• + Author's Bio
  
  WALEAD BESHTY (b. 1976, London, UK) is an artist and writer living and working in Los Angeles.  Upcoming exhibitions include: The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (solo 2009); The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (solo 2009); LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (solo 2009); The Tate Triennial, TATE Britain, London, Englnd (2009). Past exhibitions include: Word Event (After George Brecht), Kunsthalle Basel (2008); The 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2008); Meanwhile in Baghdad, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2008); Los Angeles Confidential, Centre D’Art Contemporain Parc San Leger (2008); Recent Acquisitions, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2008); Between Two Deaths, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2007); Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (solo 2006); Wallspace, New York, NY (solo 2009, 2006, 2004); China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles, CA (solo 2008, 2005); The 2006 and 2008 California Biennials, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, (2006/2008); The New City, The Whitney Museum of American Art, (2005/6); PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (solo 2004); Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL (2004). Selected portfolios and press include Artforum, Art Review, The New York Times, Frieze, Modern Painters, Art in America, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, ARTnews, Art on Paper, Blindspot, Aperture. His work is in the public collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; The Miami Museum of Art, Miami, FL; The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; FRAC Nord – Pas de Calais, Dunkerque, France and The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. He is a regular contributor to Texte zur Kunst, and Afterall Journal, and has written for several exhibition catalogs and monographs. Beshty was recently appointed core faculty in the Graduate Fine Art Program of Art Center College of Art and Design. A monograph of his work will be published in 2009 with JRP Ringier. Beshty holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Yale University School of Art.
  
• + Notes
  
  1. George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field” October, vol. 114, Fall 2005, p 122.
  
  2. Thus we are confronted with the recurring theme that what is missing from a photograph, constitutes what it is truly about. An approach most notoriously deployed by Walter Benjamin when he wrote that the work of Atget derived its meaning from its appearing like a “recently evacuated scene of a crime,” in his “Short (Small) History of Photography”.
  
  3. G. Baker, op sit., p 138.
  
  4. For example, on page 127 Baker writes/quotes “’That is’ to really paraphrase Krauss, ‘the [not-narrative] is, according to the logic of a certain kind of expansion, just another way of expressing the term [stasis], and the [not-stasis] is, simply, [narrative].’” Baker’s insertions are represented within the text as brackets, or “breeches” in the continuity of Krauss’ voice through which Baker’s formulations bubble up.
  
  5. “At any rate, when I first sketched my graph for the artist with which I began, Nancy Davenport, she quickly grabbed my pen and paper and began to swirl lines in every direction, circling around my oppositions and squares, with a look that seemed to say ‘What about these possibilities?’ My graph was a mess. But the photographer’s lines, though revolving around the field, had no center, and they extended in every direction.” ibid. p 140. [emphasis added]
  
  6. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, (tr. John Osborne),London and New York:Verso, 1998, p 185.
  
  7. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field,’ October, vol.8, Spring 1979, p.30.
  
  8. ibid. p33.
  
  9. Baker, p.128.
  
  10. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (trans. Gregory Elliot), New York and London: Verso, 2006, p.466.
  
  11. Neither Owens nor Buchloh mention the other’s work despite various similarities in reference and argumentation, and the assumed awareness the two authors had of each other’s work.
  
  12. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’, Artforum, September 1982, p.56.
  
  13. ‘Pictures’ is the title of an exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp that opened at Artists Space, New York in September 1977, including works by Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith. An essay of the same title was published by Crimp in October, vol.8, Spring 1979, pp.75–88, which was an expansion of Crimp’s essay that accompanied the exhibition.
  
  14. Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (Part 2)’, October, vol.13, Summer 1980, p.71.
  
  15. Ibid., p.79.
  
  16. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and the Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, New York and Cambridge: October Books, 2001, p.xxi.
  
  17. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures”, October, 8 (Spring 1979), p.85. italics added.
  
  18. Craig Owens, “Photography en abyme”, October, 5, (Summer, 1978), p. 78
  
  19. Ibid. p 88.
  
  20. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, (Hill and Wang: New York), 1981. Tr. Richard Howard. P 31-32.
  
  21. Sigfried Kracauer, “Photography” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, (Harvard University Press: Cambridge London), 1995. Ed/tr, Thomas Y. Levin. P. 59.
  
  22. Oliver Wendel Holmes, “The Stereoscope and Stereograph.” Classic Essays on Photography. (Ed. Alan Trachtenberg). New Haven: Leete's Island, 1980. p 80.
  
  23. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, (London:Reaktion Books), 2000. p 20.
  
  24. G. Baker, op sit. p 124.
  
  25. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces”, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (The MIT Press: Cambridge/London), 1985, pp131-50.
  
  26. Patrick Beaver, The Crystal Palace, 1851–1936: A Portrait of Victorian Enterprise, London: Hugh Evelyn, 1970, p.34.
  
  27. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (trans. Dana Polan and Th. de Duve), Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p.115.
  
  28. Phillip Dennis Cate, “The Spirit of Montmartre” in The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw.