Christopher Wool and Richard Hell: the abstract painter and the rocking writer talk about their new collaboration

Interview, May, 2008 by Glenn O'Brien

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Christopher Wool is widely recognized as one of the world's most important painters. His first one-man show was at the legendary Cable Gallery in 1984, and since then, he has showed his bold word paintings; edgy, energetic pattern paintings; and revolutionary, quietly startling manipulated abstract paintings in galleries and museums around the world. Richard Hell was one of the originators of punk music. He played in the first wave of bands that brought attention to CBGB and became famous in 1977 as the auteur of the album Blank Generation. He retired from music in 1984 and built a reputation as a writer to rival the one he made as a musician. His most recent novel is Godlike. Richard and Christopher have now collaborated on a series of word images. Glenn O'Brien, who goes way back with both of them, met the pair at Wool's studio on the far Lower East Side of Manhattan to discuss this. PSYCHOPTS is a book of 57 pictures by Wool and Hell, published by JMc & GHB Editions this month. Publication coincides with an exhibition of a portfolio of nine silk screens of these images, along with six collaborative drawings, at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and Art Gallery in New York City (johnmcwhinnie.com). Christopher Wool will show new work at Luhring Augustine in New York City, May 10-June 14.

GLENN O'BRIEN: How do you know each other?

CHRISTOPHER WOOL: You want to tell?

RICHARD HELL: We first got acquainted when Christopher called me up about using some words. This was 1997 or 1998. He wanted to ask my permission to use the words that I'd written on my chest on the cover of my Blank Generation album, as the text for a word painting. Which of course he didn't have to do. I mean, that was really courteous. It's not like I own those words.

CW: I have taken things and made paintings without having permission. But in this case, I wouldn't. Oh, and then it turned out I missed something when I painted Richard's words.

RH: I went over to Christopher's and saw his painting. On the original album cover I'm standing there holding my jacket open, and I don't have a shirt on underneath. And in Magic Marker I have across my chest, in all caps: YOU MAKE ME--. It was just a blank. An underscore. Anyway, when I saw the painting, Christopher had filled up its entire surface with "YOU" on top of "MAKE" on top of "ME." And I said, "Wait a minute. Where's the 'blank'?" And he said, "Well, how about I just leave a space at the bottom?" Which is what he did. There's an empty line below the last word. So it worked out great. I was impressed by how casually he was willing to make what seemed like a major change. It seemed gallant. And like ... self-confident, and suave. The guy was a gentleman and an artist.

GO: Then what?

CW: Richard was publishing a series of poetry books. CUZ Editions.

RH: They were more like pamphlets really.

GO: I have several Rene Ricard with art by Robert Hawkins ....

CW: They were poetry and art collaborations.

RH: Well, not necessarily, but many of them included drawings. But I asked Christopher if he would do the cover of mine. It's called Weather.

CW: Explain what Weather is. The book is actually all the versions of one poem as Richard was working on it.

RH: Well, there was choice involved.

GO: I thought they were variations on a theme.

RH: But the way it actually happened was that they are states of writing a single poem. I realized at a point, as I looked over the drafts, that they made a poem I liked more than any of the drafts separately. Christopher had actually done the same thing, though I didn't know it--and neither did he, since he didn't know the history of Weather, and in fact didn't publish his until a few years after my book. He did a book of the Polaroids he would take of his paintings as he went along, pictures at various points in the process of making a single painting.

GO: Are these poems in the order that you wrote them?

RH: Yes.

GO: And Christopher, what order are your Polaroids in?

CW: Actually they are almost in reverse order. But it's edited. The thing is that the discarded stage in retrospect sometimes looks more interesting than the direction I took in the finished painting.

GO: I used to sit with Jean-Michel Basquiat when he was painting, and he'd cover up a section of finished work with paint and I'd think, Oh, God, he's ruining it.

RH: There's a movie of Picasso painting where you see a canvas go through all of its forms, like stop-motion photography. It seemed completely arbitrary where he stopped. It seemed like therewere 30 good paintings in there.

CW: With Jean-Michel or Picasso, the fact that they could do it so easily is what makes the work, in the end, so great. They had absolute fearlessness. If you're not fearless about changes, then you won't progress.

GO: Richard, did you know Christopher's work before he asked permission to use your words?

RH: I didn't really know it. It's funny, when I first saw his stuff, I was kind of aghast. When I first saw his word paintings, I thought: I can't believe what they're getting away with these days. [laughs] But I grew to really, really love them, and all of his stuff. It's really interesting with art--movies too, but art especially--to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years. That's happened to me with a lot of artists, more so than other media, and it's part of what makes art so interesting.