KAWS Interviewed by Valérie Rousseau

Ahead of the opening of The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection, Senior Curator of the American Folk Art Museum Valérie Rousseau interviewed KAWS about his personal collection of over 3,000 works on paper by some 500 artists, the show, his collecting process, and more for the exhibition catalog.

Valérie Rousseau: If we go back to your memories as a child or a teenager, can you think of artists or art forms that you found particularly inspiring—or works you were compelled to possess—that later found their way into your collection? Which of these artists made a very strong impression?

KAWS: Of course, I was looking at graffiti when I was younger, and the impact it has on me is still strong—still something that is exciting to me. When I think about seeing photographs of some of the subway trains, that holds as much—if not more—importance as any other art. FUTURA is a good friend now and growing up I was inspired by the stuff he did—or ZEPHYR or DONDI—and more recent artists like WEST and the FC guys, too. Even local neighborhood kids when I was younger, like WHAT4. And then you get into all the different bridges that these artists made into other territories, like skateboard graphics, T-shirts, and album art. You like one graphic and then you start to realize that these other graphics you also like are actually made by the same person. Suddenly you start to realize that there are groups of people behind the things that you are drawn to, and it goes from there. I still operate in a similar way when I investigate the artists that I collect today.

One reason I collect ’70s and ’80s graffiti is because I grew up feeling so strongly about this work but not seeing it in museums in the ’90s and early 2000s. It came in and out of galleries, but I don’t think there were many cohesive collections formed. Now I figure I’m in a place where I can put one together and pass it on when the right situation presents itself. I like looking for the original works that created this culture. Whether it’s album art, magazine art, skateboard graphics—I find it really interesting that somebody can make something that takes on a life of its own and goes way beyond whatever the artist’s first intentions were.

You seem to be irritated by the question of art hierarchy, and stated the lack of critical writing about graffiti. These artists are not known for what they contributed individually, as if “it was all one nameless collective.” You have pointed out the way that art institutions missed an opportunity to explore the legacy and impact of these creators. Can you expand on this?

Unfortunately people are going to look at derivative objects influenced by graffiti instead of paying attention to the pioneers of that movement. People don’t realize there is a world to collect from and gather information from. Those works need to be gathered in order to at least form a base to start the conversation. Regardless of your take on graffiti, what other movement is really pervasive like that? It had such a global effect. The institutional art world is a relatively small bubble. Graffiti grew to influence contemporary visual culture worldwide. Here we are fifty years later, and there are still kids interested in this type of art long before they learn about a museum or a gallery. They meet up with a friend, and they paint. You also have the art of hip-hop flyers and all that stuff that PHASE 2, Buddy Esquire, and many others did. Corporate America is growing and feeding off that, so at the very least, people should get down to figuring out where it came from and who the innovators were. This was a huge driving art force.

Besides collecting graffiti artists, you have committed to significant acquisitions of works by self-taught artists on a scale that is not typical of many collectors in the United States. Not only do you seem to appreciate their inventive approach to art making, but you deconsecrate the importance of artistic training. Your support of various artistic languages, in a non-hierarchical way, is somehow political.

It’s a fact that you don’t need to go to school to make great work, but I never thought I was making a political act by collecting the art that I do. I just genuinely love the works I gravitate towards. Looking at a Susan Te Kahurangi King next to a Peter Saul, both from the 1960s—the aesthetic, the language is similar; both great, but they are creating in two completely separate worlds. Self-taught artists happen to be making some of the best work out there. Like Martín Ramírez, William Hall, Yuichiro Ukai, or Susan Te Kahurangi King. Those works are incredible; regardless of who made it, you can’t argue with the proof. It’s the work I keep returning to and thinking about.

What is the first work that you acquired?

When I was younger and doing graffiti, I would trade “black books” with other artists. They would draw in your book, and you would draw in their books. Sometimes that might go beyond a book thing into trading a small painting. That was some of the first art I owned by other artists.

One of the first pieces I bought from a gallery was in 2000. I got this Raymond Pettibon drawing, SWAK! One Sober Icy Kiss (1999), from David Zwirner. I’d been a fan of Pettibon for a while, and I bought this piece for myself for my birthday. Since “SWAK” is “KAWS” backwards, I saw it as a sign to pursue the purchase. The text in it is also great: “No love without fangs, no kiss without aftertaste.” At the time, it was just a purchase. I wasn’t thinking, “This is the first thing I’m buying for my collection,” but it turns out that it was.

One can see nuances between “accumulating” and “collecting.” When did you start looking at your acquisitions in terms of a collection? Do you remember a turning point in your activity?

There’s no distinction—I don’t think of it in that way. If anything, I kind of hate categories and labels. A lot of the works that I buy are part of my investigation of things. Sometimes I’m adding to a group of several works by one artist that I have already, because that new work represents a moment that isn’t in my collection; other times I buy anomalies—works I want to have around to investigate.

It’s one thing to look at something in a show. It’s another thing having it in your space for a couple years. You see how certain works can change with time. It can completely depend on the social climate, on whatever is going on in the world. Things jump out as being more important or less important.

It seems that beyond collecting the work of certain artists, you find strong visual connections with individual works. Even though you don’t necessarily seek to collect an artist’s full repertoire, you mentioned that in some cases you might want to complete an ensemble. For instance, you said: “That’s a great Wölfli, but I hope to eventually have smaller works that are going to inform it.”

Right. With an artist like Wölfli, I’m working with what’s available. There’s not an abundance to collect. Occasionally, I’ll see something that makes me think, “What do I need to sell in order to buy this?”— meaning selling my own work. Trust me, I would love to have all the best pieces from every artist, but I also like the small stuff, the notes, the ephemera that inform the other works. For instance, I really enjoy collecting Peter Saul’s early catalogs and invitations. I could show you boxes of graffiti ephemera, like Lee Quiñones’s Barbara Gladstone invitation from the ’80s or sign-in books from 51X gallery on the Lower East Side. I’m not actively seeking this work, but if it comes up, I’ll grab it. Before I could buy art, I bought books.

What kinds of books? Where do you find them?

Every kind of art book. I really like design and print applications, so my interests can stray in many directions. I collect black books like the ones I mentioned earlier. Sometimes artist’s sketchbooks—even from when they were in college with notes from class. One time I bought a book from the Mudd Club—it was the sign-in book used during the Beyond Words exhibition that Keith Haring curated. People signed in simply with their name and address—everyone from George Condo to Kim Gordon, the whole of downtown. But then it hits the Beyond Words exhibition, and you have pages of graffiti artists just drawing. Artists like FUTURA 2000, CRASH, and DAZE all made drawings in this book. It also has a nice marker portrait of Keith that Basquiat drew. When people learn that you collect certain things, offers start to come out of the woodwork.

These are chronicles of a community at a very particular moment. What do you think of this notion of the “masterpiece.” Do you believe in such a term?

Saying something is “the best” is so subjective. I see things get elevated and whatever you call the reverse of that by people who feel entitled to do so. I’m always thinking, “Who is this person?” I’m not collecting like that. I’m looking for what I feel is the right thing, and I’m not thinking these are the masterpieces. I’m not collecting trophies or trying to create a church environment; it’s more of a library. When you think of how artists, over decades, change and transition, you understand why it’s great to be able to look at all of this work in person—to see firsthand how work goes back and forth. Here, we’re sitting in front of a 1960 and a 1982 Peter Saul, and they couldn’t be more different. Peter revisits imagery a lot.

How does the collection intersect with your own artistic practice?

For me, collecting is always an interesting distraction from making work. Buying work, looking at other artists’ work, and getting lost in those things gets me out of my own space. And for that purpose, it’s a positive. Besides that, they all keep me company, honestly. For example in my home there’s Peter Saul’s Double de Kooning Duck (1979). I see it every morning, and it is one of my favorite paintings. It’s behind my kids at the breakfast table. That painting led me to buy Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Woman IV (1982). It’s fun to have Peter Saul interpreting a de Kooning painting next to Lichtenstein also interpreting a de Kooning painting. You couldn’t have more difference; they both make it their own. I like the idea that artists can make something, and then it’s out there in the world and part of everyone’s point of reference.

Your collecting activity is clearly one of many of your multifaceted creative endeavors. How do these works you collect serve as sounding boards for your artistic explorations?

It’s hard to know what makes you gravitate towards something. Sometimes it is a contrast to what I make or gives me other perspectives on making. I think of Robert Crumb: his whole career can exist within an eleven by fourteen scale. In one way or another, it can be a complete departure or a one-to-one inspiration that you see translated to my work. It can inform the work that I make. As an artist, intimately knowing the work that you collect is very different from looking at it in a gallery or a museum. When I am collecting for myself, I have to sell my own works so that I have money to buy works. It’s putting skin in the game. It is not just endlessly acquiring. Every dollar I have ever spent on art comes from earnings from my own work. When I’m in the studio after walking up to my office and painting so tight all day, it’s refreshing to see Peter Saul’s 1960 painting. You learn about the many trajectories. Helen Rae started making drawings when she was fifty. Hilma af Klint was actively pursuing a career as an artist when she was younger, and then she decided to put her works away in storage for twenty years. Artists exist in many ways, and some are conscious—or not at all conscious—about the art world, the market, audiences.

If we look at some themes represented by your collection, can we say that it engages primarily with American culture and its unconscious, aside from a few exceptions like Adolf Wölfli, Louis Wain, and Hilma af Klint?

Human culture, more than American culture. I don’t think regionally about the work I collect. But of course I have an interest in New York. A lot of the artists, whether it’s Anton van Dalen, Martin Wong, or Jane Dickson, find inspiration in the city itself. I feel like they’ve walked the same streets that I would eventually find my way to, and that is interesting to me. But I don’t think that reflects the majority of the collection. I look at artists from Japan, for instance, with the same appreciation as those in New York.

While your artistic practice is embedded in a vast community of peers, artists, collectors, gallerists, and museum professionals, your collecting practice seems to be a far more isolated or private process.

There’s no committee. I don’t check with anyone before buying something. I never thought about putting a show together like this one at The Drawing Center. I’m mostly private about what I collect aside from occasionally sharing stuff on Instagram. Once it becomes more public, I think that might take away from it. Curating this show is personal. I have put my own work out there for so many years, but this is a new type of exposure. This is sharing what I do in a different way. I mostly think of my collecting as research. It is a selfish way to live with and understand other art being made. Being with works day after day, looking at the differences between artists and the materials they each choose for communicating their thoughts is the most rewarding part of this.

At The Drawing Center, for the first time, you have an opportunity to give many artworks from your collection a full spatial deployment on such a different scale. Was this exercise illuminating?

I think I mostly realized I might own too much work. I often think about works hanging in rooms together in these imaginary spaces in my mind. When it comes to actually editing down to fit an actual space, I find it really difficult. In some ways wish I could curate several solo shows. I thought this show was going to be a much smaller group of artists—ten to fifteen. I thought that I could show more of how I look at things, but then it was too hard because there are so many artists I would like people to see. I’m not a curator.

How do you situate yourself within the long legacy of “artist-collector,” like Jean Dubuffet, André Breton, Warhol, or Jim Shaw?

It’s not something I think about. I’ve always had collecting inclinations, starting with stamps, comic books, toys. Actually, I like the feeling of the Roger Brown Study Center in Chicago. Because it is what it is. It feels like a personal space, filled with his things. It doesn’t matter that he has an African mask next to a Jim Nutt drawing. That’s the way he wanted to put it, and that’s what you’re getting.

In the central area of the first gallery, you will install two iterations of your studio display—the current one and the previous. These were displays set in your studio on the second floor, where you meet with visitors. There is a table with products you designed and other collaborations and a couch where people sit; it is hard to not see the couch for its reference to psychoanalysis, as you sit in your rolling chair. Are there themes and compositions that unify these works and guided your installation?

Early on, I was compelled to recreate the studio display as two installations, because in a way it shows how I collect. I can go from one thought to another. I wanted to have the two studio installations in the show because it allows the visitors to experience the way that I live with the work. I will try to place it identically.

There is not a real unity across your collection. I see such contrasts, for instance, between the irreverence of Peter Saul and the internalized scientific concepts in abstract form of Hilma af Klint and the incredible travelogue of Adolf Wölfli. What is the thread?

People making marks. There are a thousand ways to exist as an artist and many different trajectories. One can have institutional success, non-institutional success, commercial success, no commercial success, or be completely ignored. A lot of people tend to get focused on hierarchy—what is “art world,” what is “commercial world,” what is “outsider” or “self-taught.” I never look at things like this. I look at the work. On the wall, all together, next to each other—all that other stuff falls aside. Helen Rae does better than most trained artists. There is no lack of confidence, only intention. There is a clarity because she wasn’t dealing with the bullshit, the market. I found that refreshing. It is one thing to see one good drawing by Helen, but it is another thing to fully realize time after time how much it’s hitting. And how dedicated she is, how consistent she is. There are forty-eight of her drawings in the show that are great. You have seen my office upstairs: if I have more options to look at, I am happier.

Are you interested in bringing back into this exhibition space the initial connection you had with the works—replaying that experience?

No, this is only this moment, and it’ll be what it is at this moment, and then tomorrow is another one. The pressure I feel is that I don’t want to do a disservice to any artist that I include or don’t include. I want the show to be an uplifting experience. It’s presumptuous for me to put artists in a room together and say that “this is how I see things” without knowing how one might like or dislike the context. I’m approaching this the way I approach doing shows with my own work: I try to pull the works together as much as possible, knowing the space. And also allowing an openness, knowing that things change when you’re standing one-to-one with something.

Is The Way I See It a corrective lens for your ideal art history book? Or rather this artist-collector perspective that you wish to put at the forefront of the visitor’s experience?

Honestly, I don’t know what the balance is. I am not calculating—female artists, male artists, contemporary artists, illustrators. There are definitely things of great importance in this show that are not considered in the art history books or in the contemporary art world. There are a lot of different things going on in the show, but I see it as a starting point or a collection of points of entry for anyone who is interested in delving further.