Walead Beshty

Walead Beshty (born London, UK, 1976) is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer.

He is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Art Department at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and has taught at numerous schools including University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of the Arts; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the MFA Program at Bard College. Beshty has exhibited widely in numerous institutions and galleries around the world.

Beshty earned a Bachelor of Arts from Bard College in 1999, and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art in 2002.

“Games aren’t constituted with a particular outcome. Games are constituted by the rules that are used ... It isn’t whether or not it produces one sort of outcome, but how all these rules react to one another and how it defines a set of relationships. In that same way, I don’t think of any particular object as being particularly significant. It’s much more the system that generates it.”

“Art itself has the potential to democratize aesthetics and reimagine aesthetic production as communal, available and non-hierarchical. I like the idea of demystifying aesthetics by communicating that we can all make aesthetic objects; it’s not simply for those with capital or power.”

“Objects have no meaning in themselves, rather they are prompts for a field of possible meanings that are dependent on context … That is, objects facilitate certain outcomes to arise that are not wholly predictable. These interactions accumulate over time, thus the meaning of an object is ever evolving.”

“ … you can’t produce negatively, production is an active, cumulative process.”

“I’m not interested in a grand definition of a particular medium—some sort of ontological construction—but in the particular expression of a set of relations within specific contexts. I think I’m most interested in the translation of abstract ideas—from abstraction in general to the materially specific. I’m very sensitive to abstractions, but I don’t want to traffic in them.”

“I only try to not conceal the process, make it available; I don't look to reveal it. I simply try to make work that considers how it materially came into being, whose appearance is directly and transparently linked to that coming into being. I think that viewers can engage with work on multiple levels; I don't want to teach a lesson or provide a recipe, but I actively try not to conceal. Power works by concealing how it functions, by enforcing a ritual, naturalizing it. This makes the means through which power functions camouflaged, and power itself sublime. I try to avoid this as much as possible, and part of this is to situate the production of the work in a public or common structure, one that is accessible, ubiquitous, instead of tacitly claiming artistic inspiration or selfhood as a justification for a work”

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