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Lot Essay
Asserting a powerfully lyrical cadence, Untitled is one of Christopher Wool’s highly renowned word paintings, a body of works the artist began in 1987 that marked the major breakthrough of the artist’s mature career. Against bright white paper, the bluntly imperative, yet playfully rhythmic, phrase is emblazoned in black-stencilled lettering. Combining the austere, utilitarianism of Minimalism with the all-over compositions of the Abstract Expressionists and the bold, mechanical directness of Pop Art, Wool’s word paintings appear as a synthesis of the varied strands of postwar American art. However, the paintings are heavily steeped in the contemporary urbanity of the gritty metropolis that was New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s—at once, historically reflexive and the embodiment of Wool’s own time. Executed in 1990, Untitled is situated between two major solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, a period during which the artist reached international acclaim. Dating from the beginning of Wool’s iconic text-based series, Untitled exemplifies the rawness of expression and powerful immediacy that Wool’s word paintings embodied.
Drawing its subject matter from another form of radical discourse, Untitled continues Wool’s legacy of looking toward countercultural manifestos. As the Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Brinson explained in Wool’s retrospective catalogue for the Guggenheim, New York, “The painting depicts a series of paratactic statements that render a world where even the illusion of comfort has been lost: ‘The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home.’ The longest most complex arrangement of text by Wool, the language is genuinely difficult to decipher, forcing the viewer to remain standing before it in a state of gradual comprehension that attains a time-based, near performative sense of engagement. While Wool’s appropriated expressions are most commonly culled from pop culture, this painting has a more rarified source. He first came across the lines in Greil Marcus’s counterculture history Lipstick Traces, which cites Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem’s use of the passage to describe the condition of nihilism in his seminal 1967 book, The Revolution of Everyday Life. Vaneigem was in turn paraphrasing the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov, who coined the formulation to allegorize the upheaval of the Russian Revolution…In curious echo of Wool’s coopted title Apocalypse Now, Rozanov’s lines originate in the 1918 essay entitled ‘The Apocalypse of Our Time’” (K. Brinson, “Trouble is My Business,” in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013, p. 42).
Sparse and stripped of imagery and color, Wool’s Untitled takes a nihilistic pronouncement of the Russian revolutionary Vasily Rozanov and transforms it into a formal statement that takes a critical look at the artistic movements of the past and the nature of painting itself—calling into question the mediums efficacy as a vehicle for contemporary artistic expression. The stark letters in black and white and the deliberate randomness of spacing and punctuation imbue the work with an unexpected exuberance. The medium and the procedure both align and contrast with the stenciled grid pattern, while the optical effect of letters, randomly spaced, rivet the senses and disrupt the focus from the chosen words and their meaning. Untitled highlights what for Wool were the relevant questions for a young painter at the edge of postmodernism—was there still relevance in the act of painting?
Wool drags grit from the underbelly of the industrial urban environment into the history of fine art in his search to redefine the traditional painterly surface. This radical revision coincided with a general assault on the visual arts in the 1980s, an assault whose catalytic moment had driven artists to haul language and materials from the streets in a subversive overthrow of the primacy of painting. Painted in 1990, during the heyday of New York’s downtown art scene, Wool looked to the future of painting as his muse. “I think of myself primarily as an abstract painter, but I find that in making paintings there is a little bit of investigation into what abstract painting can be” (C. Wool, quoted in K. Brinson, “Trouble is My Business,” ibid., pp. 38, 40). As Glenn O’Brien has explained: “One could superficially interpret Wool’s paintings as parodies of Pollock’s seriousness, as a cynical re-enactment of action painting utilizing an impoverished bag of tricks hijacked from vandalism. But then one would be missing the point. No, Wool embraces and engages action painting as his primary source and he then manipulates it, with the cool reflection of a Pop artist or Dada collagist, creating art that is both intense and reflective, physical and mechanical, unconscious and considered, refined in technique and redolent of street vernacular, both high and low. But despite the many apparent contradictions, the work is singular, strong, organic and as deep as it might appear shallow” (G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Christopher Wool, Köln, 2012, pp. 10-11).
Showcasing the ongoing debates that raged about the significance of painting, Untitled also reflects the life experiences of a new generation of artists growing up in the tough urban environment of the early 1990s. Wool’s directness, both aesthetically and conceptually, stands as an exceptional example of his work from this important period. The ambiguity of the syntax is as uncanny as it is menacing, and allows Wool to fundamentally question the content of paintings and re-interpret the narrative elements of art in a thoroughly modern context.
Drawing its subject matter from another form of radical discourse, Untitled continues Wool’s legacy of looking toward countercultural manifestos. As the Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Brinson explained in Wool’s retrospective catalogue for the Guggenheim, New York, “The painting depicts a series of paratactic statements that render a world where even the illusion of comfort has been lost: ‘The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home.’ The longest most complex arrangement of text by Wool, the language is genuinely difficult to decipher, forcing the viewer to remain standing before it in a state of gradual comprehension that attains a time-based, near performative sense of engagement. While Wool’s appropriated expressions are most commonly culled from pop culture, this painting has a more rarified source. He first came across the lines in Greil Marcus’s counterculture history Lipstick Traces, which cites Situationist writer Raoul Vaneigem’s use of the passage to describe the condition of nihilism in his seminal 1967 book, The Revolution of Everyday Life. Vaneigem was in turn paraphrasing the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov, who coined the formulation to allegorize the upheaval of the Russian Revolution…In curious echo of Wool’s coopted title Apocalypse Now, Rozanov’s lines originate in the 1918 essay entitled ‘The Apocalypse of Our Time’” (K. Brinson, “Trouble is My Business,” in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013, p. 42).
Sparse and stripped of imagery and color, Wool’s Untitled takes a nihilistic pronouncement of the Russian revolutionary Vasily Rozanov and transforms it into a formal statement that takes a critical look at the artistic movements of the past and the nature of painting itself—calling into question the mediums efficacy as a vehicle for contemporary artistic expression. The stark letters in black and white and the deliberate randomness of spacing and punctuation imbue the work with an unexpected exuberance. The medium and the procedure both align and contrast with the stenciled grid pattern, while the optical effect of letters, randomly spaced, rivet the senses and disrupt the focus from the chosen words and their meaning. Untitled highlights what for Wool were the relevant questions for a young painter at the edge of postmodernism—was there still relevance in the act of painting?
Wool drags grit from the underbelly of the industrial urban environment into the history of fine art in his search to redefine the traditional painterly surface. This radical revision coincided with a general assault on the visual arts in the 1980s, an assault whose catalytic moment had driven artists to haul language and materials from the streets in a subversive overthrow of the primacy of painting. Painted in 1990, during the heyday of New York’s downtown art scene, Wool looked to the future of painting as his muse. “I think of myself primarily as an abstract painter, but I find that in making paintings there is a little bit of investigation into what abstract painting can be” (C. Wool, quoted in K. Brinson, “Trouble is My Business,” ibid., pp. 38, 40). As Glenn O’Brien has explained: “One could superficially interpret Wool’s paintings as parodies of Pollock’s seriousness, as a cynical re-enactment of action painting utilizing an impoverished bag of tricks hijacked from vandalism. But then one would be missing the point. No, Wool embraces and engages action painting as his primary source and he then manipulates it, with the cool reflection of a Pop artist or Dada collagist, creating art that is both intense and reflective, physical and mechanical, unconscious and considered, refined in technique and redolent of street vernacular, both high and low. But despite the many apparent contradictions, the work is singular, strong, organic and as deep as it might appear shallow” (G. O’Brien, “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Christopher Wool, Köln, 2012, pp. 10-11).
Showcasing the ongoing debates that raged about the significance of painting, Untitled also reflects the life experiences of a new generation of artists growing up in the tough urban environment of the early 1990s. Wool’s directness, both aesthetically and conceptually, stands as an exceptional example of his work from this important period. The ambiguity of the syntax is as uncanny as it is menacing, and allows Wool to fundamentally question the content of paintings and re-interpret the narrative elements of art in a thoroughly modern context.