Christopher Wool’s See Stop Run debuted in 2024 on the 19th floor of an empty high-rise in Manhattan’s financial district. Curated by Anne Pontegnie, the exhibition featured 75 works set against the raw architecture and cityscape, drawing 12,500 visitors over four and a half months. Gathering nearly 300 photographs of the installation, this expanded artist’s book re-mediates the project through the eyes of its visitors—Instagram users, friends, and fellow artists (including Zoe Leonard, Rita Ackermann, Stuart Comer, Richard Hell). It offers a photographic response to a landmark show, reflecting on the ways in which contemporary art exhibitions are documented and reproduced. The publication also features an extensive conversation between the artist and Pontegnie regarding the show and Wool’s three-decades-long approach to photography and installation.

Anne Pontegnie: In the process of making the exhibition, I progressively let go of most of the mediation frameworks that I initially thought would be necessary: from organizing talks with theoreticians to hosting events like concerts and workshops. Once I witnessed our first visitor’s reaction I realized that an introductory text was not even needed. I must admit I was afraid that the project would generate some criticism, mainly centered around privilege, and that it was necessary to offer a theoretical context that would situate the project. You were resistant from the start, and I could not understand why. What we both agreed upon was that institutional exhibitions have become too much about information and not enough about a physical experience of the art. In the end, the openness of See Stop Run, both in terms of space and display, seems to have afforded visitors a special place. It came as a surprise how long people stayed, sometimes hours, how many times people returned, and how many conversations started between strangers. It became a kind of third place. Can you take us through your experience of the exhibition once it opened? In general, artists do not get to witness how people look at their work.

Christopher Wool: That’s an excellent point. You know, I’m still trying to parse what the reaction to the show means. I’ve not been in this situation before. Being able to be personally present during much of the show is something relatively new in the art world. For artists to be able to interact with one’s audience is quite unusual, and the fact that the strong audience reaction is one of the big takeaways is not something I expected or have experienced, so I haven’t been able to process most of this. It certainly doesn’t make the idea of gallery shows very intriguing anymore, and there have been disruptions in our cultural world that at least in my limited view are still being sorted out. The show was not in any way a reaction to these changes that are still being worked out, but there were noticeable positive reactions to the exhibition’s position outside the commercial gallery world. We certainly tapped into something. Maybe there’s a path forward in this, but I can’t say I know for sure. Many of us have seen how galleries and museums (and artists?) have “lost focus,” to put it nicely. I’ve been around just long enough to know the art world from before the auction houses and art fairs took over. It’s not clear to me where we are right now or where we are headed, but a reckoning was inevitable.

AP: I am wondering how this show will impact your exhibitions in the future. Does it make it difficult to imagine going back to more traditional formats? In the past, you have developed further elements that arose in an exhibition. Are there elements of See Stop Run that will inform future projects?

CW: It’s not so easy to answer, but I had found myself increasingly uninterested in gallery shows. My normal way of working is to concentrate in the studio on the work itself and then consider later how and where to exhibit it. If I look back, I didn’t foresee that photography would become so important to me following our Dijon exhibition twenty-five years ago. I’m working on a couple of very large cast sculptures and will probably take them to Texas where I can ultimately install them outdoors. I don’t feel I need to do this kind of New York installation again. It’s not something I feel I need to repeat. We will see where the work takes me. It’s a bit like the photos in Road, trying to figure out which way is forward and then moving in that direction. It can be easy to get lost, yet getting lost can be incredibly productive.

AP: Could you take us through the decisions that were made on how to
structure the present publication, following See Stop Run?

CW: I think we’ve come up with an interesting concept for the publication. This idea came from something you had suggested, which was to look at Instagram for people’s posts related to the show and how they responded to or experienced the exhibition. It was noticeable how involved so many people became. We focused more on the photo side than on the text side, and we saw that the show somehow touched a large number of people in ways unusual for art exhibitions. We had 12,500 visitors, and this included many who made repeated visits. We also saw how difficult the exhibition was to portray in standard professional photography. I took my own photos, of course, but even these didn’t capture the essence of the show experientially. We started looking at Instagram and decided that the exhibition was best shown through the audience’s images. Of course this meant reaching out both to friends and Instagram users whose photos we thought captured the spirit of the show. Along with these numerous cell phone pics, we had a substantial group of photos that Zoe Leonard had contributed. Besides documenting the show, this publication became an interesting look at photography and documentation itself. This idea captures a couple of important issues, first, that the book focuses on the audience’s reaction to the show as a way of documenting it, and that the ubiquitousness of cell phone photography is what has allowed that possibility …