Walead Beshty's Revolution Will Be Colorful

Walead Beshty's work with photograms hangs on a crucial moment of interpretation. Beshty creates seductive, colorful surfaces, ostensibly abstractions although their texture demonstrate visible curls and depth to suggest the artist's indexical mark and spatial depth. These images come with a backstory,namely the artist's rigorous mode of production and controlled inexpressiveness, formal constraints that include using only the basic CMY printing inks, delicately timed repeat exposures, and a constructed deployment of chance. Beshty makes an analogy of his practice to a game, "where the range of outcomes is implict to the rules, and the rules become more or less the important thing." The nature of this game has to do with the viewer's recognition of the rule's creative limits and the contingency of viewership within the exhibition context, and depends upon the viewer's inclination to do so.



INSTALLATION RENDERING COURTESY JOHNTON MARKLEE AND WALEAD BESHTY



Beshty's recent series of photograms, called "Black Curls," are on view as part of a collaborative exhibition with architects Johnston Marklee. "Later Layer" showcases the latter's models for a set of pavilions for Italy's Depart Foundation, and demonstrate a strong interest in modularity, marked by permutations of spatial proportions that expand and focus the floorplans. Beshty has emphasized the model's "propositional" aspect by coating the windows of the exhibition space at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles with color contacts to filter the space's light. He's created pedestals according to the proportions favored in the exhibited models; these double as minimalist sculpture and triple as benches. It's this paradoxically expansive range of options, mimicking the rules of both conceptual art and mass customization, that are packed into what the artist calls "a cleavage in the moment of display and the moment of production."


GARTENFELD: Your installation with Johnston Marklee is situated at the Italian Cultural Institute, and presented by the Depart Foundation, an Italian cultural organization. The press materials for the show insist on "site specificity," while the title of the exhibition title, "Later Layer," is a Latinate term for bricklayer. Could you explain for me the significance of the specificity here—is it embedded in the historical overlap of building a contemporary Italian culture and a more generalized sense of Latin architectural heritage?

BESHTY: I'm not aware of the exact wording of the press release, but regardless, the exhibition isn't specific to the physical site of the institute, but rather began with the relationships that both Johnston MarkLee and I had with the Depart Foundation, and with each other. For me, the Loos quote, which goes something like "an architect is a bricklayer who studied Latin" was compelling in that it emphasized both the modular (i.e. the stacking of bricks), linguistic play, and the emphasis on material craft. The word "Later" is the Latin word for brick, hence "Later Layer" invokes the figure of the brick layer, but is also a homophonic doubling or stacking. This duality seemed appropriate because running throughout the show, and the works, is this element of modularity and recombinatory processes, that plays between projected meaning, and material concreteness.

GARTENFELD: So the site specificity is not native to this particular set of institutions with which you are dealing?

BESHTY: In a sense it is, because both the IIC and the Depart Foundation are frames through which the show is operating, and gave form or expression to my collaboration with JohnstonMarkLee. But not in the classical sense of site specificity, which usually implies that a work, or exhibition, has no meaning outside of a single physical location. For example, the modular pedestals that we designed together, were designed to be able to be repurposed for any site, or configuration, so I'd say that adaptability more than site specificity was being emphasized. I would say the show is specific to the context that surrounds it, but it is not tied to any particular site, but rather was designed to be adaptable to various locations. Perhaps a better term is "institutional specificity," since the Depart Foundation—and any institution for that matter—is more than a physical site, but an array of forces that reach beyond a physical location.

GARTENFELD: Returning to the title, which refers to the role of the architect, how is the sense of human labor (in architecture, or otherwise) meant to manifest in this installation, or more generally in your work?

BESHTY: I think of the exhibition as propositional, beginning with the idea of the model or the schematic. So it is more about the projection of a hypothetical space, an idealized site that remains abstract, and the shift from that projection to the physical site of reception.

GARTENFELD: Your photograms, which are florid abstractions, are firmly rooted in material constraints. You only use the C-M-Y exposures to create your colors-not even K, which is a color correction. For this exhibition, for instance, you used settings created by previous users of your photo lab to determine the composition of the works. And you rely on gravity and error to create the different colors. I wonder how your interest here in specificity can be reconciled with the flat surface of the works themselves.

BESHTY: K, or black, is only present in ink based printing processes, not in photography, with photography all you need is Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow to make a true black. If you're referring to the "Black Curl" works, I wouldn't call them abstractions, they are more concrete or literal. So, in technical terms, they are anything but abstract. They contain a transcription of their surface on their surface, so I would say they are specific in the sense that the material and the image are tied together, neither could operate without the other. They may be serial, because each is made in the same way and is essentially the result of the same set of forces, but each is unique to its particular moment of production. In a sense, they are the expression of a set of rules, or processes, which allow for differentiated outcomes.

GARTENFELD: The title, "Later Layer," is channeled through Adolf Loos, whose most famous quotation is that, "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects." You've discussed the importance of the abstract, or perhaps better put "general," aspect of your photograms. But in the context of a show of architecture, how does your generalized visual surface square with the concept, specifically, of "decoration" as a non-utilitarian surface?

BESHTY: It depends on how you use the term "decorative." I don't have a problem with the term because the history of art objects is tied to the decorative, tied to taste, but it also has the ability to do more, or invite a questioning of its appearance, its seduction. I suppose one of the things I think about is how to dismantle the assumptions related to aesthetics, democratize it in a sense by locating it in a public sphere or the instrumental use of aesthetics. That is one reason why I choose to externalize the production of my work, situating it within readymade procedures, or processes, rather than making works that rely on internal compositional choices. I look to naturalized conventions associated with the technologies and materials I use, and consider how I could employ them in such a way that they can be generative, while acknowledging the tacit assumptions about aesthetics they imply, how they formulate and bracket our experience of the world.

GARTENFELD: If the work is embedded in politicized restraints, is there a responsibility for the artist to exceed the limits of the design object, as itself a signifier and agent of power and restraint?

BESHTY: Are you asking me about the differences between design and art? I'm not sure I could answer that, except to say that art more readily elicits questions about its own making, its role in power relations, and the examination of the ideological assumptions about aesthetics. I think thoughtful design can operate in this way as well; it's just not expected to. That said, design tends to be more honest about its relationship to use, how it is instrumentalized, how it is trafficked, within art, this is usually concealed, or repressed. Art for Art's sake, etc. But really, I don't think the division between the two is all that useful, each instance of aesthetic production/reception should be taken on its own terms, considered specifically; I don't see much use in thinking of things in broad categories, broad categories tend to obscure more than they reveal.


LATER LAYER IS ON VIEW THROUGH FEBRUARY 28. THE ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE IS LOCATED AT 1023 HILGARD AVENUE, LOS ANGELES.