Photograph courtesy of White Flag Projects
B. Wurtz is a sculptor who’s been making waves in art circles lately, thanks to last summer's Works,1970-2011 at Metro Pictures gallery. A sort of comfortable outsider to those in New York, critics and collectors alike marveled at how this curious little fellow remained out of their visual fields for the last few decades. His pieces conflate ideas of miniature and monument, typical and totemic, and exhibit a playful awareness of formalism, the readymade, text and content. Art with qualities like these is hard to suppress in spite of unassuming material choices.
Wurtz’s material choices are quotidian and often naked, and the way the materials are used is not rough, but respectful. The age and used qualities of the materials reveal themselves through gentle bends, tender frays and a bit of dirt. Unfinished wood and unprimed canvas alongside lightly wrinkled shopping bags and shaky wire configurations (in contrast to Alexander Calder’s pristine and smooth use of wire) reveal the richness in the constructions’ aging. Like a price label from a yellowed, used paperback that finally escapes its text, leaving a ghostly hue of glue, we assuredly number the days.
Untitled (1996), is almost florid in its combining of sculptural tension and weight with the linearity and lyricism of drawings. In its understatedness (conveyed by its size and choice of shoelace, sock, carpet sample and canvas swatch), it illustrates powerful formal relationships. Untitled (2010), weighs more heavily on collaged bits of supermarket advertising. It resembles a gray, trapezoidal temporal temple or mobile (not “mobile”) creature adorned with hasty yellow and white brush strokes. The grocery cutouts suggest a preference for regional produce (Eastern Potatoes, NY State Bosc Pears, California Carrots) and the price-less adhesive label printed “best before” wryly nods to their demise and overall impermanence. Three Blue Mops (1986) are three blue mop handles mounted on a frame from Pearl Paint, NYC’s largest art supply store (and #1019 on Lonely Planet’s list of 1902 things to do in New York City). I want to give this piece more credit than it probably deserves, but there is an undeniable force transferred through the direct affixation (with eyehooks and screws) of the handles to the frame. Untitled (2009), a combination of plastic bags, paint and canvas goes big, but ends up clumsy.
That we take into consideration his use of items of domestic daily routines at all (a trip to the hardware store, a stroll through the clearance section at the lumber yard, and a grab for groceries) speaks more to a general need for the presence of an author in these works. The object choices are so mundane that we comfort ourselves in knowing that someone did the required routines and assembled the refuse, and I think the average art patron is still uncomfortable in reconciling their disbelief in the utilization of found objects as art ones. I am gently humored by Wurtz’s backstory, but I don’t think it’s necessary as an “in” to the sculptures themselves. Perhaps this is more to our need to be reminded of the obvious, regardless of our being presented with a purely visual language. I am quite content with looking at wood that’s been neglected for 30 years with no heroic signs of aging, as everyone should be.
B. Wurtz runs through October 20. White Flag Projects is located at 4568 Manchester. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5, and by appointment; admission is free. For more information, call 314-531-3442, or go to whiteflagprojects.org.
William Gass is a writer living next to a pizza place and the Yowie practice space in the Tower Grove Heights neighborhood. Born in Nashua, N.H., he’s been in and out of St. Louis since 1998. He collected a combined bachelor’s in Art History and German with honors from Webster University. Gass has written for frieze, Flash Art, Snowflake, and the Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary, among others. He dreams of owning Rubens’ 1636 painting,“The Discovery of Purple.”
