Walead Beshty

Wallspace Gallery is pleased to announce The Body-Body Problem, Los Angeles-based artist Walead Beshty’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York.

In The Body-Body Problem, Beshty continues his ongoing project examining the contemporary subject of late capitalism, here focusing on the various bodily allusions within the commercial realm. Exploiting familiar aspects of contemporary culture (the school portrait, the commercial display, pop songs), Beshty lures the viewer into a comfortable and familiar environment in order to enact a broad range of political theatrics and subversions: the body becomes a serialized object, personal expression enters the zone of corporate speak, and the commodity is re-imagined as a site for erotic pleasure. His work operates in the margins between the earnest and the parodic, maintaining both cool criticality and visceral immediacy, resulting in images that have political resonance and humorous undertones.

The newest work on view, dating from 2004, shows the artist’s hands squeezing, prodding and exposing commercial architecture and consumer products. Beshty brings to the surface the sublimated bodily tensions in the commercial environ through an aggressive, almost vulgar use of his disembodied hand. Through the employ of a ring flash (a staple of both commercial and medical still life photography) this series combines the bodily confusion and sexual provocation of surrealism with the pop seduction of advertising, riding the line between sexual fetish and clinical examination.

Also on view are two pieces from his series Phenomenology of Shopping, in which the artist, over the span of three years, made photographs in various malls across the country, inserting his own limp form into display showcases, with those selected emphasizing domestic spaces recreated in commercial locales. Dressed in the jeans-and-t-shirt garb of joe-consumer, his face—the main signifier of his individuality—is literally devoured by the merchandise on display. His body, when placed within the “orifice” of a washing machine, for example, loses all semblance and functions of an active body/consumer, while the inanimate begins to assume anthropomorphically monstrous traits.

Beshty takes this erasure of the self and the plasticine display of the body a step farther with Paired Adonis. This naked, classic beauty (and his stereoscopic double) brings to mind the erotic play of Greco-Roman sculpture turned inward. While the subject’s pose echoes the idealized male figure and titillates with its revealed nude form, further examination presents the imperfections all bodies contain in a disruption of the ideal to which it alludes. Still, the figure stands in autonomous self-satisfaction. For Beshty, the Adonis represents a vision of the post-capitalist body, a form of the self whose sexuality is inverted, and hermetically sealed within its own fully revealed form. Like a store bought product, the body is serialized, and de-natured, keeping the consummation of viewer’s desire for access to subject in the image at bay, while unabashedly showing every detail. The figure is left to ponder his own absence through his naked, sexless double, while just around the corner, inanimate objects (holes in store walls and washing machines) become the active sites for erotic fantasy and performance.

A similar erasure is played out in Absent Self-Portrait (Age Progressions), wherein the artist's own face, and all of the quirks and traits that signify individual identity, become infinitely reproducible stock features. For this project, Beshty sent eight photographs of himself between the ages six and twelve to a forensic artist at the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, under the auspices that these were images of siblings. He then asked the expert to ‘age-progress’ the images to 25 years, the age of the artist at the time of the project. The result is a series of images that have no direct connection to a unique individual, but rather, become images of "types" that can be exchanged, duplicated and mass-produced ad infinitum.

Walead Beshty currently has a Special Project Show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Phenomenology of Shopping + Dead Malls, which was organized by Bob Nickas. The exhibition occupies three rooms on the museum’s third floor, and will run through the 27th of September. In the past year, the 27-year old artist has been featured in numerous venues in the US and abroad including: the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, MA), Galerie Chez Valentin (Paris), the Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY), and Sandroni Rey in Los Angeles. Additionally, his critical writings have been published in Influence Magazine, Afterall, Aperture, Artforum, Site Journal, and Text zur Kunst. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and has taught at CalArts, UCIrvine and UCLA where he is currently a lecturer in the Art Department. He is a graduate of Yale University’s MFA program in Photography.

Walead Beshty
The Body-Body Problem