EF: So at that moment, drawings gained recognition as artworks in their own right, even if they were sketches for something else. In addition to the market and audience aspects of this shift, was the issue of scale a factor?
WHK: A wall drawing is not something that can be ignored!
EF: Right! It can’t be ignored, but it also can’t be taken off the wall.
WHK: Well, if you go to Mass MoCA, you’ll see that a lot of the LeWitt wall drawings were in fact collected. But yes, somewhere in that period artists began to object to the commodification of art and they started making things that couldn’t be framed. And then it turned out that, in order to make their large works, they had to make some smaller drawings to convince someone to pay for the big projects, and they were right back in the same bind.
EF: When you were starting out, how did you find these artists that no one else knew about?
WHK: I knew some artists, and I occasionally bought something, and once you buy something, an artist tells a friend… I wanted to see a lot. I went to studios, and I found out about other people’s studios. And you get known, not so much for the fact that you’re buying things but for the fact that you’re willing to go to a studio that is not the easiest place to access. I visited a lot of fifth- and sixth-floor walk-ups. Artists have said to me, “You look so hard.” And I do. I look very hard.
EF: In all that looking, you have identified several generations of artists.
WHK: Yes, but I should clarify that I have never thought of the collection as the collection.
EF: Right, and you haven’t tried to say, “This is drawing today.”
WHK: That’s certainly true. I’ve said, “This is the drawing that interests me today.” Underlying almost everything I’ve collected is the grid. I am interested in how many things you can do with a grid, and the circle is part of the grid.
EF: The other common denominator for you seems to be the surface.
WHK: May I say more the support rather than the surface? Materials—what is used to make the drawing—that’s what intrigues me. In the fifties I saw an exhibition of silverpoint drawings, and I asked somebody how they were made. After that, I wanted to know whether someone was using a sharpened pencil or an unsharpened one or a crayon or whatnot. From then on, the details mattered. That interest helped me a lot because it put the conversation on a different level than just saying, “That’s a pretty picture,” although I say that on occasion too!
EF: You like to figure out how artists make things, but I find there are works in your collection about which, even if you know the mechanics, there is still something inexplicable. They could not be more real, of course, but they also seem impossible!
WHK: Oh yes, there’s always mystery. Every drawing has mystery. I think it is not a work of art if there is no mystery. People ask me, often, whether I’ve made mistakes in my collecting. And I say, of course I’ve made mistakes, because you can’t collect if you don’t make mistakes. And you don’t find out until maybe two or three months after hanging something on the wall that you’ve made a mistake. It may be amusing and interesting and fun, but it isn’t challenging for any long period of time. If you put it on the wall for the second or third time and it still doesn’t do it for you, that’s a mistake. It may not be a mistake for everybody, but it’s a mistake for you.
EF: There is time spent looking, which is clearly important to you, but time is also integral to many of the works you collect. And there’s a huge spectrum—for instance, William Anastasi’s pocket drawings are done in the space of a subway ride, or someone like Jill O’Bryan, with her 40,000 breaths that she counted by drawing notch-like marks over many years.
WHK: When I first look at a work of art, I think about how it was made and the relationship between the artist and the work over a period of time. That period of time can be very brief, much less than a subway ride. I mean, Sol LeWitt made a work by folding a coffee filter! That work probably took him thirty seconds to make, but the thought that went into getting there took forever. No work of art of any interest stands in time by itself—it is always related to the time invested by the artist in making it and to the time invested in getting to the point of making the work of art. One of the things that troubles me today in looking at a lot of work is that the time invested in making these decisions seems to me to be less concentrated, less serious. I’m not talking just about the academy, although that has something to do with it, but also about the individual investment in perfecting artisanship before making a work of art. That seems to me to be lacking in a lot of work that I see today, compared to work from the sixties and seventies and even the early eighties, when much of the work—despite the fact that artists didn’t want to refer directly to art history—lets you know that they know their art history.