Artist Shipped Glass Inside FedEx Boxes To Produce Shattered Artworks

Well, Walead Beshty seems… inspired. The LA-based artist packaged his art pieces in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the countries to exhibitions and galleries. One would expect that extra precautions are made in delivering precious cargo for display, but Beshty intentionally designed his pieces to break. The reasoning behind this odd decision was that the sculptor wanted to obtain a ‘fingerprint’ that documented the journey of each package to its destination: 

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 organized around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another.

Image credit: The Whitney Museum of American Art


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