BWW Reviews: Guggenheim Hosts a Collaborative, Keen-Witted Christopher Wool Retrospective

The Guggenheim Museum's current exhibition of Christopher Wool's artworks feels very much like a homecoming. Manhattan, as Wool knew it when he was starting out, was a playground for alt culture types, from punk rockers who actually lived like punks to DIY moviemakers who actually did the movies themselves (no Indiegogo, no parents money, nothing). With a little help from film professors and not-quite-extinct Abstract Expressionists, Wool began figuring out his own brand of urbanized cool: his mostly big, mostly black-and-white, mostly clever paintings and his jittery, ornate photographs. That was the 1970s; now, Wool has moved triumphantly uptown. And he's starting to seem like a 21st-century Old Master. As explained by exhibition curator Katherine Brinson, this showcase (simply entitled Christopher Wool) is made up of "paintings, photographs, and works on paper that constitute the artist's nuanced engagement with the question of how to make a picture."

Normally, I'd be wary of praises like these. But Christopher Wool isn't the kind of stale tribute that they serve up often enough in the world of fine art; this time, "nuanced" isn't a platitude or an overstatement. There's an irresistible aura of collaboration to the whole endeavor, starting with Wool's brand-new bronze sculpture in the Guggenheim's entryway, and ending with Wool's freshly-designed cover art for the exhibition catalog. There's also the simple fact that this is one of the best uses the Guggenheim has made of its Rotunda in the recent past, at least since that ravishing David Smith retrospective in 2006. Wool's canvases amid Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture-sure, there's a certain postmodern chic to all that white-on-white. But it's the tension (and the occasional reconciliation) of these two personalities that really hooks you: Wool's wry repetitions versus Wright's curving dynamism, Wool's grit versus Wright's suavity, Wool's looming blobs and doodles versus Wright's air, light, and vertigo.

Instead of beginning at the beginning (that is, Wool in the late '70s, early '80s), Brinson starts off with works from the last years of the Reagan Era. Two kinds of paintings defined Wool's output at this point: canvases covered with stamped-on or rolled-on plant and floral patterns, and black-on-white stencil paintings of short words and sentences. Though the word paintings are famous enough as semantic thought puzzles, they don't succeed on braininess alone. Wool made those simple statements and block letters his signature, and enlivened this kind of signage in ways that, frankly, you have to experience to understand. For my part, whenever I pass through Newark, I make a point of stopping by a LOOK OUT FOR TRAINS sign painted in Wool-style lettering. The art-into-life effect is dizzying; so is the personality that Wool, by some distant and unknowing magic, has bestowed upon that sign. Look out for trains.

I can't get enough of Wool's photography, either. Working almost exclusively in black and white, Wool pieced together photobooks such as Absent Without Leave (1993), Incident on 9th Street (1997), and East Broadway Breakdown (2003). Some of the lighting effects in these are remarkable, precisely because they aren't the kind of lighting effects you get in polite photography. A lot of the city-street objects in East Broadway Breakdown look like they've been stewing under interrogation lamps, or like they've just been caught in Wool's headlights; as for the travel photographs in Absent Without Leave, the lighting here recalls everything from flashlight beams to atom bombs. Wool's eye for depth and shadow is so bad it's brilliant, and his eye for patterns is brilliant period: hourglass wall designs, lines of scaffolding, flanks of city buses, and New York windows that blur all in the same direction.

Photographs, sculptures, even stained glass windows-though Wool has worked in all these forms, he appears to be a painter at heart. At least that's the impression that Christopher Wool leaves. By the mid 1990s, his canvases had become as excessive and explosive as anything the New York School dreamed up, though never as colorful. Cartoon flowers hurtle forward, checks and circles wink and throb, and spray-painted lines of rust red and dirty black curve, careen, and collide. Wool took all this disorder and gave it another jolt, transferring his shapes to silkscreens, fragmenting them, offsetting them, peppering them with pixilated dots-and generally coming up with more alluring paintings than he would have if he'd let the shapes sit on their original canvases. Just look at what he did with the big orange blot in Minor Mishap or the spray-painted twirls in He Said She Said; with their subtle fissures and blurs, these silkscreen "paintings" of lines, drips, and splotches become ethereal, complicated, analytically cool.

Yet there's a limit to how much provocation a painter's painter like Wool can really stir up, and Wool-despite the photos, despite the spray paint, and despite stencil paintings that read "HELTERHELTER" and "TRBL"-barely stirs a puff. Because the paintings are so process-heavy and often so baroque, you will never be plagued by the "anyone can do this" sensation that you get, say, when looking at Cy Twombly's scratches and doodles. But Twombly's power to annoy is an indispensable discussion-starter; in contrast, Wool won't give you a lot to debate, unless you're a formalist of the most refined perceptions. His powers of selection are simply too keen, his style too inevitably urbane, to deliver much more than carefully-set dissonances.

As I walked through this retrospective, I kept wondering what it would be like if, instead of trotting out his artistic past, Wool had turned the walls of the Rotunda into his own oversized canvas. They're certainly white enough. Envision the boldness, the brashness, the glorious anarchy: trouble, without the irony quotes. It would be a hoot and a mess, but it wouldn't be Wool. And that would be a loss.

Christopher Wool, Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum