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Lot Essay
R. I. O. T.
Four resolute capital letters, arranged methodically two by two, each within its own quadrant. These four letters, comprised of pooled blue enamel paint constrained by stencils dried thickly upon an imposing aluminum sheet primed with a velvety white ground, have become more than mere letters constituting a word, rising beyond text to serve as icons of Christopher Wool’s revolutionary artistic practice. Untitled (RIOT) is one of the artist’s most enigmatic and important works from his celebrated word paintings. RIOT. A single word, split in two. A headline, an announcement, a command, a demand, a threat, or a warning? This singular succinct word holds all and none of these meanings, or is maybe without meaning, evoking Wool’s eccentric enterprise examining the limitations of linguistics, the confounding of communication amid the explosion of text, and visual symbols in the era of mass media. Occupying a novel metaphysical space somewhere between language, image, speech, and act, Untitled (RIOT) conjures the best qualities of Wool’s radical reinvention of painting. The work demands to be looked at, stared into, deciphered, read, uttered aloud. But not understood. “Are the word paintings really declarations? Or is he punishing someone. I don’t know. I had one hanging in my house for a couple of years and I thought I was being rewarded” (R. Prince, “WOOLWLOOOLOWOOWL-LOWOOWOLOOLWLOOW,” in Christopher Wool, ed. K. Brinson, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem, New York, 2013, p. 237).
Untitled (RIOT) is one of the very few from the approximately 75 word paintings to have blue rather than black enamel. Constrained by Wool’s stencils—which the artist fabricated himself in order to achieve his desired grand scale, nine by six feet across—the blue enamel hardened into a sumptuous dark ultramarine. Upon close inspection, the coloration in each letter oscillates slightly, the blues becoming deeper in areas where more paint pooled. This effect, coupled with the drips and painterly stutters observed around the nominally straight edges of each letter, is a deliberate and painstaking residual of Wool’s presence in the painting, revealing the materiality of the painting transcending its graphic effect and opening up myriad conceptual potentialities. Carefully planned, “they indict themselves, and, in the process indict the viewer,” explains the critic Jim Lewis. “YOU MAKE ME, yes, but it might just as well say ‘you unmake me,’ or even, ‘this isn’t made’” (J. Lewis, “Fail Better,” in Christopher Wool, ed. H. W. Holzwarth, Köln, 2012, p. 100).
“Like it or not, Christopher Wool, now fifty-eight, is probably the most important American painter of his generation” (P. Schjeldahl, “Writing on the Wall,” The New Yorker, 4 November 2013, p. 109). So admitted Peter Schjeldahl a decade ago, probably the most important art critic of his generation. Untitled (RIOT) is among Wool’s crowning achievements, signifying his subversive lure as a painter in an era when painting was dead. Made in 1990, Wool stood out in the midst of seismic historical and art historical junctures. The Berlin Wall had just toppled—the Soviet Union had not. History was still being made, its path uncertain—Francis Fukuyama only published The End of History in 1992. The first web server arrived in 1990, but its significance was yet to be acknowledged. Wool was straddling the nebulous temporality between two eras, creating in the midst of great uncertainty as the Cold War was coming to a close and the Internet Age was fast approaching. Christopher Wool’s importance arises from his almost prophetic ability to capture the zeitgeist not just of his era but our own; if anything, Untitled (RIOT) has amassed more poignance in the contemporary moment of artificial intelligence.
Christopher Wool began making his word paintings amid an ongoing crisis where painting’s dominance and relevance as a medium of artistic expression was under sustained attack. Reviewing the Whitney Biennial in 1991, the critic Thomas McEvilley, writing in Artforum, proclaimed painting’s “final irrelevance,” describing how “there is a hint in the air (not for the first time) that our culture’s long obsession with this art form as its channel to reality has been loosening again in favor of the conceptual object” (T. McEvilley, “New York: The Whitney Biennial,” Artforum, vol. 29, no. 10, Summer 1991, p. 99). Wool emerged from the schismatic downtown New York art scene of the 1980s. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel tried to arrest this seemingly inevitable historical pull away from painting with their Neo-Expressionist figuration. Wool’s contemporaries Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince went the opposite direction, inaugurating the Pictures generation. Wool’s middle way of earnest painterly invention, epitomized with his word paintings, was as radical as it was accretive. The word paintings amalgamate the raw energy of Abstract Expressionism with Pop Art’s deadpan cool, accommodating the Post-Minimalist emphasis on process within the strategies of replication and referential piracy. While concerned with and critiquing contemporary culture, Wool does not simply appropriate themes and images. As Marga Paz summarizes, “Christopher Wool’s work must be considered one of the most radical, innovative and therefore important reflections of pictorial thinking of the present time. We are confronted with work that deals with the possibilities and mechanisms that keep painting alive and valid in the present, an issue that, despite all forecasts, is one of them so productive and complex issues in contemporary visual art” (M. Paz, “Christopher Wool,” in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d’art Modern, 2006, p. 200).
The origin of Wool’s word paintings has achieved a quasi-mythological tenor. On one of his many walks exploring and photographing the urban detritus of downtown Manhattan, Wool stumbled upon a gleaming white delivery van recently vandalized with black spray-painted graffiti: ‘SEX LUV,’ crudely rendered in crisp font. Utterly transfixed by the graphic and auratic power of this text, Wool set off at once to his studio in order to capture this raw energy in what would become his word paintings.
Wool’s textual explorations are abreast of a grand historical tradition in both literature and painting. His toying with the relationship vis-à-vis visual and verbal representation recalls the literary experiments of Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire. The Cubists’ inclusion of snatches of newspaper text in their still life constructions similarly stimulates the push and pull of recognition and illegibility. Ed Rucha’s portraits of words first called attention to how the brain is incapable of looking and reading at the same instant. Cy Twombly and Basquiat looked to words, scribbling them onto canvas, repeating them, crossing them out. Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer made language their medium too, while Glenn Ligon’s Door Paintings are contemporaneous. “But Wool made it new,” Peter Schjeldahl explains. “He merged the anonymous aggression of graffiti with the stateliness of formal abstract painting. Selecting words and phrases that appealed to him, he leached them of personality, by using stencils, and of quick readability, by eliminating standard spacing, punctuation, and, in one case, vowels (“TRBL”).” (P. Schjeldahl, op. cit., p. 210).
Wool sourced the text for his word paintings from a vast mental archive he maintained of any words or phrases which arrested his attention. Textual spolia wrought from disparate sources, from obscure philosophical texts, Francis Ford Coppola films, Richard Prince jokes, or street graffiti, form the basis of each composition. RIOT is singular in its status among the series, its primal, almost guttural diction less spoliation and more an outpouring from the artist’s own inner psyche. Articulating an aura of anxiety also embedded in works like Apocalypse Now (1988, Private Collection), which commands SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS, or Untitled, depicting a series of paranoid statements paraphrasing the apocalyptic prose of Russian Philosopher Vasily Rozanov (1990-91, Private Collection). RIOT, however, appears to be among Wool’s most favored words, appearing as titles and texts to several other works.
The present work thus achieves a poignancy lent by its intimate proximity to the artist’s imagination, accommodating the most important attributes exhibited in Wool’s best work, as identified by Jeff Koons for Wool’s first solo exhibition in 1986: “Wool’s work contains continued internal/external debate within itself. At one moment his work will display self-denial, at the next moment, solipsism. Shifting psychological states, false fronts, shadows of themselves, justify their own existence... Wool’s work locks itself in only to deftly escape through sleight of hand. The necessity to survive the moment at all costs, using its repertoire of false fronts and psychological stances is the work’s lifeblood” (J. Koons, quoted in K. Brinson, “Trouble is my Business,” in Christopher Wool, ed. K. Brinson, op. cit., p. 35). Then and now a painter’s painter, Wool’s continuing importance is best summed by his contemporaries. “Is a Supreme Court decision more important than a Wool painting?,” Richard Prince asks. “I doubt it. Wool is better and more needed. HANDS DOWN. Just ask yourself... who was the president of France when Gauguin was painting his beautiful paintings in Tahiti” (R. Prince, op. cit., p. 237).
“The harder you look, the harder you look.” Christopher Wool
Four resolute capital letters, arranged methodically two by two, each within its own quadrant. These four letters, comprised of pooled blue enamel paint constrained by stencils dried thickly upon an imposing aluminum sheet primed with a velvety white ground, have become more than mere letters constituting a word, rising beyond text to serve as icons of Christopher Wool’s revolutionary artistic practice. Untitled (RIOT) is one of the artist’s most enigmatic and important works from his celebrated word paintings. RIOT. A single word, split in two. A headline, an announcement, a command, a demand, a threat, or a warning? This singular succinct word holds all and none of these meanings, or is maybe without meaning, evoking Wool’s eccentric enterprise examining the limitations of linguistics, the confounding of communication amid the explosion of text, and visual symbols in the era of mass media. Occupying a novel metaphysical space somewhere between language, image, speech, and act, Untitled (RIOT) conjures the best qualities of Wool’s radical reinvention of painting. The work demands to be looked at, stared into, deciphered, read, uttered aloud. But not understood. “Are the word paintings really declarations? Or is he punishing someone. I don’t know. I had one hanging in my house for a couple of years and I thought I was being rewarded” (R. Prince, “WOOLWLOOOLOWOOWL-LOWOOWOLOOLWLOOW,” in Christopher Wool, ed. K. Brinson, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem, New York, 2013, p. 237).
Untitled (RIOT) is one of the very few from the approximately 75 word paintings to have blue rather than black enamel. Constrained by Wool’s stencils—which the artist fabricated himself in order to achieve his desired grand scale, nine by six feet across—the blue enamel hardened into a sumptuous dark ultramarine. Upon close inspection, the coloration in each letter oscillates slightly, the blues becoming deeper in areas where more paint pooled. This effect, coupled with the drips and painterly stutters observed around the nominally straight edges of each letter, is a deliberate and painstaking residual of Wool’s presence in the painting, revealing the materiality of the painting transcending its graphic effect and opening up myriad conceptual potentialities. Carefully planned, “they indict themselves, and, in the process indict the viewer,” explains the critic Jim Lewis. “YOU MAKE ME, yes, but it might just as well say ‘you unmake me,’ or even, ‘this isn’t made’” (J. Lewis, “Fail Better,” in Christopher Wool, ed. H. W. Holzwarth, Köln, 2012, p. 100).
“Like it or not, Christopher Wool, now fifty-eight, is probably the most important American painter of his generation” (P. Schjeldahl, “Writing on the Wall,” The New Yorker, 4 November 2013, p. 109). So admitted Peter Schjeldahl a decade ago, probably the most important art critic of his generation. Untitled (RIOT) is among Wool’s crowning achievements, signifying his subversive lure as a painter in an era when painting was dead. Made in 1990, Wool stood out in the midst of seismic historical and art historical junctures. The Berlin Wall had just toppled—the Soviet Union had not. History was still being made, its path uncertain—Francis Fukuyama only published The End of History in 1992. The first web server arrived in 1990, but its significance was yet to be acknowledged. Wool was straddling the nebulous temporality between two eras, creating in the midst of great uncertainty as the Cold War was coming to a close and the Internet Age was fast approaching. Christopher Wool’s importance arises from his almost prophetic ability to capture the zeitgeist not just of his era but our own; if anything, Untitled (RIOT) has amassed more poignance in the contemporary moment of artificial intelligence.
Christopher Wool began making his word paintings amid an ongoing crisis where painting’s dominance and relevance as a medium of artistic expression was under sustained attack. Reviewing the Whitney Biennial in 1991, the critic Thomas McEvilley, writing in Artforum, proclaimed painting’s “final irrelevance,” describing how “there is a hint in the air (not for the first time) that our culture’s long obsession with this art form as its channel to reality has been loosening again in favor of the conceptual object” (T. McEvilley, “New York: The Whitney Biennial,” Artforum, vol. 29, no. 10, Summer 1991, p. 99). Wool emerged from the schismatic downtown New York art scene of the 1980s. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel tried to arrest this seemingly inevitable historical pull away from painting with their Neo-Expressionist figuration. Wool’s contemporaries Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince went the opposite direction, inaugurating the Pictures generation. Wool’s middle way of earnest painterly invention, epitomized with his word paintings, was as radical as it was accretive. The word paintings amalgamate the raw energy of Abstract Expressionism with Pop Art’s deadpan cool, accommodating the Post-Minimalist emphasis on process within the strategies of replication and referential piracy. While concerned with and critiquing contemporary culture, Wool does not simply appropriate themes and images. As Marga Paz summarizes, “Christopher Wool’s work must be considered one of the most radical, innovative and therefore important reflections of pictorial thinking of the present time. We are confronted with work that deals with the possibilities and mechanisms that keep painting alive and valid in the present, an issue that, despite all forecasts, is one of them so productive and complex issues in contemporary visual art” (M. Paz, “Christopher Wool,” in Christopher Wool, exh. cat., IVAM Institut Valencià d’art Modern, 2006, p. 200).
The origin of Wool’s word paintings has achieved a quasi-mythological tenor. On one of his many walks exploring and photographing the urban detritus of downtown Manhattan, Wool stumbled upon a gleaming white delivery van recently vandalized with black spray-painted graffiti: ‘SEX LUV,’ crudely rendered in crisp font. Utterly transfixed by the graphic and auratic power of this text, Wool set off at once to his studio in order to capture this raw energy in what would become his word paintings.
Wool’s textual explorations are abreast of a grand historical tradition in both literature and painting. His toying with the relationship vis-à-vis visual and verbal representation recalls the literary experiments of Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire. The Cubists’ inclusion of snatches of newspaper text in their still life constructions similarly stimulates the push and pull of recognition and illegibility. Ed Rucha’s portraits of words first called attention to how the brain is incapable of looking and reading at the same instant. Cy Twombly and Basquiat looked to words, scribbling them onto canvas, repeating them, crossing them out. Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer made language their medium too, while Glenn Ligon’s Door Paintings are contemporaneous. “But Wool made it new,” Peter Schjeldahl explains. “He merged the anonymous aggression of graffiti with the stateliness of formal abstract painting. Selecting words and phrases that appealed to him, he leached them of personality, by using stencils, and of quick readability, by eliminating standard spacing, punctuation, and, in one case, vowels (“TRBL”).” (P. Schjeldahl, op. cit., p. 210).
Wool sourced the text for his word paintings from a vast mental archive he maintained of any words or phrases which arrested his attention. Textual spolia wrought from disparate sources, from obscure philosophical texts, Francis Ford Coppola films, Richard Prince jokes, or street graffiti, form the basis of each composition. RIOT is singular in its status among the series, its primal, almost guttural diction less spoliation and more an outpouring from the artist’s own inner psyche. Articulating an aura of anxiety also embedded in works like Apocalypse Now (1988, Private Collection), which commands SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS, or Untitled, depicting a series of paranoid statements paraphrasing the apocalyptic prose of Russian Philosopher Vasily Rozanov (1990-91, Private Collection). RIOT, however, appears to be among Wool’s most favored words, appearing as titles and texts to several other works.
The present work thus achieves a poignancy lent by its intimate proximity to the artist’s imagination, accommodating the most important attributes exhibited in Wool’s best work, as identified by Jeff Koons for Wool’s first solo exhibition in 1986: “Wool’s work contains continued internal/external debate within itself. At one moment his work will display self-denial, at the next moment, solipsism. Shifting psychological states, false fronts, shadows of themselves, justify their own existence... Wool’s work locks itself in only to deftly escape through sleight of hand. The necessity to survive the moment at all costs, using its repertoire of false fronts and psychological stances is the work’s lifeblood” (J. Koons, quoted in K. Brinson, “Trouble is my Business,” in Christopher Wool, ed. K. Brinson, op. cit., p. 35). Then and now a painter’s painter, Wool’s continuing importance is best summed by his contemporaries. “Is a Supreme Court decision more important than a Wool painting?,” Richard Prince asks. “I doubt it. Wool is better and more needed. HANDS DOWN. Just ask yourself... who was the president of France when Gauguin was painting his beautiful paintings in Tahiti” (R. Prince, op. cit., p. 237).
“The harder you look, the harder you look.” Christopher Wool