Though the artist’s touch has long been dethroned as the be-all and end-all of artistic success, practices that eschew tactility for a conceptual approach can often feel too cool for their own good. Such is not the case with Los Angeles artist Walead Beshty. Even though he makes use of random events and by-products associated with photography, video, printmaking and sculpture, he manages to invest his efforts with enough incident to engage the eye as well as the mind. For his latest show, Beshty remains rigorously passive in accepting accident and standardization as his tools. But the overall impression here of a hands-off stance quickly gives way to results with a distinctly organic, even visceral, effect.
Large-scale photographic prints in muted colors, for instance, are marked with smears and drips that make the works appear more painterly than mechanical, but they were created by exposing sandwiched-together sheets of light-sensitive paper. Elsewhere, several flat-screen monitors flicker with ghostly images after they’ve been drilled into or chopped in half. The gleaming surface of a multipart copper sculpture is enlivened by the oily handprints of preparators who purposefully moved them without wearing gloves. Finally, anyone who’s ever wanted to take a baseball bat to a disobedient piece of electronic hardware will appreciate two entries from Beshty’s “Office Work” series, in which a disassembled computer and printer are skewered on poles, continuing to buzz and flash impotently for our sadistic enjoyment.