Interview

M: Does leaving New York change your art?

KW: That type of process becomes the work in many ways-physically removing yourself from what your work was based on before. By and large what I'd been doing was mining the streets of African America, using a sort of urban vernacular. That changes radically when you remove yourself physically, especially around the world.

M: Manhattan seems pretty developed, you know what I mean? Like it has peaked in culture. The Village Voice called it McHattan. It's just become impossible for young, creative artists to live in New York.

KW: Where do you find it most fruitful to work?

M: I think traveling really helps. I know some musicians who have studios in Trinidad. There's a collective of artists and painters there now who went to Central Saint Martins College [in London] with me. They live there and make art. It's neat to see that-[people] not led by money or pretentiousness. It's a small community, but you really have the space to observe and digest the culture. You go to a place where social commentary is rare and important and you can serve people. That's what's inspiring to me-finding someplace where people haven't already seen themselves in a certain light.

KW: Yeah, I know.

M: You create that light, you create that visual or image.
In America, everything has been done. We've had everything. And now we're rerunning what's already been done.

KW: Right, recycling. The recycled object.

M: Exactly! I performed at a show at the MoMA. There was this big dinner there, and I was seated in this hall with the mayor of New York and all these extremely wealthy art-
supporting and art-buying people. There was a piece of work hanging in the hall-it was a fan. This fan was supposed to swing by the momentum of its own propeller. So, while we were having dinner, the fan was stopped, and the guy next to me, a curator at P.S.1, said, "Look, this is what art symbolizes today." Like, that piece of art is supposed to be moving, but just to have dinner we've stopped the art. That's what New York is like today. You can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.

KW: I think so, too. There's a freshness. I remember being in West Africa and thinking about my father's country-he's from Nigeria-and I was there, opening up a studio, doing a lot of street casting, stopping people, and there was this film crew with me because we were doing a documentary on my process, and I was contrasting the experience I had there with the experience I had doing the exact same street casting in places like the Fulton Street Mall, in Brooklyn. And it's amazing how, in New York, there is almost a feeling of entitlement by the public-this very palpable lack of surprise at being stopped in the street and being asked to be the subject of a 12-foot monumental painting. I think part of that is mediated by a very televisual sense of instant celebrity, something that's sort of "just add water"-an age where reality television mediates the way that we see new faces entering our lives. Whereas when I was in Nigeria, in places like Lagos and Calabar, there was a very ineffable exchange where these guys were really curious but also so far removed from this artificial environment that I was creating. It gave something new to the work. In some ways, there is a look in the paintings that seems a bit more fragile.

M: It's like cinema, when you put someone onscreen who's never been on before. You show it to them and say, "This is you. This is what you look like on a 60-by-60-foot screen." It's a different understanding of art. Take India: Even though it's got a major movie industry, when it comes to contemporary art, artists on the streets don't see themselves as artists-it's like a skilled job. When they're painting a car and they decorate it with all this crazy stuff, I think, "Wow, this is amazing! It's something I would hang on my wall." But they're always really shocked when I go up to them and ask them to do something for me. Do you think that's what you're going for, looking for ideas outside of the disposable "just add water" kind of thing?

KW: My desire is to restart the conversation. It's akin to this idea that most 18-year-olds who are going to be voting for the first time this year in the American elections were 10 and 11 years old during the 9/11 attacks-this idea that we're all kind of collectively correcting and rebooting, this desire to throw away the old rules. This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new.

M: Yeah, change. You know, what really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart. As artists, that's the best commentary you can do because there's just so much vacuous content. For example, yesterday I stayed in bed for 24 hours and watched TV. I do that, like, every six months, where I just don't answer phone calls and the only thing I do is watch television. And it's insane! I couldn't tell the difference between the news and an advert. It's all Fox News, 30-second sound bites, and there was nothing I got from it at all. Where the fuck are all the Michael Moores in our culture? Where are the cool Democrats? Where are cool people on television? Where has cleverness gone?