“I think, the way I used text was not didactic. I was not speaking about art…. The text was more subject than anything else.”
—Christopher Wool
Brashly exploding with overlapping, grungy colors that complement the artist’s fiercely combative text, Christopher Wool’s My House I is an ultimate 'fuck-you' to the typical emphasis on legibility and clarity in the world on printed text. Drawing from the artist’s widely regarded word paintings, My House I appropriates the same phrase and placement he utilized for paintings in the 1980s and 90s: “AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT YOU CAN GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE” is written in militaristic black font, the words blending into one another with a lack of spacing and punctuation that resists immediate legibility. Once untangled and unabstracted, the phrase, lifted from the 1987 Eddie Murphy stand-up comedy film Raw, is taken out of its original context to become a one-liner that is both overtly brutal and subtly humorous.
Tapping into the punk sensibility of anger and angst that spurred his artistic career, Wool adds a visual cacophony to the once black-and-white statement by photographing, xeroxing, and then re-separating the original image to become the basis of the screenprint – thus, a painting without an image has become an image of a painting. The duplicated, superimposed lines of text further the disruption to readability. With shadows of contrasting bright tones that references the cyan, magenta, and yellow tones (CMYK) that build the entire spectrum of hues in color printing, Wool creates an intentional effect that the text is printed out of alignment. The result is a dimensional composition reminiscent of the layers of provocative graffiti that accumulated on downtown facades in 1980s New York, spun with Wool’s signature flair for the syntactical and conceptual.
