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Lot Essay
Along with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic canvases, Christopher Wool’s Word paintings have come to define a generation who proclaimed their arrival with paintings defined by their bold physicality, forceful expression, and artistic innovation. As with his contemporaries, Wool absorbed the dynamism of urban culture and, defying the traditions of “high art,” disrupted the formal expectations of painting. Emerging from this DIY punk ethos, Wool has come to be regarded as one most groundbreaking artists of the period, and his influence has been felt ever since.
Laid out over six rows and six columns, the statement emerging from Christopher Wool’s 1990 Untitled — CRASS CONCEITED VULGAR AND UNPLEASANT — is undeniably raw, impactful, and affecting. The stark message, presented in bold block lettering with loose paint dripping from its edges, strikes a jarring chord. It is a gnomic and eloquent reprimand, each word a punch, each letter an assault. Wool’s confident, edgy, and uncompromising censure refuses to be contained, bursting the limits of its framing structure, visually echoing the intensity of its language.
As Wool has often done throughout his career, Untitled mines the dark depths of rock ’n’ roll. Here, his incantation scrapes the underbelly of the proto-punk movement, drawing directly from a 1976 headline in Sounds newspaper by music journalist and punk rocker Giovanni Dadomo. Dadomo’s article, “Crass, Conceited, Vulgar and Unpleasant. Also Quite Unique,” is a review of the final album released by The Stooges before their 2003 reunion. The album, Metallic K.O., captures the band’s legendary last performance at the Michigan Palace in Detroit on February 9, 1974 — a concert that has since become iconic for the sheer hostility between the audience and the band’s notorious frontman, the “Godfather of Punk,” Iggy Pop. Amidst the sets in the bootlegged vinyl, beer bottles, eggs, ice, and jelly beans can be heard shattering against guitar strings and ricocheting off the stage, a cacophony of chaos in response to Pop’s relentless provocation. This moment is immortalized not as polished rock ’n’ roll, but as a raw documentation of the tension and fury at the heart of the punk ethos.
Dadomo’s review pulls no punches, acknowledging the album’s visceral nature: “It’s no great rock ’n’ roll per se,” he writes. “What I do believe is that it’s an astonishing piece of documentary work, revealing as it does the face of rock ’n’ roll that few singers/musicians would ever be rude, angry, wrecked or impolite to reveal. Sure, it’s crass, conceited and justifiably vulgar plus a hell of a lot of other singularly ‘unpleasant things,’ but I still like it. A record that quite literally has to be heard to be believed.” (G. Dadomo, “Crass, Conceited, Vulgar and Unpleasant. Also Quite Unique,” originally published in Sounds, 1976). Wool’s Untitled absorbs this sense of brutal honesty, transforming the album’s chaotic energy and Dadomo’s confrontational language into a visual manifestation of punk’s unfiltered spirit.
Wool’s word paintings are deeply entrenched in the artist’s personal vernacular — the chaotic, abrasive, gritty urbanity of downtown New York, where he has resided for over fifty years. They evoke the graffiti sprawled across crumbling buildings, peeling posters and flyers pasted on top one another in collage-like layers, and a counterculture where a legendary musicians like Iggy Pop and Richard Hell held court at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs. Born from the urban fabric of the metropolis they channel the vitality and harshness of New York. Wool captures the ways New York looks, sounds, and smells in our time,” art critic Jerry Saltz has explained, “much as Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings embody the city’s texture in the fifties. I see Wool creating new order out of all this chaos. I see little epiphanies and glean the same clashing, gritty, seemingly haphazard, abrasive, bludgeoning beauty [of] New York” (J. Saltz, “Christopher Wool’s Stenciled Words Speak Loudly…,”New York Magazine, November 11, 2013).
In elevating the grit of the industrial urban landscape into the tradition of painting, Wool has unleashed new possibilities for post-modern art. His work resists easy categorization — simultaneously legible and perplexing, self-reflexive yet outward-looking. The message, though imperative in tone, remains fragmented and enigmatic, capturing a brazen, urban poeticism. Wool’s painting stands as both a visual and linguistic provocation, echoing the rebellious spirit of punk while carving out a new space for contemporary artistic expression.
Laid out over six rows and six columns, the statement emerging from Christopher Wool’s 1990 Untitled — CRASS CONCEITED VULGAR AND UNPLEASANT — is undeniably raw, impactful, and affecting. The stark message, presented in bold block lettering with loose paint dripping from its edges, strikes a jarring chord. It is a gnomic and eloquent reprimand, each word a punch, each letter an assault. Wool’s confident, edgy, and uncompromising censure refuses to be contained, bursting the limits of its framing structure, visually echoing the intensity of its language.
As Wool has often done throughout his career, Untitled mines the dark depths of rock ’n’ roll. Here, his incantation scrapes the underbelly of the proto-punk movement, drawing directly from a 1976 headline in Sounds newspaper by music journalist and punk rocker Giovanni Dadomo. Dadomo’s article, “Crass, Conceited, Vulgar and Unpleasant. Also Quite Unique,” is a review of the final album released by The Stooges before their 2003 reunion. The album, Metallic K.O., captures the band’s legendary last performance at the Michigan Palace in Detroit on February 9, 1974 — a concert that has since become iconic for the sheer hostility between the audience and the band’s notorious frontman, the “Godfather of Punk,” Iggy Pop. Amidst the sets in the bootlegged vinyl, beer bottles, eggs, ice, and jelly beans can be heard shattering against guitar strings and ricocheting off the stage, a cacophony of chaos in response to Pop’s relentless provocation. This moment is immortalized not as polished rock ’n’ roll, but as a raw documentation of the tension and fury at the heart of the punk ethos.
Dadomo’s review pulls no punches, acknowledging the album’s visceral nature: “It’s no great rock ’n’ roll per se,” he writes. “What I do believe is that it’s an astonishing piece of documentary work, revealing as it does the face of rock ’n’ roll that few singers/musicians would ever be rude, angry, wrecked or impolite to reveal. Sure, it’s crass, conceited and justifiably vulgar plus a hell of a lot of other singularly ‘unpleasant things,’ but I still like it. A record that quite literally has to be heard to be believed.” (G. Dadomo, “Crass, Conceited, Vulgar and Unpleasant. Also Quite Unique,” originally published in Sounds, 1976). Wool’s Untitled absorbs this sense of brutal honesty, transforming the album’s chaotic energy and Dadomo’s confrontational language into a visual manifestation of punk’s unfiltered spirit.
Wool’s word paintings are deeply entrenched in the artist’s personal vernacular — the chaotic, abrasive, gritty urbanity of downtown New York, where he has resided for over fifty years. They evoke the graffiti sprawled across crumbling buildings, peeling posters and flyers pasted on top one another in collage-like layers, and a counterculture where a legendary musicians like Iggy Pop and Richard Hell held court at Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs. Born from the urban fabric of the metropolis they channel the vitality and harshness of New York. Wool captures the ways New York looks, sounds, and smells in our time,” art critic Jerry Saltz has explained, “much as Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings embody the city’s texture in the fifties. I see Wool creating new order out of all this chaos. I see little epiphanies and glean the same clashing, gritty, seemingly haphazard, abrasive, bludgeoning beauty [of] New York” (J. Saltz, “Christopher Wool’s Stenciled Words Speak Loudly…,”New York Magazine, November 11, 2013).
In elevating the grit of the industrial urban landscape into the tradition of painting, Wool has unleashed new possibilities for post-modern art. His work resists easy categorization — simultaneously legible and perplexing, self-reflexive yet outward-looking. The message, though imperative in tone, remains fragmented and enigmatic, capturing a brazen, urban poeticism. Wool’s painting stands as both a visual and linguistic provocation, echoing the rebellious spirit of punk while carving out a new space for contemporary artistic expression.