Richie Budd
Road Agent
- Michael Odom -
Whiteout, 2008; mixed media; dimensions variable; photos courtesy the artist and Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York
Richie Budd, Untitled, 2008; mixed media; dimensions variable
Richie Budd’s work conflates mechanical, inorganic objects with human characteristics: both flesh and matters of the mind, like appetites, cognition and judgments. His recent show at Road Agent was mostly comprised of antic assemblages of semiotically resonant objects and materials—beer cans, cigarette packs, strobe lights, video monitors and cameras, sound systems and more—which are often glued together with gloppy pours of resin. Most likely, Budd constructs his designs with craft and care, but the results have an aura of improvisation. Component parts meld under hardened goo in ways that suggest an ad hoc attitude.
The centerpiece of the exhibit, Bon Voyage, Somnambulating De Pileon (Jamilee Lee), is an everything-and-the-cookware-too concatenation of video projector, sound systems, luggage, food, lights, bubble and smoke machines and assorted objects chosen with apparent insouciance. Dominating the gallery’s main exhibition space, the piece was a “party dude” the night of the show’s opening, when it was stocked with chilled cocktails (vodka and pink grapefruit juice) to go along with a supply of hot dogs and soft pretzels. Plus, it sits on wheels. And yet, beneath all the Jean Tinguely razzle-dazzle lies a structured statement. The wheels are from one of those scooters for the disabled you see on late-night TV. One of the sculpture’s audio tracks consists of a series of questions about the nature of specific sensory experiences. The cocktails come from what appears to be the sculpture’s ass end, as though the piece excretes juice. As with traditional portraiture, one senses a personality here: an individual represented via wild associations of objects with ideas.
Budd’s delight in assemblage is also clear in Blog of Eternal Stench, surely a candidate for the best sculpture title of the year in the Punk category. (In fact, there really is a blog by that name.) As with Bon Voyage, the piece assembles disparate objects—dried mouse carcass, beer cans, a cell phone, fist-sized glass globes, a video camera and screen, etc. Unlike the bigger piece, this one has human proportions, and here again, one can read the sculpture’s text in terms of human qualities. Another assemblage, Whiteout, likewise cobbles together minor appliances like a multifunctional radio alarm clock, a working popcorn machine and various glass globes (one holds a compass), onto wheeled walkers. The whole is encrusted in white resin. Popcorn litters the floor below. With a head, legs and torso, the body reference is clear, and the body being referenced is ailing, damaged.
With a couple of creepy little black plastic works, Meat Gigantor and Wall Mole, Budd enters a realm of bio-architectural weirdness. They look like diseased blemishes—melanomas erupting from the walls’ inorganic material. Addressing the white cube of the gallery with representations of the dangerous side of our organic being, they infect the very structure of the room. Everything acquires the qualities of flesh. It is as though Budd’s desire to express human qualities, like hunger, thirst and intellectual curiosity, in mechanical form has lost any specific location and permeates the environment itself.
Michael Odom is an artist and writer living in a sleepy little town outside of Dallas.