Walead Beshty and a review of Altermodern – Tate Triennial 2009

...it is three other artists who really steal the show, largely because they don’t rely too much on relationally aesthetic mannerisms but wilfully re-examine modernist debates from other angles. Walead Beshty’s shattered glass cubes are, in simple terms, the record of their own international transportation. Glass cubes of the same dimensions are packed in FedEx boxes and shipped to the gallery in which the artist is due to exhibit. Inevitably damaged in transport, they are then displayed on the cases in which they were packed. As the material record of their own journey from A to B, they are in a certain sense as modernist as a Jackson Pollock. Yet they can equally be read as an allegory of the transnational ‘FedEx’ culture of the contemporary art world. The idea of the ‘artist as international traveller’ is achieved with more subtlety in this piece than elsewhere in the exhibition.

Link to the complete review:
http://www.metamute.org/en/content/altermodern_marketing_or_movement

Exhibition Dates: Feburary 3 to April 26, 2009
Altermodern – Tate Triennial 2009 @ Tate Britain
Millbank
London SW1P 4RG
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/