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Wellington artist Andrew Beck is lanky and clean cut. He dresses normcore. The thirty-three-year-old lives in a cinder-block bedsit in Hataitai’s Park Mews—the village designed by Roger Walker in 1973 and famous for its iconic turrets and portholes. Beck’s crib is spartan, free of nicknacks and clutter—just the books he is currently reading and the food he is about to eat. His studio is in town, in Marion Street, on the first floor of a charming art-deco building, near galleries, cafes, and boutiques. Walking past, I can always see him from the street, sitting in the bay window, but he can see me too. I never know whether he fancies himself to be a prisoner in the panopticon or the guard.

Beck makes photograms—cameraless photographs. They are produced by placing objects over photographic paper and exposing it to light, capturing the objects’ shadows in negative. Before cameras, photograms were used to make one-to-one-scale documents of cuttings of plants, lace, and the like. Early last century, modernist artists—including Christian Schad, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and our own Len Lye—experimented with them, shoring up their place in the avantgarde tradition. Later, they became a classic darkroom exercise, helping students understand photographic materials and processes. There’s something appealing about their primitive, cave-painting-like quality.

Beck hybridises photograms with painting, sculpture, and installation. For his MFA show at Massey University’s Engine Room in 2011, he used the beams of light that poured in through the gallery’s skylights and onto its walls. Over the course of a week, he pinned up sheets of photographic paper and exposed them, always at 11:45am, capturing the light beams’ positions at that moment. After processing the sheets, he reinstalled them in the same spots. Visitors saw light passing through the space, coming in and out of alignment with the impressions indexed in the photograms, turning the gallery into some kind of sundial. Later that year, in Steel-Bar Shadow, he condensed this idea. He made a photogram of a steel bar, then used the bar to prop the photogram to the wall. The photogram indexed the bar’s shadow from a particular moment, but the bar casts a fresh shadow onto it—in a play of real and represented, presence and absence, now and then.

After graduating, Beck lived in Europe for a year or so. He enjoyed shows with ParisCONCRET and Berlin’s Galerie Luis Campaña. Campaña took his work to Art Cologne, the big art fair—twice. The second time, he got his own booth, as part of the fair’s New Positions programme. Despite some success, Beck returned home in 2014 and has established himself here happily. He says, ‘Obviously, I want to show internationally, but, for me, making art in New Zealand makes sense. New Zealand is my home.’

Although he doesn’t identify as a photographer, Beck’s work is all about photography. He’s constantly making references and analogies to its processes, mechanics, and optics. There are different branches to the project, but Beck is best known for his iconic constructed photograms. These feature hard-edged geometric forms, particularly triangular shards and circles, which suggest vision, optics, and photography—focused and projected light beams. Beck creates photograms using diverse techniques. Some times they are made using paper negatives; other times by bouncing light off sheets of glass at odd angles. Beck cuts, collages, and overpaints photograms. He conceals them behind painted-glass masks and coloured glass. There’s a convoluted self-referential aspect: they look like diagrams illustrating the behaviour of light, while being created by exploiting the behaviour of light.

Beck wants to make a good first impression. He says: ‘I like art that precedes interpretation, that prompts an emotional response before you understand what you’re seeing.’ His titles can sound descriptive, technical, and scientific, like Focus Point, Visual Appearance and Internal Representation, Prism in an Ultraviolet Field, Vertex Figure, and Glass Strata. But the images also have a mysterious, auratic quality. They remind us that, for all its apparent rationality, modernist abstraction was freighted with the authoritarian and the sacred.

Beck says, ‘I’m trying to make images where there’s just enough information to trigger an association. If you combine a horizontal line with a gradient, it’s hard not to read it as sky and land, as distance; as something coming towards you, something receding.’ The constructed photograms may be simple and suggestive, but they are also hard to place. They could refer to early modern art or to recent computer-generated imagery; they could belong to the past or the future. They have a sci-fi quality.

Beck says: ‘I began by referencing geometric abstract art—Malevich, Rodchenko—but now I’m more interested in cheesy Internet-art movements from the last decade, like vaporwave.’ Beck talks a lot about vaporwave, a faddish electronic-music microgenre that used slowed-down and screwed-up samples from muzak, smooth jazz, and pop, and computer sounds. It was accompanied by a visual language that recycled defunct computer aesthetics, with Greco-Roman-statue and sunset memes thrown in. Vaporwave presents a view of the future from an earlier time, a future gone stale.

Beck can relate: ‘Vaporwave was made by Internet nerds my age who grew up with dial-up Internet and are nostalgic for that time.’ He reads its retrofuturism through the work of a British philosopher, the late Mark Fisher. For Fisher, our current moment is haunted by promised futures from the past that never arrived, that were cancelled by postmodernity and neoliberalism. He argues that we are doomed to nostalgically replay these past-future imaginings, unable to generate new futures for now. We’re stuck. But, in citing vaporwave aesthetics, is Beck challenging this malaise or embracing it self consciously? Is he part of the solution or part of the problem? Either way, he offers an odd spin on this question. He admits as much: ‘In evoking a computer aesthetic via the darkroom. I’m labouring over an image that a computer can produce perfectly—easily.’

The constructed photograms look good and have made Beck a hit with collectors. He’s shown with a number of New Zealand dealers, but is currently represented by Visions, Auckland. His works were a hit on its stand at the Auckland Art Fair earlier this year, with whole editions selling out. But, while his slick aesthetic appeals, it’s telling to visit the studio and confront the detritus of Beck’s low-tech analogue process. These days, digital photographers don’t get their hands wet, but Beck still does it the hard way. There are curled-up, fibre-based prints piled up everywhere, and he’s taken over the bathroom with his processing trays, with prints pinned up to drip dry.

Beck splits his time between consolidating what he’s known for and trying out new things. He may be associated with crystalline geometries, but he’s been quietly exploring a diametrically opposed look in parallel. For five-or-so years, he’s been exposing photographic paper under water, so it registers the water’s ripples and eddies. He says: ‘I use a body of water as a lens. It’s like lying on the bottom of a pool and looking upwards to the water’s surface. That’s what the photographic paper sees.’ Perhaps he got the idea from those hours in the darkroom, processing prints in baths. The water photograms allowed Beck to break out of his comfort zone. He says, ‘With my constructed photograms, I know what I’m doing. I introduced the water because it’s chaotic, something I can’t control. The water photograms are what they are, good or bad. I can’t finesse them, can’t make them better, but I know which ones I want to keep pretty quickly.’ Scale can be ambiguous. Some look like vast atmospheres or aerial views.

The water photograms featured in Beck’s first Auckland solo show, at Bowerbank Ninow in 2018. Its centrepiece—Open Surface (Holon) (2018)—consisted of sixteen of them. Each was dominated by a horizontal line left by the edge of the glass sheet he used to hold down the paper as it was exposed, dividing the swirling waters. The photograms were abutted and aligned to create a common horizon, suggesting both a continuous beachscape and discretely framed meteorological moments. (In case you’re wondering, a ‘holon’ is a part-whole, a part that contains the logic of the whole within it—think an acorn or a fractal pattern.)

In 2019, while on a Rauschenberg Foundation residency in Captiva, Florida, Beck turned a corner with his water photograms. Another resident, Puerto Rican performance artist Nibia Pastrana Santiago, prompted him to use his body in these works. He admits, ‘I’d never thought to do this. Physically, I’d been absent from all my work. But when I started waving my arms and legs through the water, when I put my body into the image, new references came into play.’ Beck’s resulting works have an eerie, blurry, haunted quality, recalling X-rays and spirit photography—the artist as ghost.

The water photograms look so different, but are no cul-de-sac. They’ve been feeding into the way Beck makes his constructed photograms, which increasingly suggest chaotic miasmas, force fields, and flocking patterns. His 2020 Visions exhibition Iris included constructed photograms where fields of shards converge on a vanishing point or explode out from it. They reminded one critic of a view from a spaceship jumping into hyperspace or navigating space debris. In another 2020 work, a flock of triangles suggested a body dematerialising in the Transporter on the Starship Enterprise.

What’s next? Beck’s making a sculpture out of car windscreens—those curved pieces of glass that operate both as lens and screen. There’s a story: ‘I grew up sweeping the floor of my parents’ windscreen repair shop, with heaps of broken glass everywhere’, Beck says. Sculpture makes sense. ‘A lot of my installations are already sculptural, playing two-dimensional photographic representation back into the three-dimensional real world’, he says. ‘It’s photography, but backwards.’
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[IMAGE: Andrew Beck Open Surface (Holon) 2018]