His main bodies of works from the 2000s investigated how the modern conception of display developed in the mid-20th century. For his solo exhibition
an Exhibit viewed played populated at Grazer Kunstverein, Beck presented works that emerged from his research on
Richard Hamilton’s 1957
an Exhibit in which colored acrylic panels, suspended from the gallery ceiling, created an environment that turned the gallery space itself into an artwork. For
Installation, his collaborative exhibition with
Julie Ault at
Vienna Secession, he reconstructed a modular exhibit system called Struc-Tube, designed by
George Nelson in 1948. The system was presented both as a sculpture and a functional structure to display other works by Beck and Ault. Subsequently, he used the same tubular system as a protagonist for a video-work titled
About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), first presented as part of his exhibition
The details are not the details at the artist-run gallery
Orchard in New York. Between 2000 and 2010, Beck frequently designed exhibitions for art institutions, mostly in collaboration with Ault. These include over two dozen shows for the
International Center of Photography in New York between 2001 and 2004;
X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions of the 1960s and 1970s (2003) and
Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987 (2010) for
Mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna;
Projekt Migration (2005) at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne;
Journeys: How Travelling Fruit, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange Our Environment (2010) at
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, and
Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take (2014) at the
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2011, in collaboration with architect Ken Saylor, Beck designed the gallery architecture of Ludlow 38 in New York. In more recent years, Beck’s practice has expanded to address the cross-section of design, social history, and pop culture. For his project
Panel 2—“Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes...," he drew on the events of the 1970
International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) and the development of the
Aspen Movie Map. The 1970 conference, themed “Environment by Design,” marked a turning point in design history wherein the vanguard of 1950s modernism such as George Nelson and
Herbert Bayer confronted younger, hippie culture-influenced environmental activists and designers. Beck combined the narrative of this event with his research on the predecessor of today’s navigation systems, the
Aspen Movie Map, and developed an exhibition consisting of videos, photography, prints, sculpture, and artifacts. Beck’s interests have progressed to the formation and functioning of temporary communities. Through a series of loosely connected works, he has been exploring the history of American countercultural communes of the 1960s and early 1970s. His video
Turn Take Merge uses GPS directions leading from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the epicenter of 1960s hippie culture, to
Drop City, a countercultural community established in southern Colorado in 1965 and abandoned by the early 1970s that became known as the first rural hippie commune. For the work titled
rumors and murmurs (2012/17), Beck used an illustration from the 1968
Dome Cookbook by
Steve Baer, a manual for dome building, to create a freestanding wall covered in fabric sewn together from irregular polygons. Between 2012 and 2016, Beck worked on
Last Night, a series of works centered around a sequence of records
David Mancuso played on June 2, 1984 during one of the last dance parties of the Prince Street iteration of
The Loft, an underground dance party begun by Mancuso in 1970. Beck researched all the records played that night and published their production information as an artist book in 2013 (a revised second edition was published in 2019). The culmination of his project was a thirteen-and-half hour video work, first presented as an installation at
The Kitchen in New York (2017). The video shows each record played in its entirety on a vintage turntable. Both projects explore the notion of community, however temporal, and the social and physical structures that are required for its formation. Art historian Branden W. Joseph wrote: “The question ‘Is there a form to shared togetherness?’ guided Beck’s investigation into both the communes of the 1960s... and the disco of the ’70s and early ’80s, two cultural poles most often perceived as in stark opposition to each other. (This dichotomy is similar to that between the counterculture of the ’60s and the management culture of the following decades, which Beck’s work also deconstructs.)” In 2014, Beck was commissioned to develop a project to go along with the re-branding, initiated by then-director James Voorhies, of the
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. The commission resulted in a two-year exhibition titled
Program that consisted of ten episodic interventions, each addressing one of the institution’s channels of communication. The project culminated in the book
An Organized System of Instructions. Beck is represented by 47 Canal gallery in New York. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Schaulager, Basel; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson; and
Frac Lorraine, Metz, France; among others. == Exhibitions ==