William T. Wiley himself admits that he likes to ask questions with his work rather than answer them, and that become completely evident in a work like You Are As Close As You’ll Ever Be.

Many people speculate that Wiley is a “political artist” since many of his works seem to incorporate literary themes of struggle with political themes, like his work Abstraction with Torture Chamber in which he combines themes from Dante’s Inferno and the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” policy. In an interview with SF Weekly, though, Wiley states that he doesn’t  purposely paint politics. He says that he just paints his life, in which politics play a pretty hefty role.

Methinks the artist doth protest too much, though, because this painting is signed “W73” with the W caught in cross hairs. Fun fact: W 73 was a nuclear warhead that was canceled in 1959. Wiley would’ve been 22 when the nuke was canceled so he’d probably be aware that it had happened. Though this work was painted in 2002, nuclear weapons have become a real danger once again, so Wiley could be hinting at being caught in the cross hairs and idea that we might not advance farther than we have now. But who knows? Like Wiley says, he asks questions, he doesn’t answer them.

In a 1997 interview with the Smithsonian museum, Wiley says that “the way things are, the way to move forward is to move backward” and this work pretty much pairs perfectly with that statement. It doesn’t really matter which way the viewer follows the spiral; once you reach the end of it, you’ve come as close as you ever will to the end of it and have to move backward the way that they came.

There’s really nothing conclusive about this work. Just a lot of questions and head scratching. But that’s the point of Wiley’s art. It’s not supposed to be like a Warhol where you look at it and go, “Look a can!” This work is supposed to make the viewer think. And man, oh man, are we ever thinking hard about this one.