Office Work

2018 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

Dimensions variable

Walead Beshty

location: Los Angeles, California
year born: 1976
gender: male
home town: London, United Kingdom

Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole. Despite its dismantled form, the screen still functions, a simple, mountain-range desktop background clearly visible with no distortion. As with much of Beshty’s work, Office Work thematizes its own construction, in this case, through a clearly deconstructive action that preserves the technological ontology present through the monitor. Rather than engage in outright destruction, Beshty carefully articulates the inner workings of the monitor outwards, alluding to the near violence of his action through the screen’s stark impalement. The work exists uneasily between display and destruction, disputing singularly positivist notions of constructing art.


Artist and writer Walead Beshty examines the processes of his own multidisciplinary (though primarily photographic) work’s production, linking these processes to global issues including human migration,displacement, and technology. His works, oftentimes visually abstracted, argue for their own production as a process of transformation, emphasizing an expansive array of actions and methods through which art can be structurally transformed or produced. In this way, by examining the matrix of production surrounding his individual artworks, Beshty’s introspection also expands outward onto a complex field of vectors connecting actions, subjects, structures, and forms. Beshty explores the limitations and possibilities of his mediums, which include photography, light, metal, glass, cardboard, and, often, distance. Often striking in their visual presence, his work reflects the movement of images and objects, both in a literal sense and in terms of the way that ideas and materials are circulated and exchanged. They also convey another narrative: the history and the processes that construct both the world and his art.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Abstract Photography, » Color Photography, » Cultural Commentary, » Documentary Photography

Untitled (Schindler House, #01)
© » KADIST

Luisa Lambri

2007

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...

Faltenwurf (Stairwell)
© » KADIST

Wolfgang Tillmans

2017

Wolfgang Tillmans initiated the ongoing series Faltenwurf in 1989, representing compositions of unused clothing, with special attention paid to the ways in which they drape and fold...

Cathy (bed self-portrait)
© » KADIST

Catherine Opie

1987

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth...

Untitled #1 #2 #3
© » KADIST

Piero Golia

2007

Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...

Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam
© » KADIST

An-My LE

2010

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...

Tania Libre
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2016

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...

Stanley "Tom" Durrell, Tinsmith
© » KADIST

Sharon Lockhart

2008

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...

Condition Report
© » KADIST

Glenn Ligon

2000

Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...

7-headed Lalandau Hat
© » KADIST

Yee I-Lann

2020

7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...

Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04)
© » KADIST

Luisa Lambri

2007

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...

PANGKIS
© » KADIST

Yee I-Lann

2021

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance...

South Africa Righteous Space
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....

I am the Greatest
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...

Untitled (Ruby Downing sitting between two Unidentified Men in a Room), Damaged series
© » KADIST

Lisa Oppenheim

2003

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...

The Tower of Babel: Independence of the country
© » KADIST

Du Zhenjun

2010

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...

Bunny’s Sofa
© » KADIST

Gimhongsok

2007

To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...

Strange Culture
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2007

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...

Gypsy
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

2006

Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...