Published by Walther König, Köln/MAMCO Geneva. Text by Noam Elcott, Lynn Kost. Interviews by Lionel Bovier, Hamza Walker.
The art of Los Angeles–based Walead Beshty (born 1976) is mostly geometrically abstract in form and industrially produced, evoking Minimalist art. But Beshty does not present his works as autonomous objects for interaction with the exhibition space and the viewer; rather, he sees them within a broader context in which they are produced, transported, installed, exhibited, viewed, traded and discussed as objects of circulation. They are conceived in such a way as to document their own genesis, as well as to make visible the influences of the system in which the works also function: as a commodity, a carrier of meaning, a means of transport, a news archive, a fetish, an object of research.
This volume, published for Beshty’s exhibition at Kunst Museum Winterthur, focuses on his recent output, presenting numerous works for the first time alongside his well-known photograms and Fed-Ex sculptures.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Introduction by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Los Angeles–based artist and writer Walead Beshty (born 1976) started his Industrial Portraits series in 2008. He realizes them wherever he goes, asking all the art people he works with to pose in their working environment and working clothes: studio assistants, gallery staff, curators, lab technicians, critics, fellow artists, collectors, art handlers and even the “machines,” which contribute to an artwork’s progress from studio to gallery and beyond. Captioned first as “framer,” “Fedex courier” or “darkroom assistant” and then identified with the location and date of the shoot, together his models form a nonhierarchical, kaleidoscopic yet very detailed “facebook” of the art world, following in part the tradition of great American anthropological photographic surveys. This publication gathers together the Industrial Portraits created between 2008 and 2012. A second volume will be published to span the subsequent years.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Lionel Bovier. Introduction by George Baker.
Los Angeles–based artist Walead Beshty (born 1976) has long maintained an active writing career alongside his work in the visual arts. Writing on a variety of media, including essays on cinema, painting, sculpture and photography, and texts on artists such as Jay DeFeo, Sharon Lockhart, Kelley Walker, Luisa Lambri, Annette Kelm and Michael Asher, among others, Beshty has been widely published in both books and magazines. This book, the latest in JRP|Ringier’s Positions series copublished with Les presses du réel, gathers together a selection of these essays, often hard to find, in partially reedited forms. Together these texts appear as a parallel production to Beshty’s artistic work: they reflect on the conditions of the realization and circulation of images, undermining distinctions between media, abstraction and figuration, and proposing new aesthetic criteria for the works examined.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Edited by Walead Beshty. Text by Nicolas Bourriaud, Suzanne Hudson, Bob Nickas.
This new expanded edition gives a ten-year overview of Los Angeles–based artist Walead Beshty (born 1976), and elucidates his approach to photographic and sculptural representation. Most recently, Beshty’s work has concentrated on themes of production, making use of mundane procedures like air travel or mailing a package.
Published by JRP|Ringier. Foreword by Jacob Fabricius, Ferran Barenblit. Text by Nicolas Bourriaud, Suzanne Hudson, Bob Nickas.
Moments spent in elevators, check-ins at airports, subway rides—these are all examples of the kind of “in-between” time that fascinates Walead Beshty and supplies so much of the material for his photographs. “In-between time” applies to civic space, too—depopulated modernist housing developments that sit precariously between evacuation and demolition (explored by Beshty in his Excursionist Views), plants, weeds and vegetation on isolated highway medians (Island Flora), or abandoned shopping malls (American Passages). More recently, Beshty’s adventures in “the in-between” have become a means of production, as he makes creative use of such mundane procedures as air travel or sending a package. This monograph presents a ten-year overview of Walead Beshty’s approach to photographic and sculptural representation, and contains newly commissioned essays by Suzanne Hudson and Nicolas Bourriaud, as well as a conversation between Bob Nickas and Beshty.
Published by Damiani. Text by Peter Eleey, Jason Smith, Eric Schwab.
Walead Beshty (born 1976) has long used photography as a tool to explore social conditions. In 2001, the artist began documenting the abandoned embassy of the defunct Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in the former East Berlin. This publication focuses on three related bodies of work that continue Beshty's engagement with the invisible territories of globalization.
Walead Beshty: Industrial Portraits
33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters
Walead Beshty: Natural Histories
Walead Beshty: Natural Histories
Walead Beshty: Selected Correspondences 2001-2010