Walead Beshty, FedEx Large Kraft Box (C) 2005, Standard Overnight, Los Angeles-Salt Lake City, tracking #793897738861, Sept. 9-10, 2010
If you went to the Utah Museum of Fine Art’s we’re-about-to-close-for-a-year-come-take-a-look-at-the-collection party this weekend, you won’t have seen one of Walead Beshty’s Fedex boxes, a series of sculptural works in glass or copper shipped via FedEx so the shipping process becomes part of the work—they haven’t been on display. But Felicia Baca, manager of visual arts for the Utah Department of Arts & Museums, hopes when the collection is reinstalled sometime in Spring of 2017 one or more of the boxes will make an appearance:
Beshty’s works bear the marks of their travel, encouraging the viewer to imagine where and how these fragile, yet remarkably intact, works arrive at their final destinations. So much is left to left to chance, yet they travel along a definitive geographic route with a most reliable departure and arrival. He enlists an unwilling corporate entity in the creation and care of these works that evolve over time, and appropriates abstract space that is proprietary while extending the idea of the ready-made.– Felicia Baca
UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Categories: Daily Bytes
I admire both Felicia Baca indispensable service to the Utah art’s community and her estimable choice of a work worth waiting a year for, but I fear I must take issue with her characterization of FedEx. ‘Most reliable departure and arrival’? Ah, to dwell in a government auspice, where not even for sure at all still qualifies as ‘most reliable.’ 😉