UPDATE: This post will continue to be edited and amended during the run of the exhibition which is its subject.
“Popular Mechanics” is, at its core, a single large abstraction. It is composed of two main parts: a group of six large, highly saturated, geometric works on color photo paper, made by directly exposing the paper through color gels [*6]; and twenty-one black-and-white prints [* see comment 1] of the people, places, and machinery that played a role in the production of the exhibition. The large color prints are scattered individually through the gallery, alternating with groups of the b/w prints. Each of the two groups is presented in a uniform fashion, with the large prints in white metal frames and the b/w’s all matted, the same size, in black frames.
Much of Beshty’s work to date has been critically engaged with the material condition of photography. Mulched photo blocks, or folded-and-flattened direct prints, or negatives damaged by X-rays put forth a proposition about the material trappings enclosing a fundamentally abstract exchange (the visual consumption of photographic content); yet the works inhabit that proposition with a bit of wry irony that seems to wink, “or maybe not.”
And so it is that this critical posture expands its reach to the economic space that actually enables the discursive space. In the most direct way, this is meant literally: the b/w images show people who make a living providing services for the art industry, or ones who trickle the funds down. There is a strong leveling effect taking place by showing an art fabricator, and Nicolas Bourriaud, and a large-format Epson printer as equivalent entries in a catalog of production. This effort expands the field of photographic content to encompass as broad a cross-section of its own narrative as possible. [*2] The very idea of “material” undergoes a drastic re-definition here. That is, what used to be “immaterial” to the content of a photographic object (that content traditionally thought of as the drama that was contained by the special discursive space of the gallery) is here made utterly material to that drama, to the exclusion of any of the quaint means by which photographs might be aesthetically judged. One could say, then, that the content of the show has been “crowded out.” [*7]
Indeed, the large color photographs are little more than placeholders. They satisfy an admirably superficial conception of an ambitious photo image. [*3] There is nothing to recommend one print over another. Small physical incidents (a tear in the paper, or a creased corner) never rise to the level of inflecting a piece with any charged presence. The color works merely fill in the spaces between the people who made them.
And in this function they complete the circuit of articulating their bizarre economic existence. That the image of art should look so like a vanitas at this particular historical moment is tasty [*8]; without engaging in either class warfare or schadenfreude, this viewer is excited by the prospect of unfettered transparency.
Which brings me to a quibble with the checklist and press release. They don’t name names, settling instead for initials, and an outsider such as this viewer is left trying to eavesdrop on the conversations of more informed gallery goers. This decision feels like a hedge. And to extend the metaphor a bit, the hedge fund types have been held up for particular scorn lately. I’m just saying.
The Modernist project has long insisted that the artist and the audience both confront the ontology of the art object. In Post-War art, this became medium-specific purity, and then formalism. Process and performance shifted the focus to the acts preceding the object. Institutional critique emphasized the settings where “things” became “art”. But in each case, these modes still held their claims as their subject. Something destabilizing takes place with the Beshtian economic transparency –or infiltration– model in this exhibition. Instead of taking new content as the replacement for old, conventional modes, this images in this show exclude subject matter. Like those toxic assets, when the music stopped, they just evaporated…
[*4]
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1. I’m pretty sure that the b/w images are digital shots manipulated to look like classic grainy film prints. The grain really looks like digital noise to me. And I’m in favor of this treatment…it’s funny.
2. It has been quite fashionable during the financial run-up of the last decade to describe every system of exchange (even systems of dialectic exchange) with the language of economics. Economics offered the promise that, given sufficiently articulated data, its models could anticipate the dynamics of human behavior and produce, in the end, an accurate estimate of “value.” Less resolved is the question of where the model sits relative to the thing it describes. Do its descriptions of the system impact the function of the system? Is there a space outside the system from which to describe it? [*5]
3. I’ve written before that it requires a specific intelligence to recognize how nearby the logical conclusions of some thought processes are…and then to exploit those conclusions.
4. [original ending] Beshty’s FedEx glass boxes wear the code of their commercial transmission with real elegance. To this viewer, those works are Beshty’s own precedent for this exhibition. He has pushed open wide the gulf between what a picture depicts and the meanings generated by the acts of looking and thinking. It is a timely and topical exhibition.
5. I’ve been circling the drain a little bit here. The key to the conceptual action I’m attempting to describe is the economic hope of producing an accurate estimate of “value.” As I understand our current economic mess, lots of problems have arisen from the substitution of one type of “financial instrument” for another. A home was substituted for by a mortgage; a mortgage was substituted for by a bundle of mortgages; the bundles were substituted for as if they were fungible assets…
Soon, the “thing” in which the value is allegedly vested is terribly far removed from the abstract placeholder of the value. Functions are performed on the abstraction, without consideration of the “thing.”
But the thing is real! To be openly dramatic about it, society itself works because abstractions and substitutions are possible. They work. But there is a danger…the complete disassociation of the object from its abstraction will always cause trouble.
So finally maybe I’m getting there: Beshty has presented a show of substitutions and placeholders. The exhibition as a whole is an experiment in treating artworks as fungible assets replaceable by the material, social, and economic facts of their production.
But what really sets the whole thing in motion is that the substitutions themselves amount to a model abstraction of that which they’re replacing. The system must produce artwork, but instead it’s producing itself. This is a recursive logic that threatens the economic space with collapse.
I mean, on the material level, there’s no problem at all, right? The gallery viewer sees framed pictures. They all look more or less like art. Everything’s copacetic.
But what would it mean for any individual image (I’m thinking here particularly of the b/w images) to leave the gallery and go out into the world? What is it a picture of? How can it have “value” in the way that artworks have typically been assigned value?
Is this making any sense? The economic model (the curators give ideas, the collectors contribute funds, the technicians help with the prints, the framers frame, the drivers drive, the art handlers install it all, the press analyzes it) in the end produces an aura that demands a baseline value. But there is an assumption buried here: that the point of the work is not merely the activation of the economic process. I don’t know why I carry that assumption, but it seems true. So when Beshty makes this hall of mirrors, it really seems to destabilize things.
6. I assume.
7. Which gives me the opportunity to unpack the title “Popular Mechanics” a little bit.
Mechanics is being used in the same way as “mechanism” (”established process by which something takes place or is brought about”).
Popular takes its first meaning from “referring to people”, used here in a more flat way than the commonly used “popularity contest” sense. [*8]
Joining these together creates something like “process by which something is brought about by people”: essentially the expanded notion of economics.
8. The nice and devious switchback that takes place here is that the “leveling effect” in the “catalog of production” isn’t really so level; Beshty certainly appears to be on an upward career trajectory, and he is able to leverage that into making a group of photos of people whose public exposure is more of the “bold-faced names” variety than as the literal subject of an artwork.
Indeed, the opportunity (and flattery) that is presented to the curators, collectors, and gallery directors depicted here must have been understood by them as the opportunity to be a symbolic placeholder for their class in the economic system. Once the incidentals of each person’s self-presentation become stand-ins for the entire group, the meaning of “popular” shifts away from “of the people” and back towards “popularity contest”. Thus the reference to the portrait of the artworld as a vanitas.
As Orwell said, “All abuse of power begins with the abuse of language!”
[exclamation point mine!]
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