Richard Wentworth

About

Discussion of Wentworth's work often hovers between questions of language and etymology and the hardware and hardwiring of the world. The artist—drawn to elisions of both language and culture—frequently speaks using the import and export of metaphors, making historical leaps and bounds. Whether talking about the history of cable or the mass-produced book or the reflective powers of glass and mirror, all materials employed here, Wentworth is always criss-crossing ways of reading and the territories in which these things might habitually occur. “A brick can be used as a unit of culture, a doorstop or a murder weapon.”

In new works, riffs on lintels, elemental to architecture, Wentworth employs “dumb materials,” he says—or the amateur armaments of “ownership,” which have strange connections beyond their modesty. Shards of glass from discarded bottles—bottles whose cultural associations themselves carried weight (St. Emilion vs. Budweiser)—have a decorative energy, not least because of their color and our ability to be fascinated by danger and spot threatening shapes.

Wentworth never uses a material without consideration of its anthropological roots—and a sense of the moments of clarity that can emerge from the overlaps among seemingly unrelated things that surround us. For instance, he draws multiple meaningful connections between Gaudi architecture—a real statement of Modernismo for the Catalans—and the folkloric energy of Simon Rodia’s Los Angeles Watts Towers. In the anonymous masonry work of both, the artist reads “attempts to assemble bits into a whole. To take bits of surface to make a bigger surface, to create continuums. Where the need to prepare ground, to give order, to make serviceable is sometimes dumbly utilitarian, sometimes decorative.”