Graffiti Artist Kaws Takes it to the Next Level

Kaws

Kaws' real name is Brian, and he's from Jersey City, now residing in Williamsburg. He declines to give his full name, assuring me that it is, essentially, "Brian Irish." Tall and quite thin, he was part of a white minority at St. Anthony's, a Catholic high school known for producing basketball stars?making Kaws' graduation at the rock-bottom of his class all the more impressive. A St. Anthony's guidance counselor told him not to bother applying to four-year colleges. Though Brian was known at the school for his pen and his wit?he tells me wising off in class and designing activities-schedule pamphlets were the only activities that earned him enough respect (from students and teachers, respectively) to get by?nobody thought to send him to art school. Not long after graduation, he thought of it himself and applied to the School of Visual Arts. He went the commercial-design route, because "there's no way my parents would've paid for the fine art [program]."

At SVA, Kaws discovered a talent for realistic oil painting. His very first attempt in the medium, a still-life, looks like a carefully lit photograph. He thought his career path was set, even though throughout college Kaws was spending entire weeknights bombing along the Major Deegan, and weekends often found him painting legal graffiti works on volunteered walls in Soho and Harlem. His two worlds merged when a graf associate gave Kaws a little treasure?the key to every bus-shelter and phone-kiosk light box in New York City?and told him, "have fun."

Kaws' focus by this time (he was almost 22) had moved from his tag to his iconic filigree?an x-eyed "sperm-and-crossbones." A stint working for Disney had introduced him to the miraculous flatness of cell-animation paint. Kaws started using it to paint the icon on ads he'd steal and take back to his studio. His logo became a cuddly invader masking models' faces, wrapping its tentacle around or even through their bodies. Then Kaws would put the refinished work back where he'd found it, and lock it up with his key.

There's a show of such retouched Kaws works on display at Magidson Gallery through March 15 (41 E. 78th St., betw. Park & Madison Aves., 288-0666). They've been shown at Colette Gallery in Paris, the New Museum in Soho and out in Seattle, where several were sold to Microsoft employees.

Kaws has been flown to London, Hong Kong and, repeatedly, Japan, where among his high-profile collectors is clothing designer Jun Takahashi, who put the Kaws logo on a full line of extremely high-end streetwear (right down to pajamas and slippers covered with thousands of tiny sperm-and-crossbones) for the spring 2000 line of his company, Under Cover. In most of the cities he's visited, Kaws has managed to break into public-space ad frames and do his thing. Several fashion photographers are Kaws fans, including David Sims, who sent the artist an original print of one of his shots of Kate Moss for Calvin Klein for him to work on. Yves St. Laurent included a Kaws interpolation in the photo book, Forty Years of Creation 1958-1998.

His biggest ad works go for about $6500, but Kaws assures me he hasn't made any money yet, and is in fact deeply in debt. A quick rundown of his expenses backs up the claim. Much of his international success has been on the barter system, leaving Kaws with some really nice clothes and seriously maxed-out credit cards. But as he's only 25 and having a great time, it hardly seems to matter. His home studio is so close to the river that you don't see the Williamsburg pier from his windows, only water and the Manhattan skyline. The day I visit is snowy; we sit and drink tea in front of those big-ass windows, watching twilight fall on the city side. Later, over there, Kaws is delighted to discover the new Benetton campaign, featuring portraits of death row inmates. He says part of the purpose of his icon is to evoke death "in the most friendly, happy way."

It takes a few hours of us talking for the wiseguy to come out?he's an amazingly sweet, solicitous interview subject. It's only once we get to know each other a little bit that Kaws lets go with some cutting humor about the excesses of the art-collector world, the vanities of fashion cliques. It's nice to learn he hasn't been sucked in just because he's been embraced. Being from New Jersey, I find, helps keep one down-to-earth.

There's also a hiphop element in Kaws' cool. His unblinking response to his illegal art's penetration of various far-flung spheres is one example. Another is the way he plays art and commerce off each other without presenting it as an either/or situation. Most artists who comment on advertising, it seems, are hostile to it?Kaws is an unabashed fan of the campaigns he fucks with. Though he doesn't listen to rap, and says he had almost nothing in common with the artists he used to paint with under the ramp connecting the Holland Tunnel to the Jersey Turnpike, having honed his craft down there has clearly shaped him. Most undeniably hiphop is Kaws' lack of concern about the possibility of the money people in the trendy circles where he's a hit moving on, completely and quickly, like they tend to. He believes it's his skills, above all else, that make him who he is.

For our q&a, I tried to get a sense of where Kaws' head is at during his hot moment, and get a bead on where he's planning to take it.

Compared to graffiti, what you're doing now isn't all that confrontational, not as transgressive.

Yeah, 'cause I always felt that advertisers use the same tactics as graffiti artists?competing for space. But people just accept advertising. They don't question it. "Hey I woke up this morning and a banner covers my window. It's for Calvin Klein!" They don't think so much about it. Whereas if there's a little tag [on their building] they freak out and call their super.

So you're sort of piggybacking on advertisers' legitimacy.

How can advertisers really pass judgment on what I'm doing when they've already taken the bigger space before me and done the exact same thing?

Well, I'd argue with that if you hadn't already shown me that the advertisers love you.

At first I thought they were gonna hate me. I thought there'd be a lynch mob.

Why do you think there's been the opposite reaction?

It's common sense. Bottom line: their stuff is seen more. People look and pay attention to it, and it's still their ad. It's not like the advertisements had anything to do with the product in the first place. It's still their ad, with their name, but now it's hanging in a gallery. It's a month of display that they didn't have to pay for. I'm also taking these campaigns and pausing them. Every day there's all these ads that come out, campaigns all over the world and when they're done, they're done. But what I'm doing is cataloguing them, keeping them?they're going into collections where they'll exist permanently.

As a painter who can do a lot of different things, how long do you see yourself doing these?

I really enjoy it. It sounds funny because it's all the same imagery, but when the new season comes and there's new ads out, I'm eager to go get them and work on them as soon as possible. So I can't say. I never thought I'd be doing it this much... The concept keeps growing and growing.

You said something about 3-D work.

Yeah, I'm trying to get together some stuff to do some sculpture work. It'll be taking the same ideas as what I'm doing?taking advertisements and kinda claiming them, turning people's things into my things. It's along that line, just a whole new genre, new outlets. I don't really want to talk about it until it's out there and you walk into it.

So your sculptures will be outdoor, out in public, before they're in a gallery?

No, you'll have to walk into it in a gallery. Putting ads up in the street, and letting workers get them, letting people get them?the majority of my work has been just cast off to sea. And there's no way I can afford to just cast off giant sculptures. If I had unlimited budgets, I'd be doing stuff like that every day. Just do these really high-end Duratrans [transparent prints for lightboxes] and put them up at bus stops for the sake of one afternoon. But to print the Duratrans for a bus stop is probably about 500, 600 dollars.

A lot of shit I want to do, I just can't afford. I want to make big prints of the photographs of the [bus ad] stuff from the corner, and put [the photo] in that corner booth. So at the bus stop, you'd be looking at a giant photo of the bus stop with the piece that was in there last time. So it could be summertime with a big winter shot.

I'm actually gonna do something like that. But that stuff just kills you, financially. Once I have the image, though, it's really kinda worth it. Same thing with the paintings. It's not like I love losing paintings. There's been ones where I've been like, "Ah, no, ah...fuckit-don't-think-put-it-up." So I put it in and lock it up and I'm just like, "Fuck," regretting it. But the street image is forever. I have the transparency and I can get it in a book, get it into people's houses. New outlets. Just like the way I jump on the opportunity to do a corner, because a lot of people see it, I find galleries just as good. It's a new kind of person and they're looking in a different way. If it were up to me I'd do everything at the same time. Just hit everybody, through magazines, galleries, books, street work, whatever. Fake tv commercials.

It seems like for career purposes you have to move out of the streets and into the galleries.

Not necessarily. A lot of the street work makes the other stuff valid. The show [at Magidson] is little artifacts of street stuff, part of a bigger process that's going on. So I think if one side stopped, the other would be lacking. There's a dynamic between them. Like, I know the workers?the phone booth workers and the bus stop workers. I've talked to those guys, I know their time schedules and everything. Just the idea of those guys driving past the New Museum and seeing all this shit lit up behind glass. When I talked to those guys anonymously they were like, "We're gonna lay a fucking beating on this guy Kaws when we find him."

How'd you get on the topic of yourself?

First I started asking questions like, "Oh, that's interesting, are those Duratrans?" I was just amusing myself. I was on my bike, uptown, and I talked to them in a few different places. They all know the work. I'd be asking questions but really just telling them. Like, "Oh, that looks like it's 26-by-50 inches?" Just stupid facts that I should not know, about the printing processes on the poster?it's kind of intense printing that they do, and different companies use different methods. So I'd start asking these guys these technical questions, then bust out with the questions like, "So what's this cartoony guy I'm seeing, this 'Kaws' guy?" That's when the attitude in them would change. In one conversation they must have said, "We're gonna lay a beating on that guy," at least 10 times.

I tried to buy one [of the ads I painted on] from a worker once, and he wouldn't sell it to me. He was like, "I'm keeping it for evidence." Supposedly they try to build a case against a guy for when they catch him. I tried to give him a couple hundred dollars, because I saw him taking it out, but he was dead set on keeping it for evidence. I walked away feeling really fucking bad for the guy. He could've had a bigger collection of my stuff than anybody in the world, if he would just keep them and keep his mouth shut. If he was just like, "I don't know, boss."

I see what you mean about the dynamic.

For me there's a lot of fun in it, wondering what's going on in these guys' heads. And then there's the fashion designers. Now I know a little bit, but when I was first putting these out there, I knew they were reaching people?I just didn't know who they were reaching and how they were affecting them. I was super-curious about it. Photographers like David Sims?I'm in awe of the work that they do. It's so much a part of what I've been doing for the past few years and what I've been seeing. If he shot every campaign on the street, I would do so much more work than I'm doing! The images are so great. For me to meet him and to get actual photos?it's like being a baseball player and meeting Babe Ruth, having him sign your baseball.

Is your 3-D work going to involve the same sort of crossing over and transgression?

The exhibition I'm doing is gonna be in Tokyo, in Harajuku, which is one of the main shopping districts. We're in the process of sorting it out. I'm gonna be taking the essence of Tokyo, of that culture at the moment, and just fucking with it.

You mean their hip, kitschy, shopping culture that you're tapped into?

I'm gonna just re-serve it to them in a way that they'll be like... They're gonna innocently, unsuspectingly walk into the gallery, and then never be able to see the kind of images they've known for years the same way again.