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What They're Not: The Paintings of
Christopher Wool *
by Ann Goldstein
The one evolution of art forms
unfolds in one straight logical line of negative actions and reactions,
in one predestined, eternally recurrent stylistic cycle, in the same
all-over pattern, in all times and places, taking different times
in different places, always beginning with an "early" archaic schematization,
achieving a climax with a "classic" formulation, and decaying with
the "late" endless variety of illusionisms and expressionisms. When
late stages wash away all lines of demarcation, framework, and fabric,
with "anything can be art", "anybody can be an artist", "that's life",
"why fight it", "anything goes", and "it makes no difference whether
art is abstract or representational", the artists' world is a mannerist
and primitivist art trade and suicide-vaudeville, venal, genial, contemptible,
trifling.
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Ad Reinhardt,
"Art-as-Art" [1]
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The symptoms were everywhere:
in the work of painters themselves, all of whom seemed to be reiterating
Ad Reinhardt's claim that he was "just making the last paintings anyone
could make" or allowing their paintings to be contaminated with such
alien elements as photographic images; in minimal sculpture, which
provided a definite rupture with painting's unavoidable ties to a
centuries-old idealism; in all other mediums to which artists turned,
as one after another, they abandoned painting. The dimension that
had always resisted even painting's most dazzling feats of illusionism
- time - now became the dimension in which artists staged their activities
as they embraced film, video, and performance. And, after waiting
out the entire era of modernism, photography reappeared, finally to
claim its inheritance.
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Douglas
Crimp, "The End of Painting" [2] |
At the beginning of the 1980s, the conservative reinvestment in the authority
and market value of painting of the moment was marked as a retrograde,
if not necrophilic trajectory. In Douglas Crimp's 1981 essay, he condemned
the "belief" in painting and the investment in the human touch that was
essential to the idea of a painting's unique "aura". Crimp's argument
is important both in terms of how it challenged the painting versus photography
argument of critics such as Barbara Rose, and in how it went further,
to articulate a theoretical position that questioned the continued viability
of painting. Crimp cited the practice of Daniel Buren, who in 1965 limited
his painting to alternating white and colored vertical stripes as a visual
signifier within a specified space and context. Referring to Rose's critique
of Buren's work as "vaguely resembling Stella's stripe paintings" [3],
Crimp focused his critique of painting on Frank Stella's work of the late
1970s:
If we remember that it was Stella's earliest paintings that signaled to
his colleagues that the end of painting had finally come (I am thinking
of such deserters of the ranks of painters as Dan Flavin, Donald Judd,
Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris), it seems fairly clear that Stella's own
career is a prolonged agony over the incontestable implications of those
works, as he has retreated further and further from them, repudiating
them more vociferously with each new series. The late 1970s paintings
are truly hysterical in their defiance of the black paintings; each one
looks like a tantrum, shrieking and sputtering that the end of painting
has not come. [4]
Simultaneously with Crimp's analysis, however, some artists began to reconsider
painting as a vehicle for critique from within, specifically through strategies
of appropriation. As the artist and critic Thomas Lawson wrote in his
provocative text, "Last Exit: Painting" (also from 1981):
More compelling, because more perverse, is the idea of tackling the problem
with what appears to be the least suitable vehicle available, painting.
It is perfect camouflage, and it must be remembered that Picasso considered
cubism and camouflage to be one and the same, a device of misrepresentation,
a deconstrucrive tool designed to undermine the certainty of appearances.
The appropriation of painting as a subversive method allows one to place
critical aesthetic activity at the center of the marketplace, where it
can cause the most trouble. [5]
It was in 1981 that Christopher Wool returned to work in painting after
a two year hiatus. Wool's work has followed a trajectory that is at once
historically reflexive, very much of its own moment, and keenly self-critical.
Wool's work has drawn from a variety of experiences both inside and outside
art, within a framework that is concerned with the history, conventions
and problematics of making a painting in the 1980s and 90s - his work
embodies and encourages its own contradictions. As Bruce W. Ferguson has
written, "Wool accepts that he is and that his paintings are, at any moment,
within what Richard Prince calls 'wild history', subject to the intertextual
meeting of various discourses." [6]
Besides the affinity that Ferguson describes with Prince, Wool has also
shared his interest in aspects of mass culture (film, television, music)
with other close colleagues of his generation, including Robert Gober,
Cady Noland, Philip Taaffe, Albert Qehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley,
and Stephen Prina. Wool was particularly affected by the attitude of the
painters of his generation in Germany - especially Oehlen and Kippenberger
- whose work, as Friedrich Petzel has written, "hailed the productivity
of failure, claiming that the discrediting of painting's effective capacity
has opened yet another discursive field." [7]
Wool's early development as an artist reflects this multitude of influences.
In 1972, at the age of sixteen, Wool graduated from high school and began
two years of study, during which he had the opportunity to work with Richard
Poussette-Dart and Jack Tworkov. At the time he ended his formal studies
in 1975, at the age of nineteen, he was making allover abstract paintings
of accumulated mark-making. In 1976, he moved into a Chinatown studio
that remains his residence today.
Living and working in New York since the early 1970s, Wool saw a number
of exhibitions that greatly impressed him - Joel Shapiro's tiny cast iron
sculpture of a chair in his 1974 exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery,
Brice Marden's four "Figure" paintings in 1974 at Bykert Gallery, and
Malcolm Morley's 1976 exhibition at the Clocktower. Of particular importance
to Wool were the process works associated with Post-minimalism, especially
the thrown lead works of Richard Serra. These sculptures of splashed lead
are central to Wool's ideas of process and covering-up in relation to
painting, and specifically to picture making.
Wool was also exposed early on to the work of European artists including
Richard Hamilton, Yves Klein, Arnulf Rainer, and, most importantly, the
Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth, whose long-standing friendship with Wool's
father later resulted in a comprehensive collection of Roth's production:
books, drawings, paintings, graphics, sculptures, installations, and changing
works-in-progress occupying his parents' apartment in Chicago.
Music was also very important to Wool - his great interest in the Art
Ensemble of Chicago led him to Ornette Coleman's performance space in
Soho, and he encountered the downtown punk music and club scene of the
late 1970s, which also crossed over into film, specifically the films
of artists, musicians, and filmmakers - James Nares, Eric Mitchell, John
Lurie, Becky Johnston, Vivian Dick, and Michael McClard among them - known
as the New Cinema. [8] Beginning in 1978, Wool stopped
painting for two years in order to follow his interest in film, including
a brief, unsuccessful period of study at New York University. Wool started
painting again in 1981, and at the same time he became a studio assistant
for Joel Shapiro, a position that he continued to hold part-time for the
next four years.
In the early 1980s, Wool's paintings featured semi-figurative imagery
that often played with figures of speech, evident in such titles as The
Bigger the Lie the Longer the Nose or Monkey Chase (the dog in
me). Wool was working with a limited palette (red, white, and black)
with a loose, drippy, wide brushstroke, often over-painting into wet paint,
thus emphasizing the process. At this time, Wool was finding it increasingly
difficult to identify meaningful imagery. Ultimately, it was the process
of painting and the physical properties of paint that became most important
to him. As he later reflected: "I became more interested in 'how to paint
it' than 'what to paint.'" [9]
In the "silver" paintings of 1984-85 and the "drip" paintings of 1985-86,
Wool was trying to make traditional paintings that did not look like traditional
paintings - in effect trying to push what might be seen as a painting
in order to create a confusion between the act and the image: "Is it a
painting or a process?" [10] With these and his subsequent
allover works, he sought to define his work by the elimination of everything
that seemed unnecessary, thus rejecting color, hierarchical composition,
and internal form. Wool's work is as much defined by its exclusions as
its inclusions, as he has stated: "You take color out, you take gesture
out - and then later you can put them in. But it's easier to define things
by what they're not than by what they are." [11]
The images of the "silver" and "drip" paintings were the product of an
allover composition of enamel and aluminum paint poured and dripped onto
surfaces of steel backed by wood. In these works, Wool was able to control
the application of paint to such a degree that individual dots of paint
retain their individual integrity while chemical interactions between
the materials produce a secondary process of shadow or halo-like rings
that echo them. As Jeff Perrone has described the results, "Wool produced
a detailed, all-over field suggesting a chemical peel, a deep etching,
some microscopic pitting that could also be read as cosmic, astronomical."
[12]
The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock are an obvious influence on Wool's
process at this time. As John CaIdwell wrote:
Standing before such paintings for the first time is a curious experience.
One thinks naturally of Pollock because of the way the paint is dripped
onto the metal support, but to remember Pollock is necessarily to experience
a sense of loss. Instead of his looping whorls of paint, seemingly uncontrolled,
but in fact highly disciplined, one faces in Wool's work only the arbitrary
order of carefully achieved randomness. Undeniably the work is beautiful;
for many observers it resembles stars in a night sky. Yet, especially
because of the inevitable recall of Pollock's work, there is no secure
sense of what Wool's paintings mean. They are uniform, deliberate, absolute,
and masterful, but entirely resistant to ones natural search for meaning,
which they seem to deny." [13]
In an untitled drip painting from 1986, Wool reduced his palette further,
removing silver and white as the alternative to black and covering the
surface with only black on black drips. The result was a shiny, mottled
surface that gave the work a mirror-like quality as it reflected the contingencies
of light and the changing position of the spectator. Wool's interest in
opening the paintings to a wide range of associations was further expanded
in this pivotal work, not only by adding to his ongoing investigation
of the relationship between process and painted imagery, but also by raising
the possibility of a painting that would invite an active, physical engagement
with the viewer.
However important the process of dripping paint was to Wool at this time,
it was ultimately Pollock's allover strategy of picture making
that was most influential in these and the subsequent body of paintings
(begun in 1986) that were produced with rubber rollers commonly used to
apply a decorative "wallpaper" patterns to walls. These works mark a distinct
break with the earlier drip paintings through their employment of recognizable,
banal imagery - flowers, vines, clover, dots - that open the works to
associative meanings derived from the particular patterns of the image.
Wool selected images that he found the most "naturalistic" and least kitschy,
and those that when rolled out made continuous patterns without beginning
or end. Using the roller as a tool for both painting and printmaking,
these works continue to operate, like the drip paintings, as allover patterns,
albeit with a clear figure / ground relationship between the uninflected,
chalky white surface of the alkyd on steel ground and the shiny blank
enamel paint applied to it. Although he will occasionally substitute dark
blue or red for black, or add yellow or pink, Wool's "palette" remains
almost exclusively black and white.
The repetitive patterns of these works are articulated by layering, skips
in register, drips and scumbles, what Gary Indiana called "glitches."
[14] The imperfections imbue these works with fragility,
as the seemingly empty decorative patterns ate rendered imperfect, and
thus vulnerable. As Caldwell observed: "In many works the image is so
faint at times that it almost fades away entirely. In fact, the eye does
move across the paintings' surface repeatedly because in ordinary life,
outside of painting, variation implies change or development, and the
viewer actually tries to read the imperfections of the process for meaning."
[15] Likening Wool's use of rollers to Andy Warhol's
silk screened paintings of the 1960s, he continued,
In Warhol's best works, the dead movie star or the electric chair seems
to change, and the viewer experiences this with both relief and heightened
interest, only to discover that the image is the same and that there is
no escaping the harsh reality, or unreality, of the single image itself.
Wool is more reticent, cooler even than Warhol. 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. [16]
The last group of roller paintings of this initial period were those using
a dot pattern, a more neutral visual presence that refers to the Benday
dot and the basic patterns of printing. [17]
In 1987, while Wool continued to make paintings with the roller images,
he also began to use words as the imagery in his work. His interest in
working with words was first manifested in concrete poems, as well as
in titles for abstract paintings. Having seen a brand new, white truck
with the words "SEX LUV" hand-painted on the side, he started to work
with compositions derived from stenciled words, the first a small drawing
alternating the words "sex" and "luv" in a stacked composition. The first
painting was a play on the words "trojan horse", dropping the "a" in trojan
and the "e" in horse. These first so-called "word" paintings focused on
words or expressions with multiple meanings, particularly as they are
broken up in composition, repeated, or modified or abbreviated through
the deletion of letters: "helter helter", and longer texts drawn from
expressions originating in popular culture, such as Muhammad Ali's proclamation
"float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." His 1988 painting Apocalypse
Now draws from Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, and the text comes from the chilling letter
from Captain Colby: "sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids." This
work was included in a collaborative installation with Robert Gober at
303 Gallery in New York in 1988, which also included a wall sculpture
consisting of three plaster urinals (by Gober), a full length mirror,
a collaborative work by Wool and Gober consisting of a small black-and-white
photograph of a sleeveless dress, made from cloth printed with the vine
roller pattern Wool had used in his paintings; hanging on a tree, and
a work of fiction by Gary Indiana in the accompanying publication. [18]
The origins or initial contexts of the texts that Wool used were less
important than the possibility of opening them up through composition
and their conversion into paintings. Wool extended his interest in layering
imagery in the roller paintings to layering meaning in the word paintings
through the selection of words or texts that are both common and open-ended.
In a group of four-letter word paintings Wool portrays such words as "fear",
"amok", "awol", and "riot', by stacking the letters two over two. In the
case of the word "amok', when stacked it reads an incongruous "am ok',
whereas in "trbl" and "drnk', Wool has deleted vowels, thus opening up
multiple readings.
In 1989-90, Wool made a series of paintings of nine-letter words that
describe character traits, types, or roles, such as hypocrite, terrorist,
comedian, spokesman, insomniac, paranoiac, adversary, prankster, chameleon,
assassin, persuader, and pessimist. Stacking the letters in three rows
of three, the words are "read" as an allover composition as well as meaningful
text. These "Black Book" paintings - from the title of a 1990 artist's
book by Wool that reproduces all of the words he had assembled as potential
subjects - together resonate as a cast of characters; or as the multiple
facets of one.
Wool's work with text recalls that of such artists as diverse as Bruce
Nauman, Vito Acconci, or Jean-Michel Basquiat, all of whom influenced
his use of text as image and as vehicle of address. Anticipated in the
mirror-like engagement of the viewer in the untitled black-on-black drip
painting from 1986, Wool's text paintings speak out in loaded expressions
of direct address and slang. Stumbling and misarticulated in their composition,
they are often decipherable only by reading the text out loud.
This is the case in several untitled works of the early nineties that
incorporate longer texts, including a series of works that work with different
renditions of such expressions as "run dog run", "cats in the bag", and
"fuck'em if they can't take a joke." In a 1988 collaboration with Richard
Prince, Wool made two paintings using jokes supplied by Prince: "I didn't
have a penny to my name so I changed my name" and "I went to see a psychiatrist.
He said tell me everything. I did, and now he's doing my act." In 1990-91,
Wool made four untitled paintings using, without punctuation, a passage
quoted in Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life, a key
Situationist text of 1967: "The show is over the audience get up to leave
their seats time to collect their coats and go home they turn around no
more coats and no more home." [19]
In each of the paintings, Wool's stenciled text is composed and painted
in a different manner, varying in the composition of the letters and/or
words across the surface, as well as in the physical rendering of the
stenciled letters and the incorporation, or not, of irregularities, broken
edges of the letters, and drips in the paint. For example, one version
presents the text in an allover pattern of letters that do not break at
words, instead filling the surface from edge to edge until the letters
run out halfway across the bottom line. The letters themselves are re-outlined
in white paint, which drips into the text. This text was also used in
a billboard project and in a 1993 collaboration with Felix Gonzalez-Torres
consisting of a stack of sheets of paper printed with the text.
In 1988 Wool added another technique of image/paint application, that
of the rubber stamp. Like the rollers, the rubber stamp joined together
painting and process. With it Wool was able to broaden his imagery beyond
the "off-the-shelf" catalogue of the rollers. These new images included
bouquets of flowers, wrought-iron gate patterns, running men, and birds.
The "gate" imagery was particularly effective as a continuation of Wool's
involvement in allover pattern. He could construct a pattern with the
repetition of the stamped image, in effect "interlocking" the individual
stamped images like the links in a gate, as well as altering the integrity
of the image through layering, overprinting, and register variation. Working
with these rubber stamp images, chosen for the ability to convey a wide
range of associations as compositions, Wool continued to consider the
associative possibilities of decorative imagery. He also began to engage
with the idea of a "generic" painting, an idea that was addressed by a
number of artists in the 1980s, notably in the broad stripe paintings
of Sherrie Levine.
In 1991-92, Wool concluded the rubber stamp paintings with a series of
works using large blowups of the vine leaf roller pattern. These works
were shown at Documenta IX in 1992, in a collaborative installation with
Robert Gober, on walls covered with a fall forest wallpaper designed by
Gober. Wool then began to work with silk screened imagery, which he continues
to use to the present. Silkscreen opened up new possibilities of scale
and process. Wool's work of the 1990s began to shift through image construction
towards erasure or destruction as a method of image production.
The first silkscreen paintings of 1993 used large blowups of flower images
taken from the earlier wallpaper rollers, clip art, wallpaper and textile
designs. Wool's first silkscreen paintings layered black images upon black
images in dense compositions with varying degrees of overprinting, clogging,
slipping, and obviously dirty screens, all associated with mistakes in
the silkscreen process. The banality that one associates with Andy Warhol's
silk screened flowers is overwhelmed by the grittiness of Wool's intense
and seemingly out-of-control compositions. The first silkscreen works
continue the additive process by laying black flower images on top of
each other. Wool later introduced white into the works, painting our certain
areas, and then silk screening the black images again, wherein the process
that produces the works becomes both additive and reductive. In these
and such works as I Can't Stand Myself When You Touch Me (1994)
or Knee Deep (1995), in the process of "painting out" much of the
image area with pink or blue-black paint, respectively, Wool is engaged
in "a process of covering that became a picture." [20]
These works mark a shift from the allover or systematic approach to composition
of the earlier roller and text paintings to more hierarchical compositions.
The image area becomes more centralized and the structure more detached
from the edges of the frame. The picture plane often seems to be divided
horizontally, suggesting consecutive frames from a film.
In 1995, working on large sheets of paper and later on aluminum panels,
Wool made works using a spray gun to apply black paint like a drawing.
The initial works are simply a single sprayed tangled line on the surface,
with the highly liquefied paint dripping down from the initial sprayed
mark. Later the spray is used in conjunction with the silkscreen and painting-out
techniques. In Maggie's Brain (1995), a silk screen surface is
over painted with white, then silk screened again, and topped with an
explosive floral-like spray form in the center of the surface.
In the recent works of 1997, over painting with white becomes very specifically
about erasure - erasure as a process of producing and articulating an
image. The silkscreen patterns of these works are drawn from blow-ups
of the earlier roller patterns, and the white paint that covers aspects
of them reinforces the "negative space" of the picture plane as it echoes
the original ground of the surface. In his most recent works, Wool has
applied a black, spray painted, rectangular "frame" to the surface. Streaming
with drips, these "frames" hover over the surface, reinforcing it while
at the same time alluding to the convention of the painting as a "window."
Like a disembodied picture of a picture, they frame a painting within
a painting.
In addition to his paintings, Wool has worked on paper consistently throughout
his career, making both studies for paintings and discrete works specifically
conceived for the medium. He has used both painted surfaces and unpainted
rice paper for works using rollers, stamps, stencils, silk screens and
sprays. These works enrich his oeuvre especially through the incorporation
of the materiality of the surface of the paper and the degree of the absorption
of the paint.
Wool has also worked in photography, and, since the time that he began
to make the word paintings, he has produced a voluminous body of installation
shots of his work in his studio, as well as in exhibitions and collections.
A sequence of these images has been assembled by the artist for this publication.
These casual images form striking parallels to the paintings and works
on paper, both in terms of process and as picture. The blurred focus,
grainy high contrast, and askew camera angles echo the skips, clogs, and
slips of the wallpaper rollers, the distressed images of the silk screens,
and the stunning provocations of the text paintings - AMOK, TRBL, PRANKSTER,
FUCKEM IF THEY CAN'T TAKE A JOKE. Like the different bodies of paintings,
they work with multiple variations; a single painting may be represented
in half a dozen images. They incorporate the incidents of reflection and
glare that obscure and compromise the subject with white light, nor unlike
the over painting that obscures a printed image. As photographs, they
function both as documents and as pictures. In one sequence they are in
fact the documentation Wool made of the devastating damage to his studio
and artwork (for an insurance claim) in the chaotic aftermath of a 1996
fire in his building. These eerie, crime scene-like images were reproduced
by Wool in a booklet, Incident on 9th Street, and were published
as an edition of photographs. As documentation, reproductions, or as works
of art, these photographs, like his paintings, reflect Wool's ongoing
interest in multiple readings.
His work incorporates a steadfast criticality and welcomes contradictions.
As one untitled painting states, "You Make Me." Its speech is boldly directed
to the spectator, and yet it remains surprisingly open to interpretation:
you make me... you complete me. 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 by what they hold back.
* Ann Goldstein, "What They're Not: The Paintings of Christopher Wool"
in Christopher Wool, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1998): 255-264
[1] Ad Reinhardt, "Art-as-Art", originally
published in Art International (December 1962), as reprinted in
Ad Reinhardt
(Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1991): 122.
[2] Douglas Crimp, "The End of Painting", in On the
Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press,
1993): 92-93.
[3] Barbara Rose, "Twighlight of the Superstars", Partisan
Review 41, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 569, as quoted in Crimp:
88.
[4] Crimp:
99.
[5] Thomas Lawson, "Last Exit: Painting", as reprinted
in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation
(New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with David
R. Godine, Boston, 1984):
163-164.
[6]
Bruce W. Ferguson, "Patterns of Intent", Artforum (September 1991):
96.
[7] Petzel,
"Psycho-sludge", in Oehlen Williams 95 (Columbus: Wexner Center
for the Arts, 1995): 141.
[8] In
1995, Wool assembled and remastered onto videotape a selected retrospective
of these films.
[9]
Conversation with the artist, October 17, 1997.
[10]
Conversation with the artist, October 17, 1997.
[11] Christopher Wool in "Artists in Conversation I",
in Birth of the Cool (Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich and Hamburg: Deichtorhallen
Hamburg,
1997): 34.
[12] Jeff
Perone, "In the Shadow of Painting", Parkett 33 (Fall 1992): 103.
[13] John Caldwell, "New Work: Christopher Wool", in
Christopher Wool, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
1998): unpag.
[14] Gary
Indiana, "Chronicle in Black & White", Village Voice (May 31, 1987):
89.
[15] John Caldwell, "New Work: Christopher Wool", in
Christopher Wool, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1989): unpag.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Wool did return to the use of the roller in Groove
I and II (1994), paintings that played with the title of Brice Marden's
"Grove Group"
paintings.
[18] The text by Gary Indiana is reprinted in this book.
Wool later collaborated with Gober on an installation in documenta IX
in 1992 in
Kassel, Germany. Wool showed vine "stamp" paintings on walls covered with
"forest" wallpaper by Gober.
[19] Raoul
Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Left Bank Books
and Rebel Press, 1983): 134.
[20] Conversation with the artist, December 9, 1997.
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