ONE ON ONE WITH WK

People are fascinated and even in love with “Street Art” now, and that fact has certainly not escaped WK Interact. The brutal traffic and the construction noise common in New York in the summer is raging as we sit at a café looking across Houston Street at a huge colorful mural being painted by OS Gemeos, the Brazillian twin brothers. WK gestures to the cluster of fans standing on the sidewalk taking pictures of the guys painting, some asking them for autographs,

“10 years ago, 15 years ago, absolutely nobody would pay attention. You would see people driving by and they would stop and say, ‘Hey can you do the same thing on my garage?’ or something like that. People did not care. They would look and say, ‘Did people pay you for that?’ Now you have like 200 people going to that wall specifically to see it. So it’s a big phenomenon, it’s a really, really big phenomenon.”

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: What do you think of the growth of Street Art over the last few years – born in graffiti but it no longer feels like it’s related to graffiti, and the number of people who are involved…

WK Interact: Maybe 15 years ago most of the people described what we do as “graffiti” because that was it. I never really called myself a graffiti artist. I used to call myself an “urban street artist”. I didn’t even feel like the stuff I was putting on the street was art. It was not art. It was a situation. I always said “If you want to make art, you can go to your place and stretch a canvas and you paint”. To me the street is not about creating art, it is creating a language. That’s why I don’t like to make murals, or put a frame around it. I like it to be incorporated. The point of my work is not what I do but how I conceptualize my work.

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: What do you think of New York people?

WK Interact: It’s the regular type of people that I think are very interesting. It could be a carpenter, it could be an electrician, could be a kid six years old, it could be an old man … I don’t really value people for what they own, I value people for the way they are standing. I don’t expect everybody is going to be rich or intelligent or smart or creative. I think every individual has something. …That is one of the reasons that I live in New York – it is such a mixed population.

(image WK Interact)

Just completed in August: A 100 meter long 7 meter high wall in Italy (image WK Interact)

Detail of wall in Italy (image WK Interact)

Brooklyn Street Art: So you don’t think of your work as art, you think of it as an action. You worked in film, and you do create with storyboarding, so would you think of it as theater?

WK Interact: For me putting something up on the wall is the same as someone planting that tree right there, and letting it grow. It is more like urban vegetation for me. We have to call it art because it’s aesthetic. But for me it is not theater, it is more like a three dimensional urban situation.

Newest work: Motion Pictures are portraits of friends (WK Interact) (photo Jaime Rojo)

Painting at Jonathan Levine Gallery this summer by WK Interact (photo Steven P. Harrington)

Mixed media piece at Jonathan Levine Gallery this summer by WK Interact (photo Steven P. Harrington)

Brooklyn Street Art: Can you talk about the feeling of “action” more?

WK Interact: I like also to create, especially on the streets, to create a film, an action. It’s totally not about the party that created the piece, it’s not about the size, it’s not about the color – it’s about the effect and the affect. It’s not about the beauty of how many colors you have, or something you have to stand and pay attention to. It’s a “SNAP” like that (claps his hands together fast). And you basically are sucking up all this energy in half a second, and you don’t even know it… you connect with viewing something and seeing something. And for me the street is like this. I don’t see it like a mural, like an art, like a thing of beauty.

"At that moment, the person passing becomes part of the piece." (image WK Interact)

Brooklyn Street Art: So the “action” is what is happening to the person…

WK Interact: I like to work on a human scale. I want people to incorporate into it. When someone passes in front of my work, another person on the other side of the street sees them passing in front of it and sees my piece in the background. At that moment, the person passing becomes part of the piece. The one who is across the street actually sees the effect of it.

I don’t think people really see this in my work. They just see a simple black and white image. I really don’t talk that deep or detailed about my work, and if you do not explain this to people they just don’t know.

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: You are very methodical in planning and execution

WK Interact: Yes, and then I criticize my stuff. And the next year go back over my stuff. It’s kind of crazy too when you took so much work and so much effort to do it. I am interested in challenging myself to do better.

WK Interactive art for Suzuki

Brooklyn Street Art: How do you balance that desire to make more money and be better known and still not feel like you have “sold out” to, say, the corporate world. How do you find that balance?

WK Interact: I have been lucky to have not sold myself to some really big companies, because some people have come to see me and offer me things. It’s very difficult. I fight it a lot of the time. Even the few projects I did with brands, people were like “Oh, you sold yourself.” And they really put me down.

WK for fashion label Marithe

A lot of people like you to struggle. A lot of people want you to be in a place where you have absolutely no way to create something… They want you to be in pain. They want you to be successful but they don’t want you to be more successful than they are. The minute you go to making way too much money, having a car, they have problems. You always have to balance a bit. I’m lucky because I don’t really need a Porsche, and I don’t need to wear a brand name. I can just sit somewhere and say, “That’s me”.

In an example of the conversations that happen with street art, someone placed a blue cross over this piece because they may have though WK was glorifying war. In fact, this soldier was part of a series he created to give a message to bring all the soldiers home from Iraq. (WK Interact) (photo Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Did you receive reassurance or encouragement from your parents?

WK Interact: My parents, who are both artists, did not believe in my work. It took them 10 years to believe in what I was doing. They were totally rejecting what I was trying to do, and they basically told me ‘you’re never going to make it’.

It’s funny you said that because I kept all of the press from 10 years I had collected about my work and I wrapped it in newspaper and one Christmas I took it home and put this huge pile on the table. I said to my parents, “This is your present, for both of you”. They thought at first they were just some magazines in English, until I showed them the articles. They were shocked. I didn’t really want them to tell me “It’s great,” I just wanted to prove to them that they were wrong. On that day, in that minute when I did this I changed the way they used to view me. They were shocked and they said, “How come you never told us?”

I was proving something to myself, and proving also that they were wrong. And I was trying to believe in myself. It’s this motivation that is what is inside me, what has made me. It is probably one of the best qualities that I have, instead of wanting to be rich or famous or anything like that. This is probably what makes me keep wanting to put things on the street now.

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Can you now assume the parent role and offer a young street artist who is not feeling confident in themselves or their work? Can you give encouragement to that person?

WK Interact: I’ve been giving encouragement for almost my entire life. I used to help other students in school. I had an “Open-Door” policy at my gallery on the Lower East Side for five years. So many people used to come to my place with their book, or they left messages on my machine, and every time, it didn’t matter if it was a good day or a bad day I had to pay attention, and I had to be there, and be open to people. Meaning, what I did for all these years, instead of doing what they did to me, I did the exact opposite. I felt like “you cannot stop talent”. If you see somebody coming in your door, he has taken the time to come and ask you questions and is very open-minded and presenting his work – and you push him away, you create an angry young artist who will never forget that. So you have to be careful.

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: So you are saying that you took this opportunity to heal yourself of the pain of rejection by doing just the opposite.

WK Interact: Yes, I mean, if I had realized that I was doing that, I would not have chosen to do it at the street level. I mean it is good, but at the same time, I should have maybe worked out with it at a school as a teacher. When it comes to working with people and taking photos, or you put me with animals or kids; I do very well. I feel connected. As a teacher, I probably would be a good teacher. And it would have been less stress.

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Is it your responsibility to help young artists?

WK Interact: This is also one of the reasons why when I see somebody who’s got talent, it doesn’t really matter what it is, the person doesn’t really need to be painting, just talent, and he can believe in himself, I almost want to lift this person up.

When someone who is in a position to help says, “It’s not my fault, it’s somebody else’s”, I don’t believe it. I say this is your decision. If someone has come to you and told you something then you have a choice to help or not. It’s important because sometimes you just have to do one thing to destroy all the dreams of these people. It is very fast.

“It is very important to interact.” – WK Interact

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

WK Interact Site

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THE 25 YEAR WAR: WK INTERACT IN NEW YORK, PART 1

A quarter of a century since falling in love with New York, WK looks at his route.

WK Interact was 8 years old, spending hours drawing on old floor plans. On the job with his father, even then he buried himself in his work while Dad rushed around giving orders at his interior design worksites in the south of France. A few years later, his drawings came alive with movement as he hung out all day in dance schools watching young bodies fly across the floor. Once more his style catapulted forward the day he discovered how to stretch and animate a figure just by dragging it across the glass of a photocopier. Action. Captured.

Without question, his love of the street, of art, and wild motion fully materialized and went on steroids when WK first laid eyes on monstrous, convulsing New York City. He was 16. He was blown away, frightened, and excited. Two years later, he gave into the magnetic pull of New York’s raw power.

“I remember I went downstairs and I said to my parents, ‘You know what, I am going to New York’, and my parents said ‘But why, what for? Are you going to be able to get a good job? Why do you have to go to a place where you don’t even speak English?’,” he remembers. A great struggle took place but he left for the United States anyway, alone for the first time. That’s when WK’s war began, almost a quarter of a century ago, on these streets. And he won.

(image WK Interact)

If his work on the street is an indication, it has been a constant state of war. Look at these images and themes that reappear in WK’s work since he first came to New York; Ever-present fear, violence, anxiety, overheated sex-play, fishnets & firearms, contorted figures racing, martial arts kicks to the head, hand-to-hand combat, boxers swinging, prisoners tied and bound, hooded figures snapping heads of bound businessmen, terrifying escapes in progress, maniacal twined and twisted forms and faces, propaganda, undercover spies, official seals, gun assembly diagrams, digitized labels, ID fingerprints, cameras, surveillance, camouflage, radioactive symbols, streaming codes and bureaucratic text passages, black military choppers hovering overhead, contorted soldiers screaming “bring me back”, a permanent state of survivalism… All of these hellacious visions collide and collapse and expand in continuous motion and interaction almost exclusively in black and white in wheat pastes, paintings, screen prints, photographs, sculpture, and performance installations on the street.

(image WK Interact)

You may think that some of this work is vaguely autobiographical, but for WK, all of this work is simply a reflection of the city he chose and the atmosphere here. “New York is extremely demanding and challenging”, he says, “If you do something sexy in the street in New York you are in trouble. If you do something violent, people will give you the thumbs up!”

In other words, he’s playing to the audience in this particular city and unfortunately it may give an inaccurate impression of WK, the person, “I’ll just say this; My work, the people always see one thing – fear, attack, violence. They have absolutely no clue of the other side. I don’t think they are ignorant. My work is very black, it’s very bold, it’s very graphic, it’s very strong. There is nothing really friendly like a little bird flying around or a pink piglet… it’s totally not that. But I live in New York City and I am responding to that kind of contrast. The weather is very strong, very hot and very cold. All the traffic is heavy, the structure of this city is almost like a double bladed knife. I wanted to adapt myself as a New Yorker and adapt my mind as an artist. I’m always fascinated by this fear, and the people who want to ignore it.”

It was the mid-1980’s and there was not such a thing as “Street Art” yet, but “Low-brow” was in full effect, with graffiti as a new darling in the booming art market. The City had just pulled out of a deep recession, Wall Street wall was flush, newly minted “Yuppies” were ordering sushi and flashing their Swatches, Run DMC was rocking a tricky rhyme, and graffiti had been nearly scrubbed from all the subway cars. Kenny Scharf took his cartoons into the Tunnel, Richard Hambleton was doing shadows on the street walls in the Village, Keith Haring was doing his thing in the subways, and Warhol was fixating on Basquiat.

Image of Richard Hambleton shadow work by photographer Allan Molho

WK Interact knew very little about all of this activity, but he gradually learned. 18 year old WK looked for work as a graphic artist but because he spoke little English and had few connections, doors slammed in his face quickly one after another. Eventually he got work as a carpenter and painter, living in a tiny room on Houston in Alphabet City.

The Lower East Side was his first real school; “I was like a student. I was not that good in school, and all of that work, work, work to get a diploma! That diploma was absolutely no help to me. My own diploma was my own dream, it was my own need. It was not proving anything to anybody, just me.” What followed was the “School of Hard Knocks”; occasional opportunities, a lot of drawing and time alone observing city life and street life, experimenting with his work on the street, and missteps that included a period actually living on the street in a box. Socially, he wasn’t able to connect with other artists and couldn’t really understand how to navigate the city and street culture world he had thrust himself into. He spent a lot of time feeling a deep sense of alienation.

(image WK Interact)

“When I started to do my stuff I was so ‘not there’. I was so different and without an understanding of the art, the graffiti, the branding. Nobody really understood me; I was a bit early to be put in this category so I created myself just to be “this guy”. There were groups there, but I was on my own. And it was very, very difficult to believe in myself. It was so difficult not to be a part of a group. It was so difficult not to be able to speak English. I used go seek artists because I liked their work, and they never replied, or never wrote back.”

While WK still values those hard years because his inner strength and knowledge of humanity and inhumanity was greatly broadened, not to mention his development as an artist, he wouldn’t recommend them to you as a friend, as those years haunt him today. Coupled with feelings of rejection from his parents, this sense of alienation made him a lone wolf in a hostile town.

Prince and Lafette (image WK Interact)

A turning point for WK may have been the literal turning point of the corner of Prince and Lafayette streets in Soho, a garage and mechanics business. WK liked the multiple surfaces and angles of the lot, as well as their industrial rawness and he inquired about who owned it. After cajoling the owner of the garage to allow him do a piece on the wall, he eventually went on to “run” that whole corner that was a mechanic’s garage for a number of years. He likes to say no one noticed the racing, leaping, landing, crashing, chasing, panicked people in black and white on that block for many years, but in fact many New Yorkers around at that time still remember the sudden surprise of those images on the buildings and began to look forward to checking them out in when they passed through Soho.

Alek and WK (image WK Interact)

A piece on it’s larger overhead walls one time featured model Alek Well – a bicephalous blur portrait of gut-busting joy and ebullience as one head is tossed back to the left and one slightly forward to the right, anchored by solid shoulders. The scenes and players changed but usually the entire space was a spooked by hair-raising scenarios which you may or may not want to understand more clearly.

Similarly many people remember as “classic” the view of WK’s iconic 2-story speeding rollerblader racing along a building on the southwest side of Houston street to jump across Broadway. To hit one of his spots in it’s context is to experience a sudden pick-up in pulse, or skip in the beat, and a little bit of confusion that sharply torques the wild energy of the urban environment. No one else endeavors to shake you like this. It’s safe to say that you admire the mind of the artist who brought you this jolt.

(image WK Interact)

He lived frugally in a tiny studio and brought home left-over paint from his day jobs. It was pretty early in his career that he decided black and white paint was the best way to portray New York and it’s brutal contrasts. “If I go back to my country I will begin to paint blue and pink,” he explains.

Suffice to say, it’s been a long, arduous climb and not one he likes to speak about for a long time, understandably, but eventually WK Interact found his way in New York, and London, and Paris, and Italy, and Sydney, and Japan…. With labor, persistence and luck one opportunity turned another. He doesn’t appear unduly proud that his work today is in demand. He is thankful that he shows in respected galleries, is featured in articles, videos, and he is continuously on the move.

(image WK Interact)

When looking at the rough times, he says, “Those limitations created what I did. That made me want to reverse it, to upgrade it – so I made myself do more. You can see the force in my work, that constant motion, the face. It is on the move, you can see the actual thing vibrating, and this has been my position, and it has been like this for the last 23 years. As far as what happened to me coming to the States, I don’t wish this for anybody. I think this was painful, and it will always be painful.”

WK Interact (photo Jaime Rojo)

Part 2 of this inteview continues tomorrow

1980’s New York Street Life (the MTV version) with Run DMC in “It’s Tricky”

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