Untitled
1990–1991

Audio

• Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1990–91

  In Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner

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  Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1990–91

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  Narrator: In the 1980s, Christopher Wool began making paintings out of text, making the letters and words the subject of the work.

  Elisabeth Sussman: It's both graphically very strong, and at the same time, the texts themselves are powerful.  A signature of Christopher's work at this time is that he will break the words up, so that it takes you a while to read the text because the one word will carry over into two lines.

  Narrator: Wool took this text from a book that rock critic Greil Marcus wrote about punk. Curator Elisabeth Sussman.

  Elisabeth Sussman: The event that is described in the text is that there is an enclosed little space where people are somehow immersed in their lives, in the spectacle. And that at the end of the immersion, when the immersion is over, and they are forced to leave their little space and to go back into the so‑called world, there's no world there. Or there is no exit. It’s a very existentialist kind of idea.

  Narrator: If you’d like to hear more about Wool’s text paintings, please tap your screen.

• Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1990–91

  In Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner

  0:00

  Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1990–91

  0:00

  Play Transcript

  Narrator: Curator Elisabeth Sussman on Wool’s stenciled letters.

  Elisabeth Sussman: On the one hand, they are shapes of graphic interest to the artist. Breaking it up makes the thingness of it more apparent, because it's hard to read and it means you have to look at the letters really hard. You can't assimilate this quickly.

  It's very beautiful. The letters themselves just have beautiful forms and powers. By the way, it's painted in a kind of interesting navy blue color, so it's not exactly like you would expect a sign to be.

  But I think if the question is what does it mean to paint it? A text like this? I mean, all of the above, that you enjoy it graphically and you like all of that. But that ultimately, you can get the power of an experience without anything figurative other than a text. I think that must have been the reason to paint it, to project such a powerful idea with words only is quite a feat.