SH—Music is always playing at your studio –at least in New York. Why?
CK— There’s so many songs that I listen to repetitively. I’m such a repetitive listener. If I get, like, four songs that I feel a certain type of way about, I can’t stop. Especially for painting. For painting, I either do complete silence, for the serene experience of hearing the brush and paint move — did I just say that [laughs] — or jazz. I’ve been into Ethiopian music as well. But I’ll listen to the same song 25 times in an hours. It informs these movements that I want to keep accessing, so I use the music to reverberate what I’m doing.
SH— I feel like you’ve probably answered the New York/Paris question a ton of times, but a specific thing I wonder about is the foot traffic. Do you find it significantly different in either place?
CK— It took me leaving the New York bubble to realize how much of a circus downtown really is. I miss that energy. It’s a free-for-all. Say what you want to say, walk where you want to walk, cross the street when you want to cross the street, wear fucking angel wings, who cares. But also, it’s a complete circus in the most organized way. It’s such a beautiful thing. It’s where you go to do whatever you want. And I feel like I’ve always known it subconsciously — all the cliche stuff like, anything’s possible in NYC… the melting pot. But it’s so cliche because it’s so real.
SH— You briefly came back from Paris late last year. I imagine that must have been some crazy whiplash.
CK— I came back for a month. Life shouldn’t be about how much you can get done and/or how quickly you can get it done, but me working in New york for a month I didn’t even accomplish in ten months of being in Paris. There’s this weird sort of blasé tone. In New York — or maybe in America — there’s this odd take on the American Dream, where “you live to work.”
SH— Where would you say you naturally fall? Working to live, or living to work?
CK— I live to work. But with that said I’m an artist. It’s not really work for me most of the time, it’s just kind of my existence. All I do is make art, and if I’m not making art, I’m still making art. That’s what I think I’m here for. That’s what comforts me.
SH— Ending on a vague note — but what’s the plan?
CK— The plan is to keep making work that I feel needs to be made. Work that feels thoughtful right now, feels right with what's been done in the past and work that will feel relevant in the future . I think the more honest I can be with myself about that, the better I’ll feel.
Also, just making the world a better place. Which might sound as generic as it gets… but also maybe not so generic. The world would be much better if as many people actually did it as the amount of people that say they want to.
