When Michel de Certeau writes of New York as a city of the perpetual present, he writes of a place where the paths of the “Wandersmänner,” 2 the walkers, counter a vision of urban order as viewed from above and afar, where the gambol of moving through the streets posits an inherent improvisation of so many “countless tiny deportations” 3 that a total administering of the city’s contradictions is defied; where fissures open up in the over saturation of signification that typifies the urban landscape, and a different set of demands as exist along the dispersed and inverted routes the walker encounters can begin to take on “a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation.” 4 For, in de Certeau’s argument, it is the tacking route of the walker, literally and figuratively lacking a place in the restless, impending wake of the next decision that makes possible a transition from lacking a place to “an indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.” 5 In thinking about Christopher Wool’s recent paintings and silkscreens, it is helpful to have de Certeau’s essay in mind. The shifting nature of Wool’s reduced abstractions plays on just such a syntactical back and forth as can make an indefinite proper of absence, and likewise turn cancel, delete, and erasure toward positives.

That Wool’s painting style has long owed something to the dispersed style of the urban passerby is readily acknowledged by the artist’s own in-the-street anecdote of “sex” and “luv” appearing before him in black spray paint on a white van, the

initial inspiration for a series of stenciled text paintings that catapulted Wool’s career in the late-eighties. 6 Similarly, his first-hand experience of the No Wave post--punk downtown scene of the late-seventies—and interrelated experimental films by James Nares, Amos Poe, John Lurie, and others of the same loose milieu—recalls a moment of anti-aesthetic style wed to urban decay that has continued to influence Wool’s work. There exists, however, a more directly applicable enactment of “tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation” in Wool’s East Broadway Breakdown (2002), a photo book project that captures the artist’s 1994–95 nocturnal wanderings between studio and home in the form of hundreds of black and white snapshots. The emptied-out night scowl of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Chinatown conveys a longstanding interest in urban entropy that is erased, replaced, and covered up in layers of residual appearance and disappearance.

Crucial to understanding the procedural, layered, and increasingly sequential turn in Wool’s recent paintings and prints, Breakdown updates the street encounter first invoked in the word paintings. As image after image records the infinite detritus of the city at night, the frail codes of control that are revealed after most human agency has gone inside appear: overturned furniture hunkers along empty sidewalks, splatter and drip adorns shuttered storefronts and doorways, police barriers and rolling chain-link fence seem to multiply, and everywhere stains and leaks of unknown origin cross

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