’s fine.’ Nor does ‘American Passages’ constitute a nostalgia-driven plea for the preservation of obsolete regional shopping centres: the malls shown as empty and unused often still function in new ways - as community gathering places where people exercise, eat at the food courts, or just hang out.
The trio of works at LA >< ART are at once rooted in fact and indifferent to it. Paradoxically, Beshty’s romanticization of the index only distances us from its referents in the airport, the shopping centre, or the gallery. We are left uncomfortably unsure as to what extent to the artist engages with the situations he addresses; and yet, in provoking this shadowy dissatisfaction, Beshty challenges our notions of ‘engagement’ as an artistic obligation. His timely observations and dexterous manipulations of visual fact leave a lingering uncertainty: what kind of inquiry does ‘Passages’ actually make? Is it an inquiry at all, or an adroit exercise in deflection?
Sarah-Neel Smith
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