Peter Wächtler at dépendance

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Wächtler is always learning a new skill. Usually a craft (for its labor representing love.) A handicraft that a lot of people have spent a life "mastering," but which Wächtler gets suspiciously close to competent before abandoning it. (It should be noted this will all be abandoned.) Desertion of techniques perhaps preventative against said technical mastery, a mastery that would prevent identification with its wet-eyed novice. You "an uninvited spectator to his own stubborn failure at coming of age." Jeff Koons of the rags we call him. The rag is sympathetic in a way diamonds aren't. But it structures Wächtler's question, is it still earnestness if you forbid any other sentiment? Can it be manufactured?

Peter Wächtler at Josey

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THIS THEME OF OBSOLESCENCE and nostalgia runs through Wächtler’s entire practice, and not only on the level of narrative. [...] These works’ antiquated, low-tech quality and the artist’s conspicuous investment of long hours of manual labor contrast sharply with more zeitgeisty aesthetics, modes of fabrication, and artistic strategies. [...] The imperfections that mark the films testify to their maker’s stubbornness, blood-sweat-and-tears stamina, and, perhaps, hubris, while reminding viewers that these images have been produced by hand.[...]
Wächtler presents individuals moving aimlessly among an array of simulacral roles, which in turn are subsumed in a welter of images, aesthetics, formats, genres, and techniques that—like the various identities to which the artist alluded in his ostensibly autobiographical talk—all feel somewhat outdated and hand-me-down. Here and there, his protagonists cite particular culture-industrial templates to which they owe some portion of their self-conceptions.[...]
But for the most part, the figures of speech, metaphors, and character types that appear in Wächtler’s tales trigger only a vague sense of familiarity, suggesting that the artist is excavating psychic sediments left by repeated exposure to certain idioms, images, or aesthetics.[...]
AGAINST THE FOIL of current trends or problematic genre labels such as post-Internet, and in contrast to the attitude of elusive detachment so prevalent among younger artists (who endlessly repeat the studied gestures of supposed dandyism and ironic coolness familiar from the early 2000s), the pathos of Wächtler’s work, its embrace of craft, and its sense of personal investment register as idiosyncratic and even egregiously earnest, which may account for part of its attractiveness.[...]
Wächtler’s work articulates irony not simply by depleting forms of expression, nor only by inflating those forms with “subjective” content, but by doing both. The work vehemently amps up the sense of palpable investment—then punctures that impression at the points of maximum intensity, of which there are plenty. What is thus rendered ironic is not so much the notion that any actual artistic form could adequately capture the artist’s boundless subjectivity, but the inflated, idealized image of the artist itself. -Jakob Schillinger, Artforum

Peter Wächtler, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga and Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Interesting, the discrepancy in images from those on CAD versus those on Gaga/Reena's site. CAD heavy on Wächtler's material pups but containing none of Pulitzer's drawings that the gallery itself hosts. E.g. looking at CAD alone, don't get any of the Avocado replacing its face, the sprue and puzzled home, the Twin-Peaks-like stoplight. Instead loads of install. An inconvenience since the drawings of both are illustrative, showcase a similar interest in iconography and information as formal devices that lead the viewer in providing nowhere to go. So clearly defined, and yet entirely without context they self-alienate. Sure you might right recognize the PBS kids logo, and a Volcano is a volcano, but set into this cold world of ironized art (I mean the display racks jeeze) they contain a sort of neuter uselessness that doesn't mitigate an ability to still point however vacuous it may be. Images which lovely connote but don't mean.


See too: Sam Pulitzer at Real Fine Arts

Peter Wächtler at Reena Spaulings

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Somewhere between Amelie von Wulffen vegetable soirées and Sophie von Hellerman washy lumpen, a coolness carved from retrograde contemporary, a sort of faux-naive crafted askew of out-of-fashion methods. (cooly naive to fashion) Like Martin Creed’s slaughtered portraiture, the "exaggerated literary forms," the having gotten it wrong, lends an Edenic earnestness as if unspoilt by social awareness, and reattempting it through the mistakes of a Forest Gump or incompetent detective still winning the hearts if not criminal with immaculate sincerity, which of course isn’t true, but the interest lay in ascertaining the discrepancy, the disorientation of its irony.