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ACT 4 WK INTERACT ACT4_intro_B.indd 7
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INTRO STREET-ART INSTALLATION FIGURANT ILLUSTRATION WK-OUTFIT ART WORK WK-STUDIO INDEX ACT4_intro_B.indd 8
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010–025 026–095 096–151 152–173 174–217 218–237 238–289 290–311 312–318 ACT4_intro_B.indd 9
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WK ACT 4 INTRO BY ISABEL KIRSCH
WK Interact’s iconic black and white street art — human figures engaged in some type of extreme motion or emotion, running, jumping, screaming, struggling to escape — has forever pierced our memory of the Lower East Side and SOHO streets during the 1990s and the early 2000s. His unique murals reflect the feeling of downtown New York back then and our recollection of it, not only because they were so precisely integrated within the street scenery, but also because there was a lot of his work on view.
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The illusion of the motion of the “figurines,” as he calls them, is created with a subtle technique that involves many steps, from storyboarding to photography to painting, mostly in black and white. For WK the impermanent, multi-dimensional surfaces of the ever-hustling and bustling inner city are the ideal backdrop to bring his images to life. What differentiates WK from other street artists, aside from his unique visual style, is his intention to connect and interact with the environment and the people. He added “interact” to his WK moniker long before it became synonymous with digital media and the Internet. For him, the credit of his work belongs to the environment — that is, the city, the people and the surroundings they co-create from moment to moment. He has never regarded himself as a creator or even an “artist,” but rather a photographer, storyteller, architect and craftsman, depending on what he is up to. When WK says he is “extremely attached to the past,” he refers to his passion for history, causality and synchronicity, his fascination with hand-made objects and the ever-changing nature of things. Looking at a building, he imagines what it was like when it was first built, and the people involved in the construction of it. He contemplates the many causes and conditions that came together to make a structure the way it is now, in this very moment. By painting his figures on the walls and doors of buildings he honors the craftsmen who originally shaped it. For him, painting on a façade means recycling the space and giving it new life. At the same time, he feels that he is connecting with the past and becoming part of if. The site — its structure, cracks and ledges, a rusty nail, a gutter, eleven layers of posted bills, a trash can — all these elements become part of the art work. Then add another
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essential ingredient: the people, the city-dwellers and passersby. The daily grind, their everyday struggles, chasing their dreams and surviving in the mad chaos that is the city of New York are the lifeblood and inspiration of WK’s vivid imagery. “I have come to realize that the most important thing is not actually my work,” he says, “but interacting with the space and giving back this energy that New York gave to me, expressing the intensity of living in New York. I simply interact with the people, aiming to trigger an emotion stimulated by their own perception, without requiring them to read something or interpret something that is artistically complicated. The beauty of my image is not the image itself, but the location. I didn’t create the location and it doesn’t belong to me. So why should I say this is ‘my art’? Instead, I say: This is what I do. If you have the time, take a look and see what happens. And if you feel something, remember that emotion for yourself.” The streets provided WK with the open and democratic space he needed to realize his vision; something the art world could never have offered for him. “The art world only speaks to itself”, he says. “I want to interact with the world.” Growing up in the picturesque town of Saint Paul de Vences, WK had been surrounded by the arts and famous artists throughout his childhood. Both his parents were visual designers and he learned drawing at an early age. From there he developed a fascination for the human body in motion. He would spend hours in dance schools sketching images of dancers rehearsing. Creating the illusion of the human body in motion in a static image became his mission, and after years of experimenting he devised the technique of stretching photos on a Xerox machine and applying layers of other images. When he was satisfied with the result he wanted to bring his figures to life and create a multi-dimensional effect in the context of an urban environment. He figured the best way to show the motion of a person running down the street would be to use a street corner. Back then, he had no idea that street art existed as a genre. One day he had the opportunity to share his book with a well-known art critic. Looking at his work, she compared him with other artists like Futura,
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Richard Hambleton, Keith Haring and Messenger. Not familiar these names, he started researching and discovered artists who, like him, were using different approaches to capturing bodies in motion. This was a key moment for him. On the one hand, he realized that he was part of a movement and he began to feel its influence; on the other hand, he found that his technique differentiated him from everyone else, and that gave him a strong motivation.
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WK arrived in New York City in the early 1990s. On a previous visit as a teenager, he had been captivated by the intense energy of the city, and this time he came to stay. He didn’t speak any English and he didn’t have any contacts, but he had a vision and was determined to stay. During the day he picked up renovation and construction jobs and at night he went around on his bike putting his paintings on façades and doors, or gluing black and white wheat pastes whenever a more swift action was required. In the 1990s people cared less about what was going on in the street. The Lower East Side and Soho neighborhoods were run-down and disorganized, and rents were low. He went on like that for about five years without telling anyone about his nocturnal activities, not even his friends. His signature was the WK tag handle and the enlarged graphic representation of his fingerprint. “I didn’t want to reveal myself,” he remembers. “I didn’t want people to judge me. Actually I didn’t even think people were noticing my work, or that I had any kind of impact.” One day in the mid-90s WK was sitting on a bench across from one of his recently installed images, contemplating his next steps. He felt he was ready to get feedback from the public and ready to reveal his identity. The New York Times popped into his mind and he thought that it would be the right newspaper to review his work; but he didn’t want to reach out. The next day, he received a phone call from the Times inviting him for an interview. Talking to The Times he learned that the newspaper had received many letters from people inquiring about him and his street art. It had never occurred to him how impactful his work could be. The Lower East Side had felt like a village to him and he hadn’t considered the exposure of his images to mil-
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lions of people, including tourists from all over the world. The Times article from 1996 calls him “one of the most visible painters in town.” The same article mentions a “newcomer” who is putting up Andre the Giant stencils all over downtown. WK and Shepard Fairey, the originator of the Andre the Giant icon, became collaborators on many projects all over the world, both indoor installations and joint walls on the streets. Once WK’s identity was out in the open, attention was on him and offers started to trickle in. He wanted to take his work to the next level but carefully considered his options. Making money was not his primary goal; he wanted to continue what he was doing, but doing it legally and having the means to experiment and evolve. Because his work is based on human motion, the logical next step for him was to work with athletes. WK has always been fascinated with athletes and their ability to push themselves past their limits. Big brands like Nike approached him but he was very cautious not to be turned into a brand ambassador. His first large-scale collaboration was with the boxer Prince Naseem for Adidas, creating a huge billboard in London. He also worked with Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and had recently started a project with Oscar Pistorius, which was never finished due to the athlete’s unfortunate circumstances. WK felt that working with a professional athlete, “someone who has as much energy as a building,” as he says, and having the freedom to work on a scale a hundred times larger, would amplify the impact of his images. Every single frame of these athletes’ energetic and skillful moves and intensity are based on his own photography. WK needs to control every single element of the process: storyboards, styling, props and wardrobe, directing and shooting. Initially he will immerse himself in studying the athlete’s every move in detail. At the shoot he will direct his models to act with maximum intensity. Being able to create bigger and bolder art was one of the challenges WK set before himself. Another objective was to reproduce the effects he achieved on the street in an indoor space. So he began experimenting with three-di-
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mensional surfaces and visual elements to capture that outdoor energy, allowing him to create portable art on wood and canvas.
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WK was always fascinated by everyday objects such as tools and things with wheels. His work includes many sculptural pieces made of simple objects that he has turned into something at once outrageous/dangerous, and playful/humorous: a skateboard tuned up with a pipe bomb, or a painter’s brush with a hidden switchblade, or suitcases carrying a bible and a set of explosives. The skateboard is WK’s invitation to today’s kids to blow themselves up. “That’s what they are doing anyway,” he says. “They prefer to play video games and are concerned with fashion brands rather than paying attention to the issues in our society. We are raising a generation of psychopaths.” The painter’s brush is a homage to the brush as a tool in general. It’s also a hack, an invention that may become handy for self-protection, especially when painting in illegal spaces. It could also be an object invented by a clever convict to help him escape from prison. Confinement and escape have been recurring themes in WK’s work throughout his entire career. The suitcase sculpture is a provocative reminder of the damage religion has caused throughout the centuries. Although WK doesn’t want to be associated with political activism, most of his work aims to establish an awareness around political and social issues. Perhaps most notably, his image of a soldier desperately tearing his uniform to reveal the message “bring me back” sends a clear message to the public to wake up and the face the senselessness of the war in Iraq. As a motion enthusiast, WK continues to push himself further and further. Lately he has begun to incorporate 3-D imagery into his work, mostly to focus on emotional facial expression. His murals for Project Brave in New York, for which he had New York firemen reenact the struggle to save lives at Ground Zero, included black and white photography, as did the Black Palace mural in Mexico City erected on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican government granted him access to their archives, which gave him the opportunity to utilize rare photo materials that had never been published before.
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This year WK will set up a monumental installation in Normandy, France to honor the fallen soldiers of D-Day, a subject that feels close to his heart since he was born in Normandy and has chosen the U.S. as his adopted country. Through these larger public projects, WK intends to widen his audience to include people of all ages and backgrounds. “I want to reach out and interact with people who have no affiliation with street art, especially the younger and older generations,” he says. “As an artist you can make a statement that people pay attention to and that may impact and open their way of living. But mostly I think we are here as human beings to give back to the people.” Isabel Kirsch, NYC, March 2014
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POETICS IN E-MOTION: AROUND THE CORNER WITH WK BY CARLO MCCORMICK
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WK still recalls the moment of epiphany when he figured out the dynamism of wrapping an image around the corner of a building, how that could set loose a sense of motion as if it were choreographed in sequential frame, and how when he showed the effect to his artist father his response was “so what?” WK 360, a midcareer survey that promises a fuller picture of the broad vista by which this artist plays in and with the world, helps determine just what the big deal was. In a fine art universe where the sum of pictures all comes down to a kind of nature morte, WK is about the life still unfolding rather than the still life. Something of a frustrated filmmaker, WK’s hybrid convergence of media, ranging throughout his street work and studio practice from photography (the basis for his paintings) and painting to sculpture, collage, graphic design, muralism, street art and graffiti, constitutes some virtual equivalent of moving pictures. It is not simply the leaping and surging figures, the blur of transit as if Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies were animated into liquidity, that marks the palpable sense of passage in WK’s full throttle locomotion—the transposition of space and time is situational, the context of placement and the interaction with place itself the engine by which his work comes alive. Engendered by his adopted city of New York and (though he now works on projects around the world) given for decades to its urban maelstrom as if an ongoing love letter to the cacophony itself, WK’s public art cannot stand still or keep quiet for the simple reason that the world around it is no more capable of playing dead either. The painting itself is merely the result of his hand, but as a highly emotive and psychological art it is ignited by the street, the motion of all the vehicles and people passing by, the perceptual exchanges it makes with the temporal vicissitudes of all this human traffic, and the particularities of the architecture it engages. At once about place and passage, the latter though tied to the former is itself the transience of location’s fixedness; WK conjures a kind of psychogeography, a mapping of territory based on perception and its emotional topography. So many who work on the street today do so as urban guerillas plotting strategies of engagement as points of assault, WK in comparison seems more like a gardener, surveying the manmade landscape to decide
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what to plant where, each work almost like a seed that must feed off all around it to nurture and grow. But it is not about prettiness, or even so simple as beautification. Considered in relation to his studio work, where violence, sexuality, fetish, terror and the devolutionary descent of dehumanization lurk in passages of brutal irony that edge towards sarcasm, the benevolence so evident in WK’s public art must also be viewed as coming
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from a position where creativity constitutes a kind of critique. WK’s romance with the city is not the abiding comfort of an old lover but the frisson of new flirtation constructed of a constantly rejuvenating sense of discovery. He is a wanderer in the tradition of those early 19th Century city strollers, the flaneurs, whose heightened sense of observation, perpetual leisure and profound social alienation was given poetics by Baudelaire, who follows in the footsteps of those 1960’s Situationists in their derive, or “drift,” where all around can be discovered as part and parcel of the greater delusion we know as the society of the spectacle.
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WK BY MARC + SARA SCHILLER, WOOSTER COLLECTIVE
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The love affair we have for Lower Manhattan and the passion we have for the work of WK is synonymous, and impossible for us to consider separately. It was in the late 90’s that we first moved onto Wooster Street. At that time, walking the streets of a pre-gentrified Lower East Side, East Village and Soho meant that you were certain to encounter one of WK’s striking blackand-white billboard size portraits stretched across the facades of buildings both tall and wide. WK’s work is one of seduction. Whether it’s a sexy and sleek model dressed in leather or a boxer taking a blow to the head, WK’s work is always iconic and often erotic. His beautiful portraits of the South Sudanese model Alek Wek integrated into the side of an old gas-station on Prince and Lafayette were for many years the unofficial gateway to Soho. Experiencing the visual power and beauty of the work made it clear that WK, and the city itself, were a perfect match. One of our first face-to-face encounters with WK took place one summer afternoon in 2005, when a young fifteen year-old aspiring street artist from London came to visit us at our Wooster Street loft. He quickly stated that the primary motivation for his trip across the Atlantic (which was a birthday gift from his parents) was to visit WK’s popular storefront shop on Stanton Street. Truth was, we ourselves had not yet gone there, so we all wandered over together. As luck would have it, WK himself was there that afternoon. When we introduced WK to our young artist friend, he graciously took him under his wing and methodically explained the imagery, symbolism, and technique used in his work. That afternoon we learned that WK chooses his spots carefully and spends tireless energy on making extremely site-specific pieces for each location. His focus on movement of the human body, and its translation to the energy of the city, can be seen in every piece. This first interaction we had with WK was the beginning of a long and very strong friendship between us. In 2006, we invited WK to participate in our 11 Spring Street project. We had just been given keys to enter the empty building and wanted WK to set the tone of the show by place a large painting on the massive ground floor wall.
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WK said he would meet us at 9am on a Saturday morning and, true to his word, he was waiting for us with all of his materials. WK began to work his magic inside of 11 Spring Street with wheatpastes and paint. Accompanying him were two stunningly beautiful female assistants and his ever-present videographer. We would soon learn that this is how WK rolled. Not bad we thought. When WK finished his piece it spanned across twenty feet, was seventeen feet high and took up most of the wall. Clearly, WK had set a very high standard for all the other artists that would follow him over the coming weeks. The piece was classic WK—large, energetic, and superbly made. Upon seeing it, we were sure of one thing—everyone who walked into 11 Spring Street would know that this was not going to be your usual jam session. The bar had been set. A few years later we had an opportunity to work with WK again during the Re:Form School project led by Yosi Sergant. We were asked to help curate art for the courtyard walls of a defunct Catholic School in the middle of Nolita. Once WK saw the space, he turned the project from a simple 20 feet mural into a 360 degree masterpiece. We went with WK to the Harlem Success Academy where he set up a camera to photograph twelve ten-year-old students. Minutes into the photo shoot, WK had the kids hamming it up for the camera and really grasping the power of movement in photography and art. The photographs of these students were then placed larger-than-life into the courtyard mural. When the students arrived with their families for the opening, their jaws dropped. The validation and dignity they felt seeing themselves inside of a major artwork was powerful and emotional.
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Our friendship with WK has grown and evolved over the years as we’ve seen him take projects to Europe and Mexico. WK never thinks small: his work is larger than life and he constantly strives to go bigger. He is relentless in his drive for perfection and to push himself to create more complex works of art. Always with an eye on quality and an integrated story, WK never fails to reach great heights in impact and scale.
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PATRICK MCNEIL, FAILE
Moving to New York in 1997, I found my first job on Canal Street at Pearl Paint. While walking to and from lunch everyday, I was captured by the energy of the streets and what I saw there. Amongst the graffiti was a small group of artists that were doing something completely different—fresh and visceral. WK was one of the artists that caught my attention from the beginning with his large-scale black and white “interactions.” His life-size portraits of men in aggressive actions captivated me unlike anything I’d ever seen. It opened my eyes to a new way of engaging the public through art. WK was also the first artist that I engaged with while I saw him in the act of working on the street. I introduced myself and he replied in kind. He was very gracious in taking the time to greet me and tell me about his work. It was shortly after that I realized the scope of his work—in the late 90’s, WK ruled New York. His work was up in the biggest spots and he controlled the streets more than any other artist working on the street at that time. His energy was something to aspire to. One day in the summer of 1998 on a lunch break from a summer internship, I ran into Eddy high on a roof top working on a large mural at Spring and Lafayette. I was so inspired and determined, I made a vow to focus all my energy on the streets that summer and to quit my internship. It was Eddy that pointed me in the right direction, giving us tips on how to make the glue and what type of brush and paper to use. He encouraged us every step of the way. Fifteen years after meeting Eddy, I am honored to be writing this intro for him. WK is one of the true original French/New York artists to push the urban art form and inspire a generation to take it to the next level and for that I’m forever grateful.
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