Christopher Wool

An ominous phrase appears stenciled in black letters nearly two feet high on an aluminum panel. The absence of punctuation, conventional spacing, and definite articles heightens the sinister tone of the message by evoking the pared-down language of danger signs and telegrams, which typically deliver their urgent messages in the sparest of terms. A sense of detachment and expediency springs from the seemingly artless choice of letterforms, which resemble those of the commercially available stencils used to mark shipping crates. (In fact, the artist made his stencils by hand in order to achieve the large scale he desired.) Despite their apparent simplicity, the words these letters form are not easily or immediately legible; by disrupting their regular spacing, Wool invites the viewer to gradually piece the meaning together.

This work is part of a series of language-based black-and-white “word paintings” Wool began making in the late 1980s. In an effort to impose limits on his abstract compositions, he tied them to phrases of his own invention or borrowed from other, often popular sources. The lines “The cat’s in the bag. The bag’s in the river” come from the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, written by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, where it serves as film-noir code to convey the successful execution of a scheme to bring about the downfall of one of the characters.