Untitled, 1987

October 25, 2013–January 22, 2014 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Teacher Resource Unit Since his emergence as an artist in the 1980s, Christopher Wool (b. 1955) has forged an agile, highly focused practice that ranges across processes and mediums, paying special attention to the complexities of painting. Filling the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda and an adjacent gallery, this exhibition explores the artist’s nuanced engagement with the question of how to make a picture. This Resource Unit focuses on various aspects of Wool’s work and provides techniques for exploring both the visual arts and other areas of the curriculum. This guide also is available on the museum’s website at guggenheim.org/artscurriculum with images that can be downloaded or projected for classroom use. The images may be used for educational purposes only and are not licensed for commercial applications of any kind. Before bringing your class to the Guggenheim, we invite you to visit the exhibition, read the guide, and decide which aspects of the exhibition are most relevant to your students. For more information on scheduling a visit for your students, please call 212 423 3637. For the educator, this exhibition provides a perfect opportunity to invite students of all ages to join in a meaningful journey into a visually rich and stimulating world. Christopher Wool is generously supported by Guggenheim Partners, LLC. Major support is provided by the Leadership Committee for the exhibition: Luhring Augustine, New York; The Brant Foundation, Inc.; Thompson Dean Family Foundation; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; Gagosian Gallery; Danielle and David Ganek; Brett and Dan Sundheim; and Zadig & Voltaire. Additional Leadership Committee gifts are provided by: The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Marguerite Steed Hoffman; Bridgitt and Bruce Evans; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill; Agnes and Edward Lee; Nina and Frank Moore; Nancy and Woody Ostrow; Elham and Tony Salame; Cynthia and Abe Steinberger; Jennifer and David Stockman; Christen Sveaas; and David Teiger. This exhibition is also supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional funding provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. Christopher Wool in his studio, New York, 2000. Photo: Elfie Semotan < ABOUT THE ArtIST > The artist Christopher Wool (b. 1955) forged his identity in two key places and times, both awash in societal changes: the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s and downtown New York in the 1970s. The sociopolitical unrest of the former is probably best exemplified by the 1968 Democratic National Convention in made a defining breakthrough between 1986 which Vietnam War protestors and others and 1987 when he began to use paint rollers clashed with conventioneers and Chicago incised with floral and geometric designs to police. Wool’s parents were liberal intellectuals transfer patterns in severe black enamel to a and even by the age of eleven, he had white ground. Collapsing any distinction discovered some of the avant-garde artists between the physical process of making the and movements in Chicago at the time— work and its visual content, these everyday perhaps most formatively, an exhibition of tools provided the artist with a repertoire of work by the local collective the Hairy Who, ready-made imagery that avoided both a group of Chicago-based artists in the 1960s spontaneous gesture and self-conscious known for their grotesque, fantastical compositional decisions. Instead, Wool surrealism. Wool studied at Sarah Lawrence focused on the small failures that occurred College for only one year before dropping within this mechanized framework, allowing out to head to New York City, where he breakdowns and slippages in the patterns to enrolled in the New York Studio School and accrue a delicate emotional resonance. later briefly studied film at New York University. Wool quickly became immersed In tandem with his pattern paintings, Wool in the countercultural milieu that was 1970s developed a body of work that similarly downtown New York, when the city was subverted a set of existing forms, this time known for cheap drugs and cheap rent. using language as his appropriated subject The anarchic subculture of scenes such as matter. Rendering a word or phrase in bold, punk and No Wave stretched to all art forms— blocky stencils arrayed across a geometric from fashion to music—and was characterized grid, he preserved the specific form and order by interdisciplinary experimentation, of the language, but freely stripped out antiestablishment views, and promotion of punctuation, disrupted conventional spacing, individual freedom. and removed letters. The resulting compositions oscillate between verbal In the subsequent decade, he set out to communication and pure formalism, with explore the possibilities of painting at a time their structural dissonance reflecting the when many considered the medium outmoded state of anxiety and agitation conjured by and irrelevant to avant-garde practice. He the texts themselves. The silkscreen has been a primary tool A critical conceptual shift occurred in Wool’s for Wool since the 1990s. In his earliest practice in the late 1990s when he began screenprinted paintings, he expanded on the to use his previous creative output as the vocabulary of the pattern works, enlarging material for new, autonomous works. Wool their stylized floral motifs for use as near- would take a photograph of a finished picture, abstract units of composition. In this period, transpose it to a silkscreen, and then reassign Wool frequently sabotaged his existing it wholesale to a fresh canvas. At times these forms as a way to covertly generate new acts of self-appropriation leave the original ones, layering the flower icons in dense, image untouched, although uncannily overlapping configurations that congeal into transformed by the process of mechanical a single black mass or become obscured with reproduction. In other examples, Wool passages of brusque overpainting. He also manually reworked his screenprinted doubles, introduced a new, entirely freehand gesture adding rollered paint or sprayed enamel in the form of a looping line applied with to create disorienting hybrids that entwine a spray gun—an irreverent interruption of recycled and original gestures. the imagery below that evokes an act of vandalism on a city street. Over the past decade, Wool’s simultaneous embrace and repression of painting’s Wool’s attraction to the bleak poetics of the expressive potential have culminated in an urban margins was amplified in his first major open-ended vein of works that he refers to photography series Absent Without Leave as his “gray paintings.” In these large-scale (1993). Taken during a period of solitary travels abstractions, Wool alternates between the act in Europe and elsewhere, the images are of erasing and the act of drawing, repeatedly saturated with an atmosphere of alienation wiping away sprayed black enamel paint to and shot in a raw, abrasive style that disregards create layers of tangled lines and hazy any concern for technical refinement. A similar washes. The artist describes the cycle of spirit of disaffection pervades a parallel body composition and loss inherent to this process of photographic work titled East Broadway as an attempt to harness the condition of Breakdown (1994–95/2002), but in this series doubt into a generative creative force. The Wool focused on a more familiar topography, same challenge to the authority of the unique, documenting his nightly walk home from original gesture is extended in Wool’s most his East Village studio. Highlighting the recent silkscreened canvases, which use digital city’s unadorned, off-hours existence, the processing to warp the scale, color, and photographs depict a nocturnal landscape resolution of his painted marks, often merging emptied of citizens and stripped down to a them with details from other paintings. A skeleton of street lamps, chain-link fences, single work might unify the traces of multiple blemished sidewalks, and parked cars. past moments of creation, as images return in new guises to be considered afresh within Wool’s evolving pictorial investigations. Painting is a visual medium, and they’re to be looked at. Like listening to music, it’s an emotional experience.1 < ROLLERS AND STAMPS > Between 1986 and 1987, Christopher Wool layering these found forms so that they made a decisive breakthrough in his work created “pictorial discord.”5 with the discovery of a new tool that also provided him with new subject matter. At the time when Wool chose to focus on One day, he watched a worker paint the painting, an important critical question had walls outside his loft with a specialized roller. surrounded the medium for much of the The roller covered the wall with repeating twentieth century: had the possibilities of designs. It was manufactured with patterns painting been exhausted? One important (such as blossoms, vines, or abstract critic, Douglas Crimp (b. 1944), had written an geometries) incised in the surface and acted as influential article called “The End of Painting” a cheaper version of wallpaper. Soon after, in 1981, declaring that the medium was no Wool began to make paintings with this kind longer interesting to radical artistic practice or of roller, applying glossy black enamel to an historically or politically relevant. As critic aluminum surface primed with white paint. Suzanne Hudson puts it: “In the early 1980s, Wool called the result

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