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拍品專文
"I define myself in my work by reducing the things I don’t want–it seems impossible to know when to say 'yes', but I do know what I can say 'no' to … It’s easier to define things by what they’re not than by what they are." (C. Wool, quoted in A. Schwartzman, ‘Artists in Conversation I: Chuck Close, Philip Taaffe, Sue Williams, Christopher Wool’, in Birth of the Cool: American Painting from Georgia O’Keeffe to Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, 1997, pp. 32-34)
Alongside the artist’s signature text paintings, the eagle, with its intricate and iconic silhouette, is one of Christopher Wool’s most instantly recognizable and enduring motifs. The eagle–globally recognizable as a symbol of heroism, bravery, and courage, as well as the national emblem of the United States, was re-contextualized by the artist from a motif he found in an old pattern books. Wool introduced this nostalgic subject matter into the contemporary urban language of post-Punk New York in order for the reclaimed symbol to operate as a counterpoint to the Neo-Expressionist painting movements that dominated the Manhattan art world of the 1980s. With its references to both wallpaper design and stenciled graffiti, Untitled bears witness to Wool’s ability to interrogate the conceptual limits of contemporary art.
Composed like emblems or heraldic seals in outward-facing pairs down the length of the canvas, the regal eagle oscillates between abstraction and figuration. Yet, more than bridging the divide between these two genres of painting, Wool’s painting commandeers the aesthetic regimes that separates symbolism and formalism, communication and decoration, forging their own synthesis. In this painting, Wool investigates the relationship between utility and aesthetic that is often kept distinct and separate in arts traditions. He strips the decorative symbols of their original function allowing them to participate in a new mode of artistic discourse. As Ann Goldstein, former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and curator of Wool’s mid-career retrospective exhibition there in 1998 wrote, “through process, technique, scale, composition, and imagery, Wool’s work accentuates the tensions and contradictions between the act of painting, the construction of a picture, its physical attributes, the visual experience of looking at it, and the possibilities of playing with and pushing open the thresholds of its meanings. They are defined by what they’re not–and what they hold back” (A. Goldstein in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 263).
Presented in unmodulated black against a pristine white ground, the even repetition of the eagle’s form is interrupted only by the individual variations in paint application; each deviation from the same form of the eagle–who looks over his feathered shoulder with a clawed foot outstretched in front–is an insight into Wool’s method. The artist’s series of “rubber stamp” paintings begun in 1986, was so named because Wool deployed a rubber paint roller or in other cases, a rubber stencil dipped in paint and applied directly to the canvas. Wool used this method to its full advantage, employing their ability to reproduce the same image repeatedly to create paintings of repeating patterns. John Caldwell, curator of Wool’s 1989 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, elaborates, “…since the repeated pattern has no inherent meaning and no strong association, we tend to view its variation largely in terms of abstraction, expecting to find in the changes of the pattern some of the meaning we associate with traditional abstract painting” (J. Caldwell, “New Work: Christopher Wool,” in New Work: Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989, n.p.).
The stamp maintains the same form despite the artist’s wavering hand throughout the process of reapplication. In this way, Wool is the progeny of artist like Andy Warhol, whose use of the silk-screening medium was an attempt to mechanize his own art reproduction, and yet, the medium’s dependency upon a human, in all his wavering fallibility, to pull the print creates subtle variations from print to print. This method gave rise to compelling idiosyncrasies in the articulation of each print–a feature clearly demonstrated in the present work. With no two eagles identical, the work is imbued with a sense of rawness that perfectly complements its uniform composition. In this respect, the work relates to Wool’s word-based paintings, begun just a few years earlier in 1987, which investigate the relationship between the linguistic and the pictorial.
Wool is as indebted to Warhol’s Pop Art as he is to the Abstract Expressionist canvas, with its “all-over” surface pattern and street graffiti. Synthesizing these influences within a work which fuses together the abstract and the figurative, the urban and the ornamental, Wool deftly challenges the boundaries of contemporary image production through his foray with the decorative imagery and utilitarian methods.
Alongside the artist’s signature text paintings, the eagle, with its intricate and iconic silhouette, is one of Christopher Wool’s most instantly recognizable and enduring motifs. The eagle–globally recognizable as a symbol of heroism, bravery, and courage, as well as the national emblem of the United States, was re-contextualized by the artist from a motif he found in an old pattern books. Wool introduced this nostalgic subject matter into the contemporary urban language of post-Punk New York in order for the reclaimed symbol to operate as a counterpoint to the Neo-Expressionist painting movements that dominated the Manhattan art world of the 1980s. With its references to both wallpaper design and stenciled graffiti, Untitled bears witness to Wool’s ability to interrogate the conceptual limits of contemporary art.
Composed like emblems or heraldic seals in outward-facing pairs down the length of the canvas, the regal eagle oscillates between abstraction and figuration. Yet, more than bridging the divide between these two genres of painting, Wool’s painting commandeers the aesthetic regimes that separates symbolism and formalism, communication and decoration, forging their own synthesis. In this painting, Wool investigates the relationship between utility and aesthetic that is often kept distinct and separate in arts traditions. He strips the decorative symbols of their original function allowing them to participate in a new mode of artistic discourse. As Ann Goldstein, former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and curator of Wool’s mid-career retrospective exhibition there in 1998 wrote, “through process, technique, scale, composition, and imagery, Wool’s work accentuates the tensions and contradictions between the act of painting, the construction of a picture, its physical attributes, the visual experience of looking at it, and the possibilities of playing with and pushing open the thresholds of its meanings. They are defined by what they’re not–and what they hold back” (A. Goldstein in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 263).
Presented in unmodulated black against a pristine white ground, the even repetition of the eagle’s form is interrupted only by the individual variations in paint application; each deviation from the same form of the eagle–who looks over his feathered shoulder with a clawed foot outstretched in front–is an insight into Wool’s method. The artist’s series of “rubber stamp” paintings begun in 1986, was so named because Wool deployed a rubber paint roller or in other cases, a rubber stencil dipped in paint and applied directly to the canvas. Wool used this method to its full advantage, employing their ability to reproduce the same image repeatedly to create paintings of repeating patterns. John Caldwell, curator of Wool’s 1989 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, elaborates, “…since the repeated pattern has no inherent meaning and no strong association, we tend to view its variation largely in terms of abstraction, expecting to find in the changes of the pattern some of the meaning we associate with traditional abstract painting” (J. Caldwell, “New Work: Christopher Wool,” in New Work: Christopher Wool, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989, n.p.).
The stamp maintains the same form despite the artist’s wavering hand throughout the process of reapplication. In this way, Wool is the progeny of artist like Andy Warhol, whose use of the silk-screening medium was an attempt to mechanize his own art reproduction, and yet, the medium’s dependency upon a human, in all his wavering fallibility, to pull the print creates subtle variations from print to print. This method gave rise to compelling idiosyncrasies in the articulation of each print–a feature clearly demonstrated in the present work. With no two eagles identical, the work is imbued with a sense of rawness that perfectly complements its uniform composition. In this respect, the work relates to Wool’s word-based paintings, begun just a few years earlier in 1987, which investigate the relationship between the linguistic and the pictorial.
Wool is as indebted to Warhol’s Pop Art as he is to the Abstract Expressionist canvas, with its “all-over” surface pattern and street graffiti. Synthesizing these influences within a work which fuses together the abstract and the figurative, the urban and the ornamental, Wool deftly challenges the boundaries of contemporary image production through his foray with the decorative imagery and utilitarian methods.