Can your monkey do the dog

Can your monkey do the dog is a joint work by Josh Smith and Christopher Wool. Using digital imagery, they created a series of works in which one of them proposed an image from his corpus, while the other reworked it, adding or removing elements. A new “stratum” was in turn superimposed on the previous one, with no mutual constraint or censorship governing the artists’ interventions.

Former assistant and regular collaborator of Christopher Wool, Josh Smith (b. 1978, lives and works in New York) first became famous for a series of paintings in which his own name was the sole motif, a gesture of ironic self-promotion as well as a work on the multiplication of symbols of individuality. Reappropriating certain clichés of modern painting in forms borrowed from abstract expressionism and cartoons, his serial works, which combine line drawing, manual collage and mechanical reproduction, reinterrogate the distinction between original and copy, as well as the hierarchical system that separates major and minor works, to highlight the very movement of creation.

In a world of incessant flows of goods and images, Smith succeeds in proposing an alternative flow that breaks the repetition of the same. Authenticity is not to be found in a triumphant subjectivity, whose signature and expressiveness would mark the return of the “old”.