if you’re in NYC, you’ve still got a few days to catch Richard Hell and Christopher Wool’s collaborative show — Psychopts — which ends on 4 June:
“The project emerged out of a friendship Hell and Wool share and focuses on their mutual interest in experiences associated with reading. Hell, a writer and avid reader, has for some time been assembling two-word groupings drawn from personal reading experience. Using a selection of these pairs he and Wool worked together making visual combinations of the word couples. They settled on 57 separate designs from which they developed six unique drawings in various media on paper, and nine silkscreen prints which will be published in a portfolio. …The word associations suggest a process of subliminal connection. The reader, in a moment of peripheral observation, may have unconsciously summoned the word ‘incest’ where the word on the page read ‘nicest’. It is a common enough reading experience and points to the relentless realm of the unconscious and its bid for acknowledgement at the expense of the conscious and ever-censorious ego. In a similar way, the artists’ prompts to view readable signs as merely formal, visual phenomena ask that we relax the ego drive and its penchant for rational interpretation so that we might experience more directly the impact of their compositions.”
Christopher Wool and Richard Hell are interviewed here:
“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. …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.”
John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and Art Gallery: 50 1/2 E. 64th St., NYC
[Check out 3:AM's 2002 and 2005 interviews with Mr Hell.]
First posted: Friday, May 30th, 2008.
