“The words transmit a sense of dread and despair, hysteria and catharsis… We are instantly put in touch with an unraveling mind in an unraveling t.mes …The painting becomes a chant, a rant, a slogan, and a scream.”
Visceral and abrupt, Untitled epitomizes Christopher Wool’s anarchic painterly enterprise. Amongst the most iconic phrases form Wool’s text series, the present work powerfully embodies the radical energy and disruptive spirit of the 1990s, the stark silhouette of each letter wholly capturing the angst and exuberance of the downtown art scene. Executed in 1992, the rebelliously dismissive edict emblazoned upon the present work serves as an explosive stat.mes nt of intent for Wool’s critically acclaimed artistic project, successfully disrupting and manipulating art historical precedent with exhilarating nonchalance. In every way exemplary of Wool’s specialized approach to painting, the font and text of the present work immediately assault the viewer, while marks from the stencils and remanence of the handmade nature of the work juxtapose the formality of the capitalized letters.
“Wool was less concerned with language as a means to transcend image, or with the problematic conjunction of text and image, than with text as image. He has long been fascinated by the way words function when removed from the quiet authority of the page and exposed to the cacophony of the city, whether through the blaring incantations of billboards and commercial signage or the illicit interventions of graffiti artists. But with their velvety white grounds and stylized letters rendered in dense, sign painter’s enamel that pooled and dripped within the stencils, the word paintings have a resolute material presence that transcends the graphic.”
Like hastily stenciled graffiti or heralded tabloid headlines, Untitled summons the industrial severity of the urban environment. The phrase "And if you don't like it you can get the fuck out of my house" comes from Eddie Murphy's famous stand-up show Raw from 1987, and is Wool's most iconic and oft-used phrases for its brash, flippant humor. Confronting the viewer with the violent force of sudden impact, the present work juxtaposes painterly entropy with commanding linguistic force to utterly annihilate presumed boundaries between image and text. Indeed, by emphasizing the visual appearance of the letters rather than the meaning of the words, Wool transforms Untitled into a formal stat.mes nt that critically examines the nature of painting as a vehicle for contemporary artistic expression.
Arranged in seven rows of stacked letters, the formality of the grid barely contains the phrase as the words blend together, intensifying their potent graphic power; below, the last row leave ample areas of white surrounding, compounding the attitude of post-Punk indifference which permeates the painting. As explained by Katherine Brinson: “Wool was less concerned with language as a means to transcend image, or with the problematic conjunction of text and image, than with text as image. He has long been fascinated by the way words function when removed from the quiet authority of the page and exposed to the cacophony of the city, whether through the blaring incantations of billboards and commercial signage or the illicit interventions of graffiti artists. But with their velvety white grounds and stylized letters rendered in dense, sign painter’s enamel that pooled and dripped within the stencils, the word paintings have a resolute material presence that transcends the graphic.” (Katherine Brinson in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (and travelling), Christopher Wool, 2013, p. 40)
“Wool’s strategy as a painter, then, is to plunge deeply into this culture, acting complicitly with its essential tensions, in order to bring new intensities to the level of visibility...He paints to encounter the culture from within its constraints.”
By obscuring the aesthetic perimeters between the hand-painted and the machine-made, Wool embraces the compromised historical narrative of painting as a primary source, then manipulates that legacy to produce a thrillingly subversive masterpiece. Turning the joke on the viewer, Untitled challenges our right to expect anything from art, leveraging the inherent entropy of language to deliver a succinct stat.mes
nt on the larger anarchy of Wool’s painterly enterprise. The specific genius of the artist is, unsurprisingly, best described by O’Brien: “Slowly and surely Christopher Wool has reinvented abstraction and created a radical new way of working that partakes of that claritys
and that heroism, but in a way that is shockingly novel and perhaps heretically casual…This is the cool claritys
of a later t.mes
.” (Glenn O'Brien, Ibid., p. 10)
