The Phenomenology of Fondling: Shopping
By Philipp Ekardt
The Phenomenology of Shopping (Filenes, Danbury Mall, CT), 2001-2003 Color photograph face-mounted to plexiglas on display box 68 x 47 3/4 inches Edition of 2 + AP
Walead Beshty’s show, "The Body/Body Problem" showing this fall at Wallspace Gallery in New York, in parallel to the young LA-based artist’s exhibit at PS1’s project room, proved one thing, above all: stark and flashy surface need not come at the cost of art historical, conceptual and socio-analytical elaboration. Beshty’s work combines drastic imagery, comments on and builds upon artistic models from the 60’s and 70’s, as well as investigations of the formations of contemporary culture. It does all these in a deliberately dirty way, and Beshty thus invents a genre that could be called ‘conceptual comics’n’strips’. We see large photographic self-portraits of the artist, naked and shaved, staring blankly, standing in sad hotel and motel rooms, his physique as palpable and as present as the texture of the fluffy, ugly pink, grey and green carpetry. We see images of his hand as it peruses and engages with the haptic offerings and architecural features of maximized shopping environments.
Photographic imagery like this made up most of the exhibiton and was complemented by an allegorical collage in smaller format: on the left hand side, Fred Flintstone performs anal penetration on his buddy’s wife Betty, who moans: ‘Yeah, come in me, Fred.’ On the right hand side two reproductions of Le Corbusier’s iconic Maison Domino diagram find their floor levels literally filled with chunks of geomorphic formations of dirt and rubble. The heading for the images is a joke: "What do Usama and Fred Flintstone have in common? — They live in caves" (the latter the collage’s title).
Although executed in an entirely different media, Beshty’s photographs and this collage are products of a common gesture that might well count as the artist’s basic generative operation: a strategic regression (although not venturing as far into perversity as McCarthy) in which the offspring of 60’s phenomenological practices are crossbred with contemporary architectural analyses of consumerist Junkspace in the Koolhaasian vein. Beshty’s hand grabbing a basketball on display for sale, his fingers fondling a sprinkler nozzle, one finger stuck into the earhole of a rubberfoam monster mask (images from the series ‘Phenomenology of Shopping’ and ‘Touching me, Touching you’) — such gestures immediately conjure up the gestural repertoire of Acconcian video/body experiments. However, they invest them with — or perhaps restore to them their initial — libidinally concrete meaning.
Besthy’s work insists that embodiment is about crass matter. He fondles a basketball, and with that gesture makes it not simply a Kleinian part object, but actual tits, arse, or balls. His images state that penetration means fucking or fingering and that these are inextricably linked to shopping. Commodification, the provision of services, sex action, building all collapse into one freakish embodiment where an individual (the artist) lies on a department store’s floor, his head popping into a washing machine, thus letting the apparatus also be a vagina, a mouth, or an anus, all of which are to be shopped.
Indeed, Beshty’s work finds one of its most appropriate locales in our contemporary built shopping-environment that is no longer produced by a constructional logic of complexity, but through a technique of mere, quasi geomorphic, layering, as Koolhaas has famously shown. This is also evident in Beshty’s take/attack on the Maison Domino, which now resembles MVRDV’s Dutch Pavilion for the Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany: a house which simply staples stratae of landscapes on top of one another. Such fillings might be Besthy’s important contribution to the filiations of Minimalism and 60’s phenomenology, as they moved from institutional critique to our current architectural/sculptural models, a more than welcome antidote to all-too-easy sublimations of that legacy: dirt, which, as Freud taught us once, money stands for. Welcome to the malls of shit shopping. Touch this.
Walead Beshty’s ‘Body/Body Problem’ at Wallspace Gallery, NYC
