"'See Stop Run': Christopher Wool's Flashback to DIY, Gritty 1970s New York" by Linda Yablonsky

It’s uncanny how often I hear people say how much they miss 1970s New York or wish they had lived here then. I am one of the lucky ones, but let me tell you: making your way through that grimy cesspool of crime, corruption and debauchery was not always fun. Still, the daily threat of danger created its own buzz, its own glamour. Add cheap rents, a surfeit of nightclubs and dive bars, and a surging population of young artists moving into downtown Manhattan, and you had the basic ingredients of a crackling cauldron of underground activity. With little planning or interference, artists of every stripe stole into vacant properties, abandoned buildings, creaky lofts and rotting piers to stage exhibitions and live performances made legendary by their very ephemerality. It was exciting—until money came into the picture and took the piss out of it.

Now, Christopher Wool has awakened some of the old DIY spirit with See Stop Run, a survey of recent bodies of work that he and the independent Belgian curator Anne Pontégnie have installed—legally—in a magnificently unreconstructed space on the 19th floor of an office building in the financial district.

Here, in the mercantile centre of the world, is a decidedly noncommercial exhibition of painting, photography, drawing, prints, posters and books—around 75 works in all. The show has no backing from any gallery, institution, foundation or collector. Nor is anything in it available for purchase. All belong to Wool. It’s not that he had a sudden urge to indulge in institutional critique, he just wanted to see how the surrounding context would affect works of art he usually shows in sanitised white-cube galleries and museums. As he says, “the modernist ideal in art excludes context”. (The project has its own website and is open to the public, free, until 31 July.)

Read full article at theartnewspaper.com