Christopher Wool

RUN DOG RUN (Parkett Journal containing this insert by Christopher Wool), 1989


Offset lithograph on smooth wove paper

9 1/2 × 8 1/4 in
24.1 × 21 cm
Not signed

Regular price $2,500.00

This Parkett Journal Volume 22 from 1989 contains a project Christopher Wool did for Parkett in 1989. This project is a fourteen (14) page project which is meant to be viewed, flipped-through, and experienced in the Parkett Journal as originally published and distributed. Six of the pages have either the text "RUN" (4) or "DOG" (2).

They are a superb example of his use of stenciled letters in paintings. Wool’s paintings also resemble the Concrete poetry of the late 1960s and early 1970s; they abandon grammar, syntax and punctuation and break words into arbitrary units with emphasis placed on the black space. The text, Run Dog Run, is reminiscent of sentences in children’s elementary school primers. However, read in isolation as the artist has arranged them, there is an unsettling ambiguity about these narratives – the textual fragments amplify a latent violence and negativity. Far from being neutral educational aids, traditional school primers are in fact ideological, instilling in the children the image of a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world.