Untitled

'[Wade Guyton] is one of the first and most important artists of his generation to have been formed through the postmodern practice of appropriation and for whom abstraction has always existed, above all, as a reproduced image'

(V. Pécoil, 'The American Action Painter', La Salle de Bains, 2006, reproduced at www.petzel.com).


Wade Guyton, like his friend, fellow artist and collaborator Kelley Walker, is part of a new generation of artists who have pushed appropriation art to new extremes, turning it upon itself. In Guyton's Yellow U, executed in 2005, flames flicker at the bottom of a composition that appears to be based on a book cover; the fire licks a largely black linen support that is dominated by the large, isolated, almost abstract form of the letter U. These are disembodied signifiers, placed in a mysterious juxtaposition with each other. This recalls the works that, in the early 2000s, launched Guyton on his current path. In them, he took pages from art and architectural publications and transformed the images, often superimposing other images, the letter X or editing them in other ways. In this way, Guyton has enacted a process of obfuscation by which he has decontextualised both image and language, resulting in a provocatively problematic image that taunts the viewer with its deliberate inscrutability while maintaining the Ed Ruscha-like impact of flames and language in the picture plane.

As an artist whose early training was in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he met Walker, Guyton was exposed to the works of his predecessors and contemporaries largely through reproductions, meaning that the entire landscape of the printed press had an equivalency for him. In pictures such as Yellow U, he has pushed this to a new extreme, carrying out a series of removals that throw into question the nature of authorship itself. This carries through to the very process by which Yellow U has been created: at the top of this picture, a band of linen is streaked with drips that extend from the main bulk of the composition; these drips, and the varied density of the black background, are some of the clues that force the viewer's attention to the fact that Guyton has created Yellow U using an inkjet printer. This is a machine that has not been designed to cope with linen, and that conflict results in the textured, mock-expressive appearance of the picture surface. Guyton has discussed the war of subterfuge he carries out against his printer in order to trick it to accept his preferred supports:

'There is evidence of this struggle in the work, in its surface. I've been putting different kinds of material through my inkjet printer and there are lots of fuck ups in the printing, the inkjet heads get snagged, ink drips, the registration slides. I'm also just making dumb marks - lines, Xs, Us, squares, monochromatic shapes that don't require the complexity of the photo printer technology - and it's interesting how the printer can't handle such simple gestures' (Guyton, quoted in D. Fogle, W. Guyton, J. Rasmussenm K. Walker, 'A Conversation about Yves Klein, Mid-Century Design Nostalgia, Branding, and Flatbed Scanning', pp. 43-54, Guyton/Walker: The Failever of Judgement, exh. cat., St. Paul, MN, 2004, p. 49).

Guyton has used the letter U in part to bring attention to its abstract form when removed from the context of language, and in part for the simplicity which trips up the printer, as is clear in the yellow marks that invade its white expanse and which have lent the picture its title.