Julia Wachtel at Vilma Gold

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Wachtel's sign systems of the cultural meltdown, express the rupture, floating between Baldesarrian inanity and Wolfsonian semantic violence. Finding the tense middle ground where the inanity is the violence, of someone hitting you in the face with something so dumb.


See too: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

“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.