Interview

DC: Walking around your studio, the kind of creative genius that comes to mind isn't Louis Quatorze but Willy Wonka. Do you remember that movie [Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, 1971]?

JK: You know, I did see Willy Wonka a couple of times, but it was never my favorite film.

DC: What was?

JK: It depends how young I was. I always liked Disney films. To this day I think Bambi is great. But Willy Wonka was one that I never liked so much.

DC: What didn't you like about it? I mean, there's just so much-especially the chocolate room. Just walking around there, it's an incredible dream machine. All these various stages and rooms and people and things going on . . . It's amazing.

JK: I don't know, I guess there was some aspect of the movie that I didn't connect to completely. I don't know if I found it scary . . . I do like films that connect, that are positive . . . and I don't really eat a lot of chocolate myself.

DC: It's not necessarily a feel-good film.

JK: No. When I got a little older, I remember seeing my first Bond film with my father, and I enjoyed that. It was good, Goldfinger.

DC: Oh yeah, of course.

JK: I show that film to my kids today, and they talk about Goldfinger getting sucked out of the plane.

DC: Oh, right, right. What's the crazy one, where somebody's forced to swallow one of the exploding air pellets and he becomes inflatable?

JK: I didn't see it. But that's good. Appropriate.

DC: You love inflatable objects, that's for sure. Do you still shop a lot for toys?

JK: No. When I was younger I used to. I would shop on 14th Street in New York and I'd be looking for a lot of visual information that was product-oriented. But over the years I became more involved in connecting to things that are archetypal and profound, things that connect you with human history. I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

DC: Let me ask you about the train-hanging-from-a-crane thingamajig planned for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. How's that going?

JK: The train, the sculpture, a public piece, will be created for outside LACMA-for what they call the campus there. We finished our phase one and phase two engineering, which means we're ready to build. All the designs for how to make something like that actually function and be able to be maintained and workable are finished, so it will hopefully be built in about three years. We're very optimistic.

DC: It would be good to have something like that in the L.A. skyline because there's nothing there.

JK: What I like about the piece is that it functions like a kind of European town center to rally people around. I think philosophically it brings people into contact with their own sense of mortality. It's very visceral-a kind of sensual, sexualized performance that takes place with this powerful steam engine starting up and running and building momentum.

DC: So the wheels will turn?

JK: Well, everything that a real train does this train will do-but it's hanging, you know, facing straight down to the ground. It'll start heating up and steam will leak from one valve and then you'll hear, like, a ca-chunk and it'll go into a gear. And then when finally it gets close to performance time you'll hear a ding, ding, ding, and all the patterns of a bell ringing that a real train would do before pulling out of a station. Then the wheels will slowly start turning, building a moment like an orgasmic plateau, woo, woo, woo-the same curve, acceleration, every second going faster than the moment before until it's at full speed going 80 miles an hour, then it will decline until the last drippage of smoke comes out.

DC: Right. And then it asks for a cigarette?

JK: Yeah, well . . .

DC: It's tempting to look at it as commentary on car culture, in the way that public transportation has been sidelined for the last 60 years in Los Angeles.

JK: I wasn't really thinking about that, but . . . there are other powers that have replaced steam, but still it's a magnificent machine. Very, very powerful.

DC: It's also more dangerous and less playful than other things of yours. I know there's a lot of playfulness associated with it, but there's a visceral kind of dread to it, too-if you're standing underneath it, for example. What is it being suspended from?

JK: A crane.

DC: No, I know, but like some sort of cable?

JK: Yeah. It's suspended from cables, and it has the counterbalance, the weights. All these things are really very engineered. But there is that sense of awe and wonderment.

DC: I was just talking about you with a friend, about how you and Richard Serra seem on opposite ends of the spectrum sometimes, but you're both kind of in that steelworkers union now.

JK: Well, I thought about Richard when I came up with the idea for the piece, especially looking at the balance in the back and how much weight we would need to have there. It seems like a nice dialogue with Richard's work, considering mass and weight.

DC: I'm constantly having this discussion with people about your work because they always assume that you think it's funny. People think your work is tongue-in-cheek and I'm always trying to explain to them that you don't feel that way about it. Do you feel a constant battle to explain this to people?

JK: Sometimes I see irony in the pieces, but it's not the intention. I've always loved surrealism and Dada and Pop, so I just follow my interests and focus on them. When you do that, things become very metaphysical. People have different definitions of irony. I always think of irony as basically something that's kind of surprising, where you can maybe see an unforeseen connection to something.

DC: If you say you like something ironically, is it that you really like it ironically? Or do you like it and not want to admit it? Or do you not like it and not want to admit it?

JK: I agree that people have different ideas, emotional ideas, of what certain words mean, and they think of irony as something that's more associated with being cynical-it's kind of a put-down. I really believe that the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st century, where we are today, is about acceptance, and not about judgment. I don't think irony is about judgment; I think irony is something like, "Oh, that's interesting," because it's not something I think one starts off to achieve. I think it's just something that presents itself. And if it does, I find it's usually optimistic, not negative in its terms.

DC: People would be very at home grouping you with Richard Prince, for example.

JK: Well, Richard and I have known each other for years-I respect Richard's work, and Richard himself, a lot. Richard's work has developed more from the position of appropriation, and so appropriation has a little darker side to it, because it's more about theft, where my work's more associated to the ready-made, where it's something that preexists.

DC: You've both been sued for copyright stuff.

JK: Oh, yeah. We come from a very similar tradition of working with things in the external world. We've known each other since the '70s. But I would say that Richard's work has always had a certain emotional feel to it and mine has always had its own certain emotional feel to it, but we're both engaged in this dialogue about the external world.