Crazy old coots make the train ride to the cubicle that much more enjoyable, especially if they are French, because they take themselves so seriously, of course…Wait, I do that…does that make me French???¿ So, I’m reading this book Colours by David Batchelor…Oh, and if you haven’t bought the book already go out and by it because I’m not going to key in the whole goddamn thing for you because that just wouldn’t be right, even though this IS the internets and nobody reads this thing anyway, I’m just plain lazy, who wants to do all that typing. So just buy the book, I mean I know we’re in THE RECESSION, and you lost all your monies to those fancy Wall Streeters and their ponzi schemes, but David Batchelor is an artist, even though he puts together these fancy books, and could use your money just like those guys at Merrill. And if you have some extra monies in your pocket buys a few copies for all your starving artist friends. But they have to be painters, because otherwise if it doesn’t have fancy words like Baudrillard or Roland Barthes or Julia Kristeva or Derrida or Adorno or Deluze or Yoko Ono or post-modern, then they won’t be interested. Oh, but they’re in here? Who knew that they had anything interesting to say about colour? Is everything always already colourful? How pomo!

Anyway, I digress….where was I…oh yes, crazy old french coots named Max Nordau who HATE colour and have giant stiff things rammed up their cooters.

…The curious style of certain recent painters – ‘impressionists,’ ‘stipplers,’ or ‘mosaists,’ ‘papilloteurs’ or ‘quiverers,’ [this guy is so gay isn't he?] ‘roaring’ coulourists, dyers in grey and faded tints – becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria. The painters who assure us that they are sincere, and reproduce nature as they see it, speak the truth. The degenerate artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball, will in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trembling, restless, devoid of firm outline, and if he is a conscientious painter, will give us pictures reminding us of the mode practised by the draughtsmen of the Fliegende Batter when they represent a wet dog shaking himself vigorously. If his pictures fail to produce a comic effect, it is only because the attentive beholder reads in them the desperate effort to reproduce fully an impression incapable of reproduction by the expedients of the painter’s art as devised by men of normal vision.

…Thus originate the violet pictures of Manet and his school, which spring from no actually observable aspect of nature, but from a subjective view due to the condition of the nerves. When the entire surface of walls in salons and art exhibitions of the day appears veiled in uniform half-mourning, this predilection for violet is simply an expression of the nervous debility of the painter… {Read More…}

Christopher Wool / Untitled / 2007 / Enamel on linen / 126 x 96 inches / (320.04 x 243.84 cm) / Luhring Augustine

I guess there is a famous quote by Christopher Wool that goes something like “The harder you look, the harder you look.” I find that the longer I look at his work, or the more that I look at his work, the more I want there to be and it just isn’t. I want there to be more paint, more layers, more color, more erasures. I want it to be something more than a spray painted Brice Marden de Kooning Basquiat derivation. To be something more than a derivative work or a simulacra. I find myself asking, are they alienated pictures, cool intellectual, ironic, sad, frustrated? I don’t know. Standing in front of them I feel an absence, a loss, a longing for something, or a searching for something that I’m just not getting. There is something elusive about these paintings, something always out of reach, yet right there in front of me hanging on the wall.
However, this seems to me to be their goal or function–to frustrate or disturb the tranquility–to crack apart the security of my own assumptions about painting. In fact my first thought- and a dangerous thought for an abstract painter- was to assume that the work was somehow derivative, that Marden, de Kooning, and Basquiat are original, authentic, and superior, while Christopher Wool’s work is secondary, derivative, or even “parasitic.” Though I know very little about Christopher Wool, I would like to imagine that to overcome this idea- that artists in the past were original, authentic, or superior and artists working in the present are derivative- and move beyond this pattern of thinking, is a fundamental theme of Christopher Wool’s work. If not, it’s at least something I am thinking about in response to the paintings at Luhring Augustine and the more I look at them and reflect, the more I see them.

Wool is an American painter known for creating pictorial forms, often void of color due to his loyalty to black and white. First gaining notoriety from his ‘word pictures’ of the late 1980s, Wool now works frequently with enamel paint on canvas, creating layered pieces, marked with paint spatter and sporadic drips.

Other characteristic tendencies include erasing almost-entire pictures then writing over them with black spray paint. He approaches art as a process that needs revision and often makes visible corrections within his works. (artobserved.com)

Chirstopher Wool at Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street through June 21.