B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA

(Richard Telles, ICA LA )

There is now a waste issue called "aspirational recycling" in which "people set aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren’t" - no longer just trash clogging our excretory paths but hopes clogging our recycling. Headaches as evidence of anxiety at the hands of trash, of which the Wurtzian model provides a relief in seeing the objects cared for, not amassed in landfill graves but given the second life in carousels. Our aspirations finally lets them levitate, holding them off the ground, where they would become trash. Which they are suspended from.


see too: Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole, B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz), B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures

B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures

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That despite cheapness, a care that is fastidious. Like a mother combing her child's hair, a job well done. It's picture day. Not fussy. Mildly doting. but mostly, sympathetic. Wurtz seems sympathetic to his materials, even sanding to round the corners of cheap wood, like polishing a pair of meager shoes. Not all artists are sympathetic to their objects. Most use material for scorching stabbing churned molding into the god-whims of their creator hands. What little fascists most artists are. It's picture day.


See too: Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole, B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole

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or that the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when a guardian can't. Paul. P's sensitivity in the liquid touch, it's a bit easier to explain, caressing faces in fluids, the pigments absorb into paper like blood into cheeks blushing, paper becomes skin to engorge. Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much simple care like responsibility shown for them.


See too: B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

B. Wurtz at Lulu

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The American Gym Sock. Tied to teenage boys, normally repositories of filth, seed, and feet, normally locker room attire, a pubescent attire, pimples and athletics, is here given an absurdly fastidious clean, highlighting its cotton and comfort, restoring purity, virginal phallus and receiver of course. To say nothing of their wonkiness, bent, queer. The most apparent quality though always the cleanliness, cleanliness in the face of such plainness, fixated on such trivial details.


see too: “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

“The Crack-Up” at Room East

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Wurtz's very unspecific objects exist in a generalized zone of middling indeterminancy that bordered, but never hit, humor. Concertos of flat notes. But whereas Wurtz transcended the genre of mediocrity with an overly fastidious attention to his dumpy objects belying the sort of deranged care attended to them - the fastenings and threads so fussy as to feel slightly troubled - the Wurtz sensibility is not a champion of slacker lethargy, Wurtz becoming the flagship for a brand of wonky-abstractionist tendencies en vogue in the background noise of group show art that it never seemed intended to, far too buttoned up.