Art World
Walead Beshty Creates Art From Trash
Henri Neuendorf
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LA-based British artist Walead Beshty has created an artwork from a year’s worth of his personal trash, the Guardian reports. The piece─entitled A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench (2014)─was unveiled at the Barbican’s Curve Gallery in London on Wednesday.
Beshty pinned over 12,000 cyanotype prints of his trash onto a 90 meter-long wall inside the Barbican’s curved space, in an exhibition the artist described as “a year of work.” Cyanotype printing is a basic photographic process whereby objects are placed onto a porous surface covered in UV sensitive liquid, then left to dry in the sun. The result is an impressive photographic collage of cyan blue silhouettes depicting his studio waste, discarded personal objects, newspapers, old concert tickets, and the likes.
Beshty told the Guardian: “You could say it’s my diary, an exegesis on how a studio produces, that it’s about waste─you could say any number of things. While all those narratives could stick, there are also things that simply don’t add up to support that story,” he added that it is “a picture that tells its own story.”
