Walead Beshty in Conversation with Hamza Walker

On the occasion of Equivalents, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, April 7, 2018.
Edited and published in Walead Beshty: Work in Exhibition, 2011–2020 (London: Koenig Books / Kunst Museum Winterthur), 2020.

Hamza Walker: 
I think of your work as incredibly discursive even unto itself. It seems to be a kind of ongoing conversation. One thing leading to another thing, perhaps, but I never feel as though it’s project-based, insofar as there seem to be an underlying set of questions that would tie all the chapters or bodies of work together, regardless of whether it’s sculpture, or photography, etc. You took photographs of the abandoned Iraq embassy1, and parallel to that you did a body of work that was—I’m going to say abstract2; I would like to go back to that initial moment, where there was a recognizable content in your photographs, alongside concerns about a more ontological investigation into photography that, I guess, would masquerade as abstract. It was actually quite a sustained body of work over that time. How were you thinking about those modes: representation, documentary and abstract photography?

Walead Beshty: 
I guess I should say that I generally avoid terms like representation, abstract, or documentary, when discussing my work. In general, such terms omit the materiality of the thing they seek to describe, which disappears under the terms’ emphasis on pictorial qualities, and with it, so goes the political and social implications attached to the real-world circulation of images. Early on I decided to opt for terms like concrete, or materialist, which at least allude to the role of depictions in the world, how they traffic and intersect with our lives. Which is to say that the implications of a picture extend beyond just what it depicts. Our lives are extended through the traffic of images, objects, concepts, and so on, and they are essentially appendages, cybernetic extensions of our bodies and minds which facilitate connecting to others. We are fully integrated into this system, and live through the things around us. The boundaries between our bodies, the objects that surround us, and other bodies are, in truth, porous and fluid. 

I tend to think of my work in terms of constraints, whether that be context, convention or material, and use their logics to generate the work. I guess that’s because I see life as an improvisation within constraints, and affirmative notions of selfhood, autonomy, freedom, etc., arise through the active negotiation with restriction. Like the notion of being a citizen subject of the state, of being counted or included, which is only palpable when one confronts its limits, those numerous instances where our supposedly inalienable rights are revoked (like in an airport, or in a confrontation with the police, where the right to free speech or privacy is suspended); it’s an inclusion based on exclusion, citizenship only exists when some are excluded, rights only exist when they are bounded. What is beautiful about life is its ability to evade constraint in novel ways, that’s why I don’t think it’s enough to merely rehearse repressive conditions (as I feel much so called "politically engaged" art limits itself to), but also consider how such constraints are negotiated with and exceeded, how the world bursts forth from the containments we try to put it in. I always try to be clear about what those constraints are, be conscious of them rather than just assume them. In the case of the Travel Pictures (2006/2008), the work I made in the former Iraqi embassy to the GDR, I was trying to find a way to think between pictorial categories, how categorical terms like representation, documentary, and abstraction fail, how photographic material can make a kind of image that doesn’t adhere to these distinctions. There are two sorts of depiction going on in those works, the optical rendering of the embassy and the literal transcription of the X-ray beam, and both are tied to the regulation and traffic of human beings. The work arose at the beginning of the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq, and both U.S.-led wars in Iraq—not to mention German history—loomed over my experience of the embassy itself.

Hamza Walker: 
I just want to say, for those of you who don’t know, this was a body of work that Walead produced in the aftermath of September 11thand was finalized between 2006–2008. It involves the Iraqi embassy in former East Germany (GDR). Embassies are grants from one country to another; the land falls under the sovereignty of that nation that receives the gift of the embassy-ship. It was abandoned in 1991, just wholesale abandoned as an effect of the second Gulf War.

Walead Beshty: 
It was the point when the Ba’athist Republic ceased to exist and they were rewriting the constitution, a process that impacted this innocuous ruin of an office building thousands of miles away from Baghdad, because those events marooned the embassy in a geopolitical limbo. Because of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the territory of the embassy was protected as sovereign territory, meaning that it was illegal for a governmental actor to set foot on it without permission, to do so would have been an act of war. It was a territory belonging to a defunct state (the Ba’athist Republic of Iraq), and guaranteed by another defunct state (the German Democratic Republic). It was, in a sense, the one place where the Ba’athist Republic continued to exist, at least until a new nation-state was established in Iraq. It was a terra incognita stuck in the middle of Pankow, Berlin, out of time, out of place. 

When there were reports of a fire at the embassy, the Berlin firefighters couldn’t get permission to enter the site, there was no one to ask, all Iraqi diplomats had been recalled when Saddam Hussein was deposed, so the firefighters just stood outside waiting. There was a little blurb in the newspaper about the whole thing. To an individual walking by, it was no different than any other structure, but with regard to international law, it was separate and apart. In trespassing onto that site, you were entering into a foreign place, with its own set of laws, and your status as an individual transformed. It was like a microcosm of West Berlin during the era of the East German state, except the embassy was abandoned and completely disconnected. Perhaps a better analogy are the prisoners being held in Guantanamo, denied status as enemy soldiers and thus the guarantees offered by the Geneva Conventions, yet also denied protections offered in US domestic courts (such as the repeated denials of writs of habeas corpus), they’ve been caught in a legal limbo as non-persons for nearly two decades. In other words, the embassy was a sovereignty-free zone, a zone that was separate from the state that surrounded it, and part of a state that no longer existed. So, you have this kind of collision between the abstraction of law and the material-based fact of things. I should also note that the situation of the abandoned embassy was complicated by the fact that the GDR gave it to the Ba’athist Republic in perpetuity. 

Hamza Walker: 
But the GDR dissolved.

Walead Beshty: 
German reunification grandfathered in a whole bunch of East German treaties. It wasn’t just the dissolution of East Germany; it was an absorption. Two things happened simultaneously, the first Gulf War and German reunification, if the war hadn’t happened, the Iraqi delegation wouldn’t have been ordered out of the country; if reunification hadn’t happened, the East German embassy wouldn't have been abandoned in the first place. But because these two events coincided, the former embassy fell between the cracks. Then, when the war ceased and relations were normalized, the Iraqis simply created a new embassy in Berlin, ignoring the former East German embassy. Around 2002, I called the Iraqi ambassador to Germany, and he wasn’t even aware of the building, and of course, he was gone within a year when all the Ba’ath party members were removed from office. Amid the turmoil in Iraq, and German reunification, this office building was not an urgent matter, so it lingered as this bubble, a kind of geopolitical hole in Berlin, a discrete alternate reality in terms of the law. 

Hamza Walker: 
Because of the status of Iraq, there was no burning issue about who does this belong to? So, it just sat there. 

Walead Beshty: 
Yeah, it simply got lost in the maze of international relations.

Hamza Walker: 
Yeah. Back to laws and abstractions.

Walead Beshty: 
Well, I think I’ve always been interested in those sorts of conflicts, these surplus unintended effects of the confrontation between abstraction (theoretical, legal, political or otherwise) and the material world. You get these moments of friction or error and the resistance of things that abstraction is meant to contain. In some work, it’s quite explicit, like the Travel Pictures and in others less so, but it is always present. I think this conflict is present in our discussion of representation, and how people usually describe images as disembodied, outside of their material existence; that they show you the world but are outside of it. You see a depiction in a magazine and a depiction on a billboard, and you call them the same image, right? But, in actuality, they address a viewer in a very different way and are made in a completely different way. They speak of different ideas about the role of depictions, of power, of capital, of who a public is and who is excluded from that public. These effects are physical as much as they are political. The term "picture" makes these things and their circumstances falsely similar, it allows for us to gloss over the urgent political stakes associated with their differences.

Hamza Walker: 
From this vantage point, a photograph is a photograph is a photograph with little if any distinction about what is depicted regardless of whether it is abstract or representational. I know you don’t like the term representational, but all photos become representational insofar as they are subject to a kind of imminent materialist critique. 

Walead Beshty: 
I mean, I don’t particularly care about photography, or more precisely, photographic discourse as such, but I think photographic conventions produce some interesting collisions between depiction and material fact. Photographs are essentially flesh; I mean they’re distilled flesh. Emulsion comes from waste products from the beef industry, that are distilled into a goo. It’s a byproduct of meat production. Barthes referred to photography as a “shared skin,” he was being metaphorical, but it literally is true. This distilled flesh is smeared over a plastic base (a petroleum product, again derived from bodies) and there’s a tactility to it, it absorbs moisture, reacts to heat, it registers touch, but these qualities are usually repressed. Film and photographic paper is kept in conditions that minimize these aspects, it’s handled such that our greasy bodies don’t leave traces, we keep it free from humidity, reduce its exposure to UV light, and so on. But this reactivity is an exciting attribute, just not a sanctioned one. Just in the physical make up of photographic film you have a connection to a multitude industries and work forces, petroleum, meat, and so on: we just repress these connections, much the same way that we repress all these highly reactive aspects of the material. That sense of connection, reactivity, and integration of a photograph (or any object) in a network of actors is the most complex and compelling aspect to me.

Hamza Walker: 
Was it Walter Benjamin who laughed at the idea of that photography was “invented,” preferring to see it instead as a sum of historical processes that weren’t merely technical but that also involved a way of seeing?

Walead Beshty: 
Yeah, and photography is merely a part of a nearly three-thousand-year tradition of technologically augmented forms of vision, I mean the Assyrians, Greeks and Romans used optical lenses. But modern optics were refined in an attempt to emulate Renaissance perspectival formula, which is extendible in every direction indefinitely. It’s premised on the grid; it is an abstraction. But humans see in curves. All lenses see in curves. Optics don’t create infinitely expandable rectilinear forms. But camera lenses, and optically based media in general, were developed to try to repress their curvilinear qualities. To mask this, we crop the image circle that lenses project into a rectangle, we design lenses that produce as flat a field as possible, we even dysphemistically call the evidence of lens curvature “distortion.” The extent of this repression is perverse. That’s why the rectangle is the default shape of a photograph, rather than a circle, because they were trying to emulate painting, force optical images to emulate the Albertian perspectival formula. Because, really, a lens projects a circle, so why aren’t all photographs circular? That answer lies beyond ontology, and beyond the photographic category, because photographic objects were designed to emulate the paintings which came before it, it was being coaxed into behaving rectilinearly, in the same way that Photoshop operates on the metaphor of photography, even though digital information doesn’t behave photographically, it’s modular, comprised of binary on/off switches. One understands that the actual base material, digital material, ones and zeroes, are electrical pulses stored magnetically, yet we engage with it through metaphor. They have nothing to do with silver crystals in a suspension of boiled animal goo, and yet, we engage in the digital through the metaphor of optics and the chemical transformation of silver salts when subject to light, we engage in it via an abstraction.

Hamza Walker: 
Exactly. That’s how we understand it. 

Walead Beshty:
You import a previous medium to understand the next one.

Hamza Walker: 
Always, right.

Walead Beshty: 
That’s very McLuhanian, but it’s a good description, and it always creates problems; and I’m interested in those problems where the abstract model can’t keep up with, or can’t fully account for, the physical thing. How life exceeds these models. We live within abstract structures, and they become natural and assumed, but there are areas where these containments can’t account for what they are meant to contain, where something seeps out, where unforeseen consequences and contradictions arise. In communication theory, this is called noise, interference, but this is just a catchall term for the unexpected and unaccounted for. It is the registration of a presence between sender and receiver, it’s a resistance to control. At first that ‘noise’ is hard to recognize as something meaningful, we only see the system, but after looking, it is prevalent. It’s everywhere, and it is evidence of a force we haven’t accounted for. Noise is often the unregistered presence of human suffering. 

Hamza Walker: 
And then there is the capacity to turn that suffering into art. We’ve been talking about abstraction versus representation and your aversion to those terms. But with respect to McLuhan, what about medium specificity, if the medium is indeed the message? I bring this up because of the way you were talking about photography materially. Does meaning reside with the medium? 

Walead Beshty: 
I think those aesthetic categorical delimiters, whether they be medium based, as in photography versus painting or sculpture, or formal, like abstraction versus representation, create false connections between unrelated things while they obscure the continuities and connections between related things. It takes the stories we tell each other about the world, say the continuity within a category of media or form, and makes them seem solid, definitional, but they’re just stories, and in the end, not terribly useful ones. You could talk about the Iraqi embassy images for example, just because of current context, as being the story about this place and about those times. But that’s one of many possible viable stories. It’s one schematic to guide you through it, but it’s not the only way of seeing the work. In the end, you’re standing in front of an object. You’re standing in front of a thing, and you think about that thing. It’s all about an experience with a thing and how it complicates one’s expectations. It’s not about someplace else, it’s not showing you something, it is about where you are, how you understand pictures, how you understand representation to work. My story about the work is just one story, in the same way that you can look at this table in a multitude of different ways, as a pile of atoms with blurry boundaries, made up of mostly empty space, swapping and sharing electrons; or as a single solid object, or a part of a certain historical development, or whatever, you can describe it in infinite ways, tell infinite stories about it. The stories are wonderful, but none are definitive. The story you tell is just the one that is useful at that moment.

Hamza Walker: 
Right.

Walead Beshty: 
And it’s not that one model is primary or truthful. It’s just that we constantly slip between these models. So, I would never want to dictate a particular story as the entry point. I can only say, in terms of my studio narrative, this is how I understand the circumstance that produced these things; but it doesn’t really explain the thing, if it did, the thing wouldn’t need to exist. For instance, regarding the creation of the Travel Pictures, in the end, it was also very much about how the film is affected when it passes through X-rays, which is similar to when you expose it to light. It’s how materials can exceed expectation, and extend perception, in this case, how these materials see something that is invisible to the naked eye, and that invisible thing coincides with other phenomena (i.e. the exposure to X-rays coincides with the movement across borders, and is part of a state surveillance system). What shows up in the X-ray is another manifestation of the partitions between countries. One of the material manifestations of a border is its militarization, which most U.S. citizens experience as being searched, frisked, scanned, X-rayed, that experience marks the shifting status of an individual as they move through a border. It just so happens that light-sensitive material or that silver halide reacts to X-rays, even though it’s a wavelength of light that we don’t see. It is affected by it, just as we are, it’s just the effect on us isn’t immediately physically apparent, but is realized in a political relation, our relation to the state as a guarantor or denier of rights. So, in a way, this also goes to that abstraction versus representation question. Which one is a truer representation of the border situation? Is it a figurative depiction of the circumstance or a mark left by state inspection? Or is it the sine curve of the X-ray beam? They’re both circling around the same phenomena, so why separate them, why not think of them together.

Hamza Walker: 
Exactly.

Walead Beshty: 
I mean, is a pictorial thing more accurate and informative? Or does the trace of the X-ray emitter tell us more? Which one is the truer depiction? Both are residues of an expansive security bureaucracy. But it also extends in another direction, into the industry of depiction, the economies of scale which produce the means to make technical images, our notion of visibility is an industrial construct. Making something visible is a way we assert something’s existence, but this also produces the false assumptions that what isn’t seen doesn’t exist, and even more perversely, that being seen is existence. I think the latter phenomenon is why representation is over emphasized, treated as an end in itself. Too often representation is deployed as a means to correct inequity when it is merely a symptom of a much deeper and more insidious inequity, one that lies at the heart of capitalist ideology, in the way collective society and the supposedly democratic state has evolved under the onus of protecting and encouraging the accumulation and consolidation of wealth and power. 

Hamza Walker: 
It’s an incredibly loaded discourse surrounding your pictures. There’s the content, but then, there’s the literal medium that is being fucked with in a very literal fashion. Like you’re saying, which of these two things are more real? You traveling and exposing the film under an X-ray machine, or the depiction of a stateless place, as a way of talking about those things? And I think this is a way for the audience to get to know that you are something other than a dialectical thinker. I don’t know what the hell that is, like, trilectical. I don’t know. We’ve got to go past three. So, even at the level, do you abide by the label “Walead Beshty, photographer,” and how do you feel about being called a photographer?

Walead Beshty: 
I think it’s a misdirection. Photographs operate within a multitude of different fields, and the term tells us little about how the thing itself is being used, or even how it was made. Earlier on the term really irritated me, because I felt like it cleaved off a whole bunch of questions that I was actually interested in. I felt it indicated a fundamental misunderstanding of my work that I needed to address. Perhaps I took it too seriously. Now it is just curious. I mean, I could also be called an electrician, because I make electrical things and I would feel just as amused by that as I would by being called a photographer. 

Hamza Walker: 
There are very few artists I can think of who are dealing with photography at such an intensely-materialist level. There’s a level of consideration about what photography literally is in your work at such an ontological level, that I don’t have another term to think of you as a photographer and I feel like other things grow out of that. You just kind of flip it inside-out.

Walead Beshty: 
My introduction to art came through photography, that’s true. Photography is an industrial medium that was simple enough for me as a student to screw around with and to understand.  That did build a set of approaches to other image-based or depictive media, or other kinds of circulatory systems for imagery, and it gave me a way to think through them. But my focus isn’t really on the photographic, it doesn’t end there. I don’t use the term because it’s impossible to define in anything more than a provisional way. I mean, what makes a photograph a photograph. Is it emulsion; what about digital cameras? Is it lenses; what about photograms? Is it light? What about offset printing? And so on. And then, just as legitimately, a sunburn is a photograph. I prefer Vilém Flusser’s term “technical images,” but I also make things that aren’t in any sense images. In fact, what guided me early on was the desire to make photographs that weren’t images, that weren’t likenesses, which is what the word image means. 

Hamza Walker: 
Speaking of your early years, were you ever interested in the moving image?

Walead Beshty: 
I didn’t have access to a video camera, or something like that, but my high school had a darkroom, and no one ever used it. So, that was a place where I could go and learn what it means to produce images and understand the logic behind it, and also be on my own and play. I approach all my work in an amateurish way. For instance, that’s where the canceled television works (2014–), and Office Works (2014–), come from: “what happens if you just drill a hole through it and string it up?” Rather than acting from expertise, I’d rather use things dumbly, without the shroud of expertise or authority, and that darkroom was the first opportunity to screw around, and it taught me something about why the world looked the way it did. If I had similar access to other means, I probably would be doing something different.

Hamza Walker: 
I was very surprised to see, so to speak, autobiographical works of yours in the show After Picasso: 80 Contemporary Artists at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2015. Would that qualify, for example, as one of those interests outside a set of narrow parameters set up by questions of the photographic?

Walead Beshty: 
From the beginning, I always tried to create artworks in every kind of situation. So, I would produce things in hotel rooms, or I would carry around cyanotype material, or I started making these drawings on stationery when I was traveling. Those Travel Drawing works (2014–) started as a way to keep working and see what working in an itinerant way could produce. Produce under the constraint of travel. I also see myself as one aspect of the production process, so I was playing with that, working in awkward situations or under duress. The ones you mention were done while I was on a bit of a bender. I wanted to make drawings under the influence and in isolation. In a sense, the medication, either prescribed or obtained, structured how I was working. So I made these drawings in the desert, taking Xanax and drinking, and doing any number of things. I was also reading T.J. Clark’s Picasso and Truth (2013), at the time, and was struck by the chapter on the sex paintings, Clark’s breezily romantic voice and Picasso’s vulgarity. That was the first time the various drugs I’m prescribed came into play in my work in a conscious way. I loved the bureaucratic, quasi-legalistic language of the prescriptions, how they described intimate things, elements of subjectivity, in this cold corporate language. It makes mind altering substances less romantic when they are accompanied by names like Pfizer or Purdue Pharma. I thought of it as a flip side to a notion of expression as the result of the internal life of the artist, here I was a vehicle for the effects of corporate interests, pharmaceutical companies, alcohol manufacturers, and so on. All of those pills and whatnot are all about structuring deviations from a supposed norm. They’re also aspirational, about better living through chemistry. I think this was a recognition that one definition of myself as an agent in the process of making art was presented by these pharmaceuticals, and through pharmaceuticals the interior of my body was connected to these global industries. It was another frame to think about my life and my work within.

Hamza Walker: 
The constraints seem crucial for your work. I never, in a million years, ever would have thought of constraints as a through line in your work. I never would have added that up as a kind of M.O. for you, which is really interesting, just to hear it put out there that way, as a framework that is, then, re-inscribed. 

Walead Beshty: 
It’s just one story that makes sense to me right now. I mean, one constantly re-narrates one’s life to oneself; artists are called upon to do this in public, which I like because it makes one accountable, but it’s a weird exercise. Nothing really happens in the manner we recount it. 

Hamza Walker: 
Yeah, but it’s nice to know that you’re still hunting for a narrative, in some sense. On the other hand, patterns and designs are a certain approach, to produce works [referring to the Inverted RA4 Contact Print works (2016–), and Cross-Contaminated Inverted RA4 Contact Print works (2016–), in the room]. What are the constraints that you’re working in, that produced some of them? I know about the fading as a result of draining the developer over repeated use.

Walead Beshty: 
I had inherited a color processor from the University of California, Irvine that they were getting rid of when they were going all digital. I had worked on that machine when I taught there, I would use it off-hours and during holidays. It was a little finicky and became more and more finicky when I set it up again in my studio. So, in a lot of ways, the progression that happens in the course of this work is also a kind of index of that machine slowly breaking down. The majority of the form comes from that, from the processor stalling or stopping in the middle of development and the staining that happens from chemistry failing to circulate properly over the surface. 

Hamza Walker: 
Right.

Walead Beshty: 
The marks on the surface of the work come from the contact of the paper with itself during the process of development, and the machine doing the best it can to move the paper through, and then, the uneven circulation of the fluids, the temperature fluctuations, as well as other factors beyond my control, produced the different colors, and the different forms, the pooling and dripping. That’s basically what generated these, I let the machine’s progressive dissolution take over, while I kept my process the same. Its prolonged decay takes the place of artistic development.

Hamza Walker: 
Over time, right. 

Walead Beshty: 
So, you can look at how the machine was changing its style, and here style is a kind of dysfunction. In fact, any attempt to lay out the practice, to talk about some sort of artistic agency or development, is really located between me, the people in my studio, and the machine. Again, it’s a cybernetic apparatus. 

Hamza Walker: 
Oh, yeah.

Walead Beshty: 
I never want the emphasis to be on my role in it, in the beginning I was actively trying to reduce my decision-making to very clear, basic actions. The initial emphasis on removing the authorial mark, or complicating authorial agency, now is just an unconscious part of how I do stuff, rather than something I consciously try to realize. It’s become automatic.

Hamza Walker: 
To me, in the series of office machine works there is so much aggression. What does all of this aggression towards digital equipment and flat screens mean? You cut the TVs in half, you bore a hole through them, ram through them, and their guts are hanging out. It’s like The Walking Dead! 

Walead Beshty: 
The TV itself produces a picture if you punch a hole in it, rather than just being a platform for a picture to be placed on top of it, and that picture is ever changing. They self-generate pictures, rather than being just an interchangeable platform for images beamed in from outside. They stop being subservient and it also makes them all unique, in the sense that, after you drill a hole through them, no two TVs will look the same. I also think it brings the object forward, and allows a viewer to see inside, which feels inappropriate. These are objects that we never see inside of, they are sealed tight. So rather than violence against them, I’m just using them in an unprescribed way, but why not? There’s a certain affection we have for the machines we surround ourselves with, they’re both sterile and intimate objects, they are familiar, but also come with strict conventions of usage. I found those tensions compelling. Among other qualities, the misuse of them produces an uncanniness I hadn’t expected. 

Hamza Walker: 
If you took two of the same LCDs, and drilled a hole through them, each would produce a different set of forms?

Walead Beshty: 
Yes, and rather than the recipient of violence, they’re going to be the most cared-for TVs because now they’re categorized as artwork. Once a new model came out, or these things stopped working properly, they would have been disassembled, stripped for parts, and sent to distant landfills. Now, instead of being discarded, they have a life they wouldn’t have had otherwise, so you can also think of my actions as a form of preservation. The office machine works are a bit different. We anthropomorphize these objects, lend them subjectivity, negotiate with them to produce the results we want. I extended that logic to the point where they stand upright, and are like other figures in the room and are given that kind of space, and continue to be animate. That tension between the impulse to anthropomorphize technological objects, and then, the base fact that these are just things, is the tension that animates the work. 

Hamza Walker: 
The idea of printing is linked to photography very closely. I mean, you could get a slide projector, but if not printed, an image would not have a manifest life just a few years ago. But now, with smartphones and computers they became objectless. We send photographs back and forth. They aren’t printed any more, they have become immaterial now.

Walead Beshty: 
But they’re very material. 

Hamza Walker: 
Right, I’m thinking of them as immaterial in their production and distribution on the screen; but in fact—let’s call attention to the material, where they get constituted, and is that what was part of your thinking?

Walead Beshty: 
The entire infrastructure for the circulation of digital information is massive, server farms, huge amounts of electricity and plants to produce it, intercontinental telecommunications, not to mention the objects you need to access the information, the smart phone or computer, whose production extends to distant continents, and when you’re finished with that object, it will be shipped off again to Africa or Southeast Asia to be picked through by masses of impoverished human beings. I would say that every Instagram image, every email, every text, is imbedded in this system. I mean, what is the separation between them? A digital photograph doesn’t exist without a machine to read it; there is no such thing as an email without a computer to view it on. It’s a part of an expansive network, one big apparatus that extends into so many facets of the world.

Hamza Walker:
Right. 

Walead Beshty: 
It’s also about our expectations of images. For example, when HD became the dominant format for TV, initially the frame rate felt completely wrong. I don’t know if you had this experience, but I saw old movies that I had already seen and thought “this looks cheap.” The aura of the original seemed lost. A relatively small change in a digital technology created a very different kind of experiential understanding of what was already familiar, and the familiar became strange. Digital media relies on a sea of server farms, and billions of miles of conduit, and massive amounts of infrastructure. But people talk about the dematerialized digital world! And then there is the fact of where these machines go when they stop being used. Disposal is a whole other phase which has immediate and dire implications. It connects the world through the actual, physical thing that came from one country, moves through another, and is dumped in another, and then raw materials are sold, and it cycles again; I think that dematerialization argument, in a lot of cases, is really pacifying. It lets us off the hook, it makes the suffering caused by our consumption of digital media acceptable—and makes the lives that support that system invisible. 

Hamza Walker: 
The copper works have been around for a while and, as a lead-up to them, what about the issue of touch and gesture? Because that’s how I see them. It’s a very particular surface, and it reacts to a real particular way, in terms of registration, some of them can be pristine, but others are completely marked by who handles them. How has it evolved?

Walead Beshty: 
I got interested in gallery interior design and about how different choices of furniture and aesthetics structure the understanding of the work that was in the gallery. So, for example, the gallery I worked with in London had this Poul Kjærholm table, totally classy. At that time, I had been interested in copper. I’d made FedEx copper works (2009–) that were handled with bare hands by couriers. I was interested in how the labor of lifting and transporting these boxes could be a kind of mark making.

Hamza Walker: 
Exactly. That’s where the handling thing’s coming—

Walead Beshty: 
The FedEx box is one kind of corporate copy-written type of shape. It’s a corporate-owned shape. It’s SSCC-coded, so it’s intellectual property, not just the trademark of the shipper, but the size and shape of the box is registered to one corporation, it’s a corporate modular. The tables were another kind of interest, another form that was borrowed. 

I knew I wanted to use copper because it registered touch. I made them to match the existing tables in the exhibition’s office spaces, where they were used in a conventional manner. It was a ready-made form that reflected the aesthetic choices of the gallery. For example, one gallery had Ikea tables, another an Eero Saarinen design, and that was interesting to me, how my work was inflected by these choices as much as it was by the architecture, and to use the decision the gallery or institution made about its own aesthetics as the starting point for my work.

Hamza Walker: 
I was just admiring the Saarinen table!

Walead Beshty: 
Yes, those aesthetic choices telegraph how the place wants to present itself. But also the idea of a table became interesting to me, because it was a site of labor, a tool for communication [referring to the tabletop and desktop Copper Surrogate works (2008–)]. It’s where a gallerist talks to a collector, or a curator, or the public, where a certain kind of work happens. It’s an arena for activity. It’s a site of interaction, negotiation, and production, and it’s where my work is produced as well, because it’s where it’s explained, it’s where it’s put into the world. It’s a place that pushes it forward. It’s a form of labor that’s not usually visible in the exhibition space, because that gallery labor, that sort of social labor, or that engagement over the surface of a table, it’s not something that is foregrounded, it happens in back rooms, but it is key to the making of the work, it puts the work into the world, allows it to circulate. You walk into an exhibition space and it feels like the art just magically appeared there, and this was one way to work against that, to tie the work to the labor of so many. I began thinking about all the activity and labor that’s involved, just to put stuff on the walls, and the actions and the huge network of people who crate and move the works, that’s part of the art world, and by extension, a part of all artworks, so these works are a way to acknowledge that, make it conscious and integral to the experience of the work.

1] Walead Beshty, Travel Pictures [Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures* (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPH-SEALAX) March 27–April 3, 2006] *Contax G-2, L-3 Communications eXaminer 3DX 6000, and InVision Technologies CTX 5000, 2006/2008, series of nine chromogenic prints, 51 x 90¼ inches (129.5 x 229.2 cm) each

2] Works from the series of black and white photograms Pictures Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light and Folds, and the series of color photograms Multi-Sided Pictures.