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拍品專文
Exalting Muhammad Ali’s famous maxim “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” Christopher Wool’s potent 1988 work on paper is an early example of the artist’s famed word paintings. It is with these works that Wool arrived on the contemporary art scene as the leader of a new generation of post-conceptual artists whose paintings captured the “scary, euphoric mood of the high-flying period” (K. Johnson, “Art in Review: Christopher Wool, March 17, 2000, p. E37). The present work is an early, iconic painting that cleverly blends the raw, graphic power of graffiti with the cool, formalist precision of Minimalism showcasing both the artist’s sardonic wit and highly inventive style.
At first glance the appearance of the monolithic letters that Wool manifests on the surface of Untitled appear to be uniform, utilitarian forms stenciled onto the sheet in almost mechanical fashion. However, closer inspection reveals an array of undulating lines, Pollock-like drips, and “shadows” caused by the stenciling process that allude to, paradoxically, the hand-made nature of Wool’s painterly process. Far from homogenous, his forms are in fact the remnants of very human interventions and gestures.
The structure of the text in Untitled engenders both familiarity and discord. The first word of Ali’s famous saying presents itself in its entirety, but then the first letter of the next word appears before the rest of the word drops down to the next line. This pattern is then repeated on subsequent lines until a structure of entirely new words is formed: FLOATL IKEBUT TERFLY STINGL IKEBEE. This new structure causes the viewer to pause and try to decipher these new unfamiliar forms, forcing a formalist interrogation of the supposedly familiar phrase.
Wool chose these words very carefully, very deliberately, and after considerable thought. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" is of course Muhammad Ali’s phrase,” the artist told curator Ann Tempkin. “Initially I had been drawn to text because I wanted to make a work that was a little more direct, a little louder, that talked a little more directly to the audience, than some of my abstract paintings had, and working with found text often seemed suitable (quoted in Contemporary Voices, New York, 2005, p. 127). Initially attracted to its potent association with Ali, Wool subsequently realized that the poetry inherent in the famous phrase allowed him to experiment with the syntax, “I loved the poetry… You could read it in so many ways,” he has said (ibid.). Wool used this particular text in two paintings, the present example, and a large, monumental version on aluminum, in the UBS Art Collection.
Muhammad Ali first uttered these famous words during the preparations for his 1964 world title fight against Sonny Liston. Although the boxer (still known as Cassius Clay at the time) was considered to have little chance against the much-fancied Liston, he defeated him with a technical knockout in the seventh round. At the time, the bout was regarded as the greatest fight of all time and soon gained widespread notoriety around the world. The lyrical nature of the full quote—"Fight like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see”—refers to Ali’s reputation for graceful footwork (which allowed him to avoid incoming punches) combined with his own powerful jabs. Thus, this is a particularly suitable phrase for Wool’s textual intervention, whereby the usual expressive nature of language is interrupted, resulting in a powerful exercise in self-examination.
In seeking new possibilities for the medium of painting, Wool, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, turned to the city, drawing inspiration from the grimy, graffiti-covered streets of post-punk New York. The often-documented moment of inspiration for the artist’s word paintings first came in 1987. Living and working in downtown Manhattan, Wool saw a white van with the words SEX LUV crudely branded in spray paint on the side. Taken by the immense simplicity and graphic power of the black letters against the white surface, Wool made his own version of the image, and subsequently began to create his word paintings. Wool reinvented the possibilities of abstract painting with his unique adaptation of the industrial materials of urban culture, absorbing himself in the processes and the very act of painting. Thus, the present work is deeply entrenched in the narrative of the period it is depicting: in the chaotic, abrasive, gritty urbanity of downtown New York, a city in which graffiti was scrawled across abandoned buildings, peeling posters and flyers were pasted in collage-like layers, and bold advertisements were displayed in a gargantuan scale on billboards. In contrast to the clean-cut, commercial lettering of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, or the slick, gleaming text of Ed Ruscha or Robert Indiana, Wool’s text-based paintings were born from the urban fabric of the metropolis, conveying the same overwhelming vitality and harshness that is unique to New York. In art critic Jerry Saltz’s words, “Wool captures the way New York looks, sounds, and smells in our time, 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” (“Christopher Wool’s Stenciled Words Speak Loudly…,”New York Magazine, November 11, 2013).
As Glen O’Brien has argued, there are clear elements of both abstraction and Pop in Wool’s work. “One could superficially interpret Wool’s paintings as parodies of Pollock’s seriousness, as a cynical re-enactment of action painting utilizing an impoverished bag of tricks hijacked from vandalism. But then one would be missing the point. No, Wool embraces and engages action painting as his primary source and he then manipulates it, with the cool reflection of a pop artist or dada collagist, creating art that is both intense and reflective, physical and mechanical, unconscious and considered, refined in technique and redolent of street vernacular, both high and low. But despite the many apparent contradictions the work is singular, strong, organic, and as deep as it might appear shallow” (quoted in “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Christopher Wool, Köln, 2012, p. 9).
An important early work, Untitled pushes at the boundaries of what might, at the time, have been understood to be painting in the traditional sense in its mixing of urban scrawl with billboard advertising lettering and the traditional painterly gesture. Wool questions as he celebrates this tension between act and image, high art and the urban landscape, order and randomness. As critic Jim Lewis mused, “Wool can take a word and worry it, turn it this way and that, beat on it a few times, paint it, paint over it, paint it again, try to break it, auscultate it like a doctor tapping the chest of a sick patient and listening for the echo inside; try to humiliate it with paint splatter, and then to deify it as if it were the word of God; and then, when it’s been stripped of sense, when he’s sure it can’t be understood, and he’ll erase it and paint it again, and leave it there as the embodiment of his efforts – and leave us wondering if it’s the word that means something, or the painting” (J. Lewis, cited in: Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 284).
At first glance the appearance of the monolithic letters that Wool manifests on the surface of Untitled appear to be uniform, utilitarian forms stenciled onto the sheet in almost mechanical fashion. However, closer inspection reveals an array of undulating lines, Pollock-like drips, and “shadows” caused by the stenciling process that allude to, paradoxically, the hand-made nature of Wool’s painterly process. Far from homogenous, his forms are in fact the remnants of very human interventions and gestures.
The structure of the text in Untitled engenders both familiarity and discord. The first word of Ali’s famous saying presents itself in its entirety, but then the first letter of the next word appears before the rest of the word drops down to the next line. This pattern is then repeated on subsequent lines until a structure of entirely new words is formed: FLOATL IKEBUT TERFLY STINGL IKEBEE. This new structure causes the viewer to pause and try to decipher these new unfamiliar forms, forcing a formalist interrogation of the supposedly familiar phrase.
Wool chose these words very carefully, very deliberately, and after considerable thought. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" is of course Muhammad Ali’s phrase,” the artist told curator Ann Tempkin. “Initially I had been drawn to text because I wanted to make a work that was a little more direct, a little louder, that talked a little more directly to the audience, than some of my abstract paintings had, and working with found text often seemed suitable (quoted in Contemporary Voices, New York, 2005, p. 127). Initially attracted to its potent association with Ali, Wool subsequently realized that the poetry inherent in the famous phrase allowed him to experiment with the syntax, “I loved the poetry… You could read it in so many ways,” he has said (ibid.). Wool used this particular text in two paintings, the present example, and a large, monumental version on aluminum, in the UBS Art Collection.
Muhammad Ali first uttered these famous words during the preparations for his 1964 world title fight against Sonny Liston. Although the boxer (still known as Cassius Clay at the time) was considered to have little chance against the much-fancied Liston, he defeated him with a technical knockout in the seventh round. At the time, the bout was regarded as the greatest fight of all time and soon gained widespread notoriety around the world. The lyrical nature of the full quote—"Fight like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see”—refers to Ali’s reputation for graceful footwork (which allowed him to avoid incoming punches) combined with his own powerful jabs. Thus, this is a particularly suitable phrase for Wool’s textual intervention, whereby the usual expressive nature of language is interrupted, resulting in a powerful exercise in self-examination.
In seeking new possibilities for the medium of painting, Wool, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, turned to the city, drawing inspiration from the grimy, graffiti-covered streets of post-punk New York. The often-documented moment of inspiration for the artist’s word paintings first came in 1987. Living and working in downtown Manhattan, Wool saw a white van with the words SEX LUV crudely branded in spray paint on the side. Taken by the immense simplicity and graphic power of the black letters against the white surface, Wool made his own version of the image, and subsequently began to create his word paintings. Wool reinvented the possibilities of abstract painting with his unique adaptation of the industrial materials of urban culture, absorbing himself in the processes and the very act of painting. Thus, the present work is deeply entrenched in the narrative of the period it is depicting: in the chaotic, abrasive, gritty urbanity of downtown New York, a city in which graffiti was scrawled across abandoned buildings, peeling posters and flyers were pasted in collage-like layers, and bold advertisements were displayed in a gargantuan scale on billboards. In contrast to the clean-cut, commercial lettering of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, or the slick, gleaming text of Ed Ruscha or Robert Indiana, Wool’s text-based paintings were born from the urban fabric of the metropolis, conveying the same overwhelming vitality and harshness that is unique to New York. In art critic Jerry Saltz’s words, “Wool captures the way New York looks, sounds, and smells in our time, 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” (“Christopher Wool’s Stenciled Words Speak Loudly…,”New York Magazine, November 11, 2013).
As Glen O’Brien has argued, there are clear elements of both abstraction and Pop in Wool’s work. “One could superficially interpret Wool’s paintings as parodies of Pollock’s seriousness, as a cynical re-enactment of action painting utilizing an impoverished bag of tricks hijacked from vandalism. But then one would be missing the point. No, Wool embraces and engages action painting as his primary source and he then manipulates it, with the cool reflection of a pop artist or dada collagist, creating art that is both intense and reflective, physical and mechanical, unconscious and considered, refined in technique and redolent of street vernacular, both high and low. But despite the many apparent contradictions the work is singular, strong, organic, and as deep as it might appear shallow” (quoted in “Apocalypse and Wallpaper,” in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Christopher Wool, Köln, 2012, p. 9).
An important early work, Untitled pushes at the boundaries of what might, at the time, have been understood to be painting in the traditional sense in its mixing of urban scrawl with billboard advertising lettering and the traditional painterly gesture. Wool questions as he celebrates this tension between act and image, high art and the urban landscape, order and randomness. As critic Jim Lewis mused, “Wool can take a word and worry it, turn it this way and that, beat on it a few times, paint it, paint over it, paint it again, try to break it, auscultate it like a doctor tapping the chest of a sick patient and listening for the echo inside; try to humiliate it with paint splatter, and then to deify it as if it were the word of God; and then, when it’s been stripped of sense, when he’s sure it can’t be understood, and he’ll erase it and paint it again, and leave it there as the embodiment of his efforts – and leave us wondering if it’s the word that means something, or the painting” (J. Lewis, cited in: Christopher Wool, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 284).