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FedEx’s infamous reputation for consistently cocking up their deliveries has inspired a modern art exhibition. It’s like all those smashed and damaged items finally have a purpose, proof that you can turn anything into art. It is pretty original, I must say.
Artist, Walead Beshty, shipped various glass sculptures via FedEx to art galleries throughout the United States with the sole intent of seeing what would become of them during transit – and voila. FedEx did all the hard work for him, by utterly fucking them up, as usual.
Beshty provided further insight, commenting:
The FedEx works […] initially interested me because they’re defined by a corporate entity in legal terms. There’s a copyright designating the design of each FedEx box, but there’s also the corporate ownership over that very shape.
It’s a proprietary volume of space, distinct from the design of the box, which is identified through what’s called a SSCC #, a Serial Shipping Container Code. I considered this volume as my starting point; the perversity of a corporation owning a shape—not just the design of the object—and also the fact that the volume is actually separate from the box. They’re owned independently from one another.
Furthermore, I was interested in how art objects acquire meaning through their context and through travel, what Buren called something like, “the unbearable compromise of the portable work of art.” So, I wanted to make a work that was specifically organised around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another.
There you go: a man who can back up his art. Not that art needs an explanation, by any means, but I think we were all wondering what the hell was going on this time.
Sometimes it can be hard to tell if what we are seeing is actually intended to be art or if someone is laughing at us – like this guy.
