New York: Guggenheim...

The last time me and the Missus were in New York and we visited the Guggenheim, we saw an exhibition that was a retrospective of the work of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

It remains one of the most amazing art exhibitions I’ve ever seen. But with modern art, you pays your money and you takes your chance… and our return saw us visit while a Chicago artist named Christopher Wool was having a retrospective.

Wool’s work has something of a punk sensibility to the way it seems to be constructed, with the messy and almost agit-prop way that his canvases are constructed, with images from old work being used as the basis for something new and worked over so the squiggly lines and the images they produce are quite textured.

There were also lots of quite patterned prints with splodges where the ink or paint had run as he’d recreated what looked like wallpaper patterns or geometric shapes by hand.

Some of his paintings were word pictures where he’d used sentences or words stacked over several decks and broken up at irregular intervals. I quite liked those. I also liked his stark B&W photo sequences where he’d made photocopies of the photos then hung those to distance the image and make it look even more distorted.

But, as with much modern, it either connects with you or it doesn’t. And I struggled a bit with Wool and his work. Much of his work was also untitled so you didn’t have much to go on to extract meaning.

‘He’s been deliberately enigmatic,’ said the Missus.

‘He’s just been lazy,’ I replied.

One thing I did see that really blew me away, though, was an art installation called Impenetrable. This was by an Israeli artist called Mona Hatoum and it was constructed of hundreds of thin lines of barbed wire about three metres in length that were hung vertically about two inches apart so they formed a three-dimensional cube. 

It was utterly stunning and strangely moving.