Sold for: $22,500

PROVENANCE
Wallspace, New York
Collection of George Hartman and Arlene Goldman, Toronto

LITERATURE
D. Velasco, "Walead Beshty: Wallspace," Artforum, vol. XLV no. 4, December 2006, reproduced page 310

This work is based on a 1917 construction produced by Man Ray entitled “New York 17,” one of that artist’s first Dadaist assemblages. Made of a carpenter’s vise and strips of wood, the original sculpture evoked the dynamism and growth of America’s burgeoning metropolis, and aesthetically recalled the soaring heights of the modernist skyscrapers then filling the city. Produced from material found in his studio, Man Ray subverted the notion that the artist’s expertise predicated the value of an artwork. After the original was destroyed, Man Ray recreated the construction in 1966, replacing the wooden strips with chromed bars - perhaps reflecting the rapid technological advancements of the intervening years.

Beshty, perhaps best known for his wry explorations of art systems and the conditions that produce them, produced his own version of Man Ray’s construction in 2006. Now comprising two “towers” and entirely gilded, “New York, New York” further reflects the shifts in the city from postwar optimism and scientific advancement to the dizzying excesses of financialized capital and a compromised locus of global exchange. Grounded in this is a reclamation of the artist’s modes of production first evoked in 1917: by reconstituting Man Ray’s original scrap assemblage in gold and steel, Beshty extends and elevates a Dadaist subversion into a glittering, monumental presence.

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