Rail: Do you feel at times limited by the engineering?
Wool: Oh, absolutely. I started making the pedestal-sized sculpture simply because one of the maquettes couldn’t be engineered to be larger. But the technology has caught up with my ambition for size. 3D-scanning, needed for casting the elements, was not around fifteen years ago. When I’m working small, I try not to think too specifically about enlarging it, because many of the small pieces are potential sculptures themselves. They have inherent sculptural value, and I now can pick and choose what I think can and should be enlarged. It’s not everything.
Rail: Right. I see a work here that has thin strips of metal that are twisted, bent, and crumpled. It wouldn’t tolerate an increase in scale without losing its special quality.
Wool: At this scale, it flexes. On a larger scale, it would just bend under its own weight.
Rail: It’s an engineering impossibility and probably aesthetically unsatisfying to thicken a form like that. But the wire pieces are linear; increasing the width and volume doesn’t destroy the linear expressiveness.
Wool: But if in the maquette, there are different gauges of wire, then the sculptural form must capture that difference. Just as a drip in painting or a drop of ink on paper is different. If you take a drop of ink and try to recreate it ten times as large, it’s impossible. It’s the physical nature of ink. You’re never going to get an ink drop that’s two feet across. I’ve tried. But I do it by taking a photo of it and making a silkscreen image of it. My first silkscreens were photographic recreations of paintings that were made with spray paint that had drips. And even if you enlarge this image of a drip, there’s still the sensation of motion. A drip looks like something has happened in time. And if you blow that up and silkscreen it, your brain still reads it that same way, which I found very interesting. Blowing something up can be more than just making it bigger.
Rail: You refer to the large sculptures retaining the qualities of the original wire that you find discarded in the land. For me, it’s evident in the way that one length of wire wraps around another. I can perceive that action perfectly well at an increased scale.
Wool: So that’s like the drip, the blown-up drip. There’s a lot of that wire in the ground here. The first piece I found was on Chinati grounds twenty years ago. I remember picking it up and thinking it so mirrored the kind of line that I was trying to get in my drawing and painting—ironically, a very un-Judd-like line.
Rail: In your work on flat surfaces, your painting work, graphic work, and print work, you often use a looping line which resists becoming geometric. The axis of rotation of one of your curves is changing all the time. You’re making loops and nooses rather than arcs.
Wool: The found wire has an innate drawn sense; it looks like drawing. Different gauges or types of wire bend in different ways.
Rail: In your painting, you’ve got handwork on top of screenprinting, which generates an issue in itself. But you haven’t traced those loops from anything, right?
Wool: No, no, they’re drawing with paint. I do some of the drawing straight out of the tube. So, there are factors that give a work its reason for being at a certain scale. I use my own work to generate new imagery, often what I’ve just finished, for the next work. That’s often my way, the last work being a start to the next work.
Rail: It seems characteristic of you to have some linear elements and then mark them out in a different way, like with a scribble or brush-over. You get a combination of marks that are generated variously. Drawing a line by squeezing a tube is very different from taking a brush that already has the paint on it. The tube gives you a very distinctive line—depersonalized yet distinctive.
Wool: A tube of paint is more like a pen with ink. A brush is more like a pencil, in a way. I’ve always had a suspicion of my own hand and looked for tools to modify my touch—for example, using silkscreen as opposed to a brush and palette, or stencils to create letters as opposed to writing in my own hand. Similar now with how I can use found wire to create sculptures without needing to create the underlying drawing itself.
Rail: So, what is it that you’re exploring in your work? Is the benefit to the viewer to learn something about optical experience, also physical experience? When you make the kind of curve that you make, that’s not a particularly fluid kind of curve, and it feels like there’s some effort there. Am I learning something from feeling that effort myself? Does it become an emotional experience? Yet so much of your manipulation of imagery is indirect, deploying complicated processes.
Wool: Okay, so here’s where we get a little bit into the part of interviews that makes me uncomfortable, because I end up having to say things that I only half believe. Every time I draw, I approach it freshly. I’m not trying to make the same drawing I’ve already made, or even the same kind of line. But the bigger question about the benefit to—to who? society? other artists?—I don’t know the answer to that kind of question. I have to assume people are seeing my art the way I do. But I don’t really know. What people see in my work may be important, but I don’t work at controlling meaning beyond my own artistic involvement
Rail: I find intriguing surprises in your work. With the sculpture, it might result from viewing it from quite far away, and then getting a few feet away, and there’s a big difference, more than expected. And in large works on paper, there might be black loops that are part of a screenprint. But from a distance, they look just as painted as the pink out-of-the-tube loops do.
Wool: The idea of inducing surprise is essential to everything I believe about art making. Discovery is about creating something new, even possibly unknown. With newness you may get surprised reactions. Intriguing surprises sounds like a compliment to me.
Rail: When I get close, I see that one loop is matte and utterly flat, and the other has materiality to it.
Wool: You know the question, “Is it live? Or is it Memorex?” Once you can’t see the difference, it’s less of an issue. A black-and-white photograph and a silkscreen reproduction of that photograph may look the same in certain conditions but not in others.
Rail: Quite a while ago, Chuck Close was experimenting with a large-scale inkjet printer, new at the time. He told me that it surprised him that he couldn’t tell that the print wasn’t hand-drawn by him.
The discussion that follows occurred as Christoper consulted the computer file of his inventory of works and paged through his “books” of printed images, part of the Brite Building exhibition. These he produced by digital photography and an Epson printer. The sources for Christopher’s printed images are often antecedent prints that reproduce screen transfers of marks as well as marks made directly by hand. These “pages” may have had additional markings and transfers added before being photographed and run through the printer, perhaps with a change in scale. Any specific mark might appear in its fourth or fifth iteration, along with indications of the evolving process, such as marks outside the initial margins. The layers of work visible in the final images for the books are numerous enough to make reconstructing the process difficult, even for the artist. The same holds for the very large images on the walls of the main gallery. In the digitally printed “pages,” indications of the various operations leave subtle visible traces. The images are utterly flat to a physical touch, while to the eye the markings retain degrees of texture associated with their etiology as variously painted, screened, photographed, and printed.
Rail: In the inkjet books titled Book 1 (2019) through Book 7 (2025) that you have on the table here, you seem to be playing with complication after complication after complication in terms of the quality of the printed page. There’s no handwork in there, right? There’s only handwork that gets reproduced.
Wool: Yes, these large inkjet books are all “reproductions” of art, distinct artworks. So, the first few books were just about keeping a record. I had made a group of paper pieces that shared the same background, which was an edition of silkscreen prints that I wasn’t interested in anymore, so I painted on many of them. I wanted to keep some record of these new works as a group. I work with a couple of very high-end digital retouchers and had asked the simple question: “With today’s technology, what in your opinion would be the best way to print the highest quality reproductions?” And the answer was to use inkjet, but to make sure the retoucher had all the original works at hand. This way the reproduction and the original can be compared without the intervention of memory or photography. So, this series of books are made that way. We photographed everything twice, first to get the image, and then with raking light to show the texture. Now you’re seeing a little bit of shadow. A straight-on photo would not show that, and that’s key, though it’s counterintuitive that you need to worry about the three-dimensional when you’re reproducing in 2D.
With this level of skill behind the retouching we can print these books in my studio. But there can often be misprints. After I had finished the first few books the pandemic descended, and I grabbed a stack of misprints to take to Marfa to paint on top of. Since most of the works in these books were oil on top of some kind of printing, adding another layer of image looked quite seamless.
Rail: And the misprints would be registration problems, or what?
Wool: Anything: poor registration, smears, folds or creases in the paper, fingerprints… any imperfection.
Rail: And then you took those things and did what?
Wool: Draw and paint on top of them.
Rail: And then photographed them?
Wool: Exactly. A new group of paper works could become the next book.
Rail: They’re what makes your work so engaging. I mean, the way you use off-registration to yield an overlapping of forms that don’t read as simple overlap. I got interested a few years ago in the blur factor in your work, which shows up even in images that look like they have a definite edge—somehow the form reads as if it’s out of focus or has variable focus.
Wool: I find it important to try to always keep things fresh. I’m not comfortable with stasis and try to keep moving. I’m more comfortable asking new questions as opposed to answering old ones.
Rail: This suggests to me that having turned a lot of your attention to three-dimensional form has let you discover things about yourself that you wouldn’t otherwise find.
Wool: In the past I had found it freeing to be able to switch between painting and photography. Sculpture has opened so many possibilities for me. There was a time where, because I use print techniques in my paintings, I thought there was little room for me to work on prints. To my surprise, printmaking has become a great arena for me to work in—especially etching. For the first time I’ve become comfortable with my own drawing, though the etching plate still gives the needed distance. When one is giving you a hard time, you can switch to the other. Now I’m working with sculpture and painting and photography and printmaking. It’s refreshing to switch between things, and the computer has become an integral part of almost everything. I was late to computers and never learned to type. But now, most things have some digital element to them.
Rail: Were you making looping lines in your 2D work before you started working with wire or digitally?
Wool: Yes. First with spray paint and then in etchings.
Rail: So, when you started noticing the discarded wire in the ground in Marfa—
Wool: It reminded me of what I was trying to develop in my painting.
Rail: So, there’s an affinity between the looping lines on aluminum, sprayed during the late 1990s, and the recent sculptural work.
Wool: Yes, exactly. But I should be clear: there’s an affinity, but that does not mean they are necessarily similar looking or carry similar concepts. The found wire showed new ways to move forward—not simply a perfection of old ideas.
Rail: Thinking of your books again, the contrasts in optical texture within a flat printed image are remarkable. The photographic print captures it, and then the computer-printed version does as well. So, you’re working with imagery that gets repeated and reworked, but it’s not imagery of something. It’s a marking process, an image of an operation, a process, whatever.
Wool: Well, I am and always have been an “abstract artist,” who has often focused on process, even process as an image in and of itself.
Rail: Much of your work is black-and-white. But what about color? You have a knack for finding colors to use that are neither warm nor cool, nor overloaded with connotation. Your pinks look like something has happened to them; they’re like discolored color and quite distinctive.
Wool: Like issues around the hand, there were other things that I had tended to reduce out of my paintings. So, in the same way that I’ve been able to bring back other things into my work, color is an itch that I start to scratch away at. But traditional painters don’t believe one is actually dealing with color until you have at least two colors in relation to each other. That pink has been a go-to color for me maybe because of how infrequently one finds it in nature, which means that it is also the least associative of colors.
Rail: It may be peculiar to me, but I’ve long been fascinated by areas of your two-dimensional work that have a kind of blur or stutter or a layered effect, deriving from shifts in registration in screenprinting. I also associate your use of the pattern of corrugation with this blur and stutter. Can you comment on this aspect of your work? Are some of the effects happy accidents, or do you like to exercise full control over what might look like problems in control? Of course, when something happens, controlled or not, you’re still the judge of whether it’s good or not. But since you often work in quadrants, and you juxtapose four areas screened with enlarged digital imagery, does the process itself lead to the curious effects I’m perceiving?
Wool: I mentioned that for me using certain techniques enabled me to avoid my own touch or handwriting, and I meant this quite literally. I could work with things that are endemic to the printing process to achieve certain things that might have been done in a more traditional way. Multiple layers or printing off-registration were two of the many painterly ways of using the silkscreen process. I certainly think of myself as a “painterly” painter, but I’ve found using processes that are in contradiction to that makes the issue that much more prominent. These painterly notions also help clue the viewer into the time element of painting—Jasper Johns’s idea of doing something and then doing something to that, or possibly even Harold Rosenberg’s notion of the artist in the arena.
Rail: Well, I’ll venture some connections. In a way, you’re making painterly paintings without “painting” them. The coarse visual textures that you create reflect the given material environment, somewhat like clumps of throwaway wire. From the start, it’s all artificial, analogous to your composing lines by squeezing paint from tubes. You’re a resolutely “contemporary” artist, working from available materials and processes, rather than trying to gauge what the history of Western art, or even nature itself, would want from you. Historical significance, the various traditions, are beside the point. For me, those photographs of the wire detritus, tiny but viewed close-up at floor level, are the essence of Christopher Wool, who remains a work in progress. The wire seems gigantic in an ambiguous outdoor landscape, which is actually indoors. The sense of scale oscillates between the reality of the photographic print and the grandeur of the imaginative vision from which a colossal sculptural analogue emerges. One thing generates another by reciprocal exchange. Your photographs and prints dream of sculpture. Your sculptures call out for photographs and prints.
Wool: I should be ending with a clever thought. Let’s just say that I’m comfortable enough being a work in progress.