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Verhagen contrasts Tiravanija’s celebration of the contemporary artist’s travels with a reading of Walead Beshty’s FedEx Boxes (2007). The work is composed of laminated and mirrored glass cubes, which are shipped in FedEx boxes between exhibitions, where the boxes are transformed into their pedestals. On top of the boxes are waybills and custom notes, symbolizing the ‘elaborate machinery of modern border controls’. In these material forms, Beshty highlights not only the volume of handling and shipping that contemporary artworks undergo, but also the associated knocks and blows. The cracked surfaces of the glass cubes reveal the institutional processes of their exhibition—‘the more they travel, the more damaged they are.’ For Verhagen, the cracked glass evokes structures damaged in violent conflicts, and hence points to other travellers: peacekeepers and refugees. On an aesthetic level, Verhagen sees this work as breaking with traditional assumptions of artworks as timeless objects that require careful conservation. Though this assumption has obviously been under attack for almost a century now, alongside complex and ambiguous expressions of the ‘homelessness’ of art, Verhagen reads this piece as articulating the specific nature of travel today, showing increased movement in conditions of globalization to be heavily associated with ‘risk and degradation’.
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In his 1996 essay, ‘A Theory of Tourism’, Enzensberger noted that tourism advanced in step with industrial capitalism, as an expanding urban bourgeoisie took advantage of new means of transport to escape from increasingly congested cities. But as tourists’ experiences are entirely shaped by the forces they wish to break away from, their radical taste for new freedoms is inevitably frustrated. Tourism is thus ‘always outrun by its refutation’. This dialectic is the driving force of tourism’s development, and it ‘redoubles its efforts after each defeat’. For Verhagen, Enzensberger’s point retains its relevance today, the rise of global trade and the development of budget travel going hand-in-hand since the 1960s, both shaping tourism into a ‘potent instance in the expansion in global trade and a catalyst for other forms of social exchange’, as well as a tangible mode for insertion into global circuits. Verhagen contrasts Almond’s work to the direct engagement with mass tourism in Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Visible World (1986–2001), an installation of 3,000 tourist photos displayed on light-boxes. More jarring is Turista (1994) by Francis Alÿs, an important artist for Verhagen. In this performance piece, documented in photographs, Alÿs stands beside the plumbers, carpenters and electricians offering their services on the Zócalo in Mexico City, his own sign reading ‘Turista’. As Verhagen comments, ‘In Alÿs’s action, the inappropriateness of his appearance among the job seekers illuminates his privilege and, by extension, the structural economic imbalances that underlie it.’
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For Verhagen, these works show that to simply affirm—as the ‘first line of resistance’—those aspects of life that most immediately appear under threat by the temporal and geographical reach of the global market, while lacking any clear analysis of how they are coeval with and thus shaped by that market, is to risk both naturalizing and also moralizing them. It is also to ignore, as Verhagen notes, that many global developments are today parasitic on this ideal of the local, and are in fact powered by a ‘keen and superficial’ preoccupation with it; yet the personal (or private) remains political. Critical art practice will seek to unearth the contradictions inherent within globalization’s processes, rather than resting content with the valorization of its surface-level, highly individualized positive aspects; it will refuse any attempt at escape or utopianization.