Bad Budz

When I proposed this show title to Rocco, he thought I meant Bator Budz, which seemed to me to be more of a gooner show than the one we have here. I thought it might lead to false expectations - there aren’t any circle jerks or erections, at least not at the time of this writing, it’s not all that gay, it’s the right title, but this isn’t that show. Or maybe it is, after all. One way of thinking about the enjoyment of a flower is that we are intruding. Rounding a corner in a darkroom, opening a door at a party, finding a few people engaged in an activity that you weren’t invited to. You would likely walk away, yes? Continue to another passage, or apologetically back out while closing the door in front of you. Or would you instead just stand there and stare, enjoying the aesthetic intensity of the folds, tendrils, shoots, flaps, variegations, and protrusions in front of you. Walk further in, bury your face in it, marvel at how delicate, how feral, it is. An objection to this might be: they want you, or some other animal, to watch, actually. You are the missing third without which their activity would be, lol, fruitless. Claiming that our appreciation and use of them is pointless and of no function, is just a denial of the fact that when we are looking at their buds, we are just animals, too. Whatever labors of sublimation we undertake to etherealize our enjoyment of them, doesn’t matter. They made of themselves a trap for us, whether we call it that or not. In other cases, the bait they’ve set out is meant for someone other than us, someone who we very well may have scared away with our greedy olfactions. I’m skeptical of a dismissive materialism that would wave away the enchantment of these forms by describing them as functional, reducing them to the strategic shapes of a selfish gene. As though the reproductive aims of a piece of matter deflate its aesthetic properties; as though the beauty of a plump stamen or fleshy petal evacuates its healing properties. Walking through a warehouse full of cut stems, their odor wafting through the hallways and mixing with the flood of urine in the stairwell we’ve just come through, and part way through writing this text, it’s hard not to feel like I’m in a slaughterhouse run by a particularly greedy genital fetishist. Bundles of same-species sexual organs bound together and plunged in buckets of increasingly fetid water. I do wonder at what moment it becomes hopeless: if a pollinator (could I be one?) comes through here and diligently performs its role, bringing pollen from one flower to another, on the same or a different branch depending on the needs of the particular species, can the pollination be called successful? At what point in this does sexual reproduction become form, detached from any possible generation of new life? Maybe it’s my own proclivities, but I wish they could have this in their real lives. All of this luscious bud flesh, pressed together, ambient temperature and humidity precisely adjusted to keep them plump, youthful, and fertile looking for as long as possible. Quite literally nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, but to be there together, touching. Soon they’ll be separated from each other, brought somewhere less hospitable, left to whither for us. To brighten a room and be forgotten, or die for us so we can emotionally inoculate ourselves against imagining the ramifications our way of life will have on ourselves or each other, on whichever buds would otherwise have burst forth. -carrick bell, Los Angeles, July 2022