A few weeks ago, at the base of Frank Lloyd Wright’s majestic rotunda, Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong introduced the museum’s Christopher Wool retrospective to the press by proclaiming the painter “one of the last non-ironic artists.” Armstrong sketched Wool’s arc from self-doubt to triumph in a broad-strokes narrative that followed the painter through various phases: coy appropriation, a kind of edgy language poetry, gestural abstraction, and, finally, heroic monochromes. It’s a compelling story, but the “non-ironic” reading is deeply flawed. For how can one describe an artist who came of age in New York in the heyday of punk, who made a lifelong project of cannibalizing gestural and expressive motifs from art history, whose text-only stencil paintings rendered everyday language both heartbreaking and devastatingly funny, and who seems to have arrived at a terminus of creating fields of grey, as anything but ironic?
The show itself doesn’t suffer because of this misunderstanding, but Armstrong’s remark is worth thinking about because of the limiting way it frames Wool’s career and his approach to painting. Raised in Chicago, Wool moved to New York in 1973 and immediately embarked on a course consistent with the trajectory—if not exactly the style—of his postconceptual and appropriationist peers. His early works reconfigured painting as labor, as he imperfectly rolled decorative stencils of vines and flowers onto steel plates. The late ’80s and ’90s saw him making all-text paintings using templates of the kind used for street signs. His breakthrough came in a 1987 drawing of a quote from Martin Scorcese’s Apocalypse Now: “Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids.” For fans of Wool’s text pieces, like me, this retrospective proves immensely satisfying. Dozens of such works are brought together here, from Trouble, 1992—depicting the four consonants in the title stacked in two rows—to the Untitled (Black Book Drawings) of 1989, a series of 22 paintings of one-word insults leveled at artists—like “terrorist,” “hypocrite,” “assassin,” and “celebrity”—all fractured into three equal lines. Wool’s muscular use of language retains a gritty sensibility throughout.
By the mid-’90s, Wool began to pillage flower motifs and the gesture, specifically the inkblot-like smudge and the doodle, for his rabid recycling. With restive energy, he began incorporating old and new technologies in the creation of his works—silkscreening, for example, and digital image manipulation—strategies that helped elevate him to the status of both critical darling and market superstar. His example has also spawned a new generation of ironic, commercially successful painters subjecting expression to scrutiny, copying and pasting—former studio assistant Josh Smith among them.
The retrospective’s careful chronological presentation offers moments of revelatory connection. And there are unexpected works, too, like Wool’s collaboration with Robert Gober, a melancholy photo from 1988 of a dress sewn by the latter, printed with a pattern by the former, hanging from a tree. (The rest of Wool’s black-and-white photographs, of grungy sites in New York and European cities, unfortunately don’t hold up as well.)
If the exhibition has any flaws, they lie in the default genius treatment that emphasizes Wool’s facture and innovation and give short shrift to history and context. Such omissions risk reducing postmodernism like Wool’s to a series of mannerist moves, and further marginalize other artists who work outside familiar boundaries. The final irony is that the aesthetic leveling that artists like Wool have worked so hard to achieve ends up yielding a new benchmark style, and reinforcing traditional categories and methods of working.
