Since the 1980s Christopher Wool has been asso- ciated with a masculine black and white confi-dence of stenciled word-paintings whilst at the same time wool became Rosemarie Trockel’s signature material pointing to the domestic sphere of women.
In his series of wool-pieces Jonathan Monk plays with this ambiguity by altering Wool’s visual language and tackling the inherent meaning of machine knitted woolen materiality. The exhibition „WOOLEN“ by Jonathan Monk brings together works from the series that question artistic authority by citing Christopher Wool’s compositions: his ornamental patterns and stenciled words. Some revisit the painter’s best-known early paintings like IF YOU and APOCALYPSE NOW that have entered the canon of contemporary art. Both are appropriated catchphrases from the vernacular reinforced by the material of their making, substituting alu-minum and steel for canvas and enamel paint for oil. His scheme consisting of continually modified and reproduced signifiers became an ideal subject for Monk’s practice. Monk typically employs on existing artistic strategies; here he re-appropriates Wool’s paintings and opens them up to new reflections by reversing their physical characteristic. In his working process Wool plays with words, reworks them by adding, overpainting and sub-tracting them‚ ‘until they are stripped of sense’. His words never linger but immediately snap back into being nonsensical graphic design. The often monumental scale and physical properties of his paintings underline a brute force that leads to the spectator uncertainty whether to read or look at the words. Monk not only backs out from the gesture of painting but shrinks his woolen versions dramatically giving them a manageable scale that neglects Wool’s method to create multiple ways of reading and meaning. He follows Wool’s play of words twisting by making his name the concept. The familiar images are lifted into soft parody that discovers a tension of masculine codes and the feminist implications of Trockel’s knits. The latter are feminist in asserting a traditional women’s craft. Looking closer they often ascribe to dichotomies of the male and female or creative and reproductive. Her textures and patterns turn out uniform, sometimes brutal in their machine-made perfection and cannot be mistaken as handmade objects. Similar to Wool’s practice they inhabit a serial character that im-plies mechanical procedure, just like other works originating in the 1980s that play on the anony-mous outcome of mass production. The emphasis of reproduction technique as well as works in series and their spread in strictly structured grid patterns‚ suggesting an infinite extension in space are characteristic as a reference to the Minimal Art of the 1960s. One of Jonathan Monk’s wool-pieces (Wool Pattern Piece) illustrates a circular ornamental design. The design has been knitted into an image stitch for stitch and has therefore achieved eternal status while its knitted support still pus-hes open the threshold of its finiteness. Wool Pat-tern Piece along with the other cited Christopher Wool works can be depicted as overlayers of mechanic patterns from Rosemarie Trockel’s machine knitted grid structures and Wool’s abs-tract patterns of signs that reveal Monks interest in the visual codes of reproduction and art. The decisive reason to translate ‘Wool’ into wool was Jonathan Monk’s discovery of Parkett’s 33rd edition that featured Wool and Trockel on its cover. Packaged in a Suhrkamp book design Wool’s name above Trockel’s brought about its double indication which has been transformed to another piece of the series. Using wool as his backdrop Monk casts an ironic glance at the traditional genre of painting. Where Trockel relates to it by stretching her knits on frames, Monk references it directly. He troubles the inflexibility and con-sistency of Wool’s paintings and their later reproductions. The few devices that have been explo-red by Wool ad infinitum through his obsessive technique of creating images are challenged: APOCALYPSE NOW that initially reads „Sell the house sell the car sell the kids“, a quotation from Francis Ford Coppola’s film, has been recompo-sed into ‘a detail’ (A Detail in Wool) presenting only its beginning fragment ‘sell.’ It still echoes the ‘epic three line novel’ even when most of its content has been subtracted. Yet Monk creates a plea of its own whilst using Wool’s technique of adding and subtracting. When „FUCK EM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE“ being a painting of urban personality by Wool that turned its joke aggressively on the audience- it appears domesti-cated in its woolen version (Wool piece II) freed from anger full of irony. The painter’s magic to create complexity from deadpan clarity is successfully undermined.

Camilla Bussche