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Walead Beshty Joins Brion Dillion to talk about his new exhibition a year long in the making Walead Beshty was originally born in London in 1976, he is artist and has lived most of his life in Los Angeles America. His latest artistic piece is currently on display at The Curve exhibition room ant the Barbican Exhibition Centre, London. Walead himself says he can barely remember the name of his own piece, A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench. It has been one of his biggest endeavours and has taken him over a year to prepare everything he needed for the piece. He started the work in his studio in LA on the 1st August 2013. The idea of his piece was to collect thousands of different articles from around his studio. Things like letters, cardboard, envelopes, invoices, scraps of wood and any other organic material that he could find.

The process in which he made the blue stencil like prints on every asset is a process similar to taking a photo. Each asset is called a Cyanotype and is created by coating the collected assets in Potassium Ferricyanide and left to dry in the dark. Another object or tool that is found from around the studio like a ladder, or a screwdriver or a pen knife etc is placed on the coated assets and left in the sun exposed to UV rays. After some time around 15 minutes, the areas that were exposed to the sunlight and not shaded by the object turn blue. The different shades of blue depend on the level of UV exposure, more exposure makes the blue darker.

After many weeks of assembly in The Curve exhibition room which boasts an enormous 90 meter long, 5 meter tall wall with a total surface area of 495 square meters. Many people were involved in the process of tacking every single asset to the wall in the only order being that from right to left shows the first and the last cyanotypes to be created. On the 26th of November, Walead joined writer and curator Brian Dillon in conversation at the Barbican. I joined them to uncover the meaning of the piece from that man who made it and to discover in detail about creative process. The volume of assets that he had in his studio in LA made it impossible to sort through and to see what he had actually collected. Therefore he said there is a good chance that the piece if work actually contains very personal information, like bank statements, prescriptions and phone numbers and addresses.

Walead described fitting stuff on the wall as playing a huge game of Tetris, as the people assembling it had to fit all the different bits in under pressure of meeting the deadline.People in the audience questioned, if there was a random assembly of the piece than does that mean that true meaning of the piece was lost? He replied that not everything has a true meaning. But everything has a meaning when you apply the analogy. ‘you can make an analogy between a helicopter and my foot if you want’ the same you can make a connection and meaning for any of his work.

Some people in the audience questioned what was the point of creating so many of the Cyanotypes. They were all mass produced and all pretty much the same, so why have over 495 square meters of the same Cyanotype? Walead said that everything mass produced conceals difference. He Picks up his costa coffee cup, he says that although these are mass produced cups and the cup made a second before this cup may look identical, it is unique. Even though they are all made from paper which is all made from cellulose, you can make every cup radically different. Just like you can with every cyanotype on display at The Curve.

Lewis Kitchenham