the art of public address - artist Barbara Kruger - Interview - Cover Story

Art in America, Nov, 1997 by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

Barbara Kruger discusses her new figurative sculptures and multimedia installation, surveys her recent public commissions and reflects on her early career.

Barbara Kruger is the poet laureate of the age of spectacle. Since her signature red, black and white graphics first appeared in the early 1980s, they have become a familiar presence in the world of contemporary art as well as on the street. Direct address is her tool, and her target is "you"--the collective subject created and sustained by mass media. Cutting through the clutter of our image-saturated world, Kruger's work grabs us by the collar and booms, "Don't be a jerk." (This is the Krugerian graphic emblazoned on the coffee mug from which I drank while conducting this interview.)

In November Kruger will present new work in New York for the first time in four years, showing figurative sculptures fan innovation for her) at Mary Boone Gallery uptown and a multimedia environment at Jeffrey Deitch's new space downtown. For the duration of the exhibitions, a city bus covered with quotations chosen by Kruger will follow a regular route between Queens and Manhattan--further evidence of her unwillingness to confine her work to any single place or category. A full retrospective of her work is being organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art for late 1999. The following conversation took place last summer, while Kruger was preparing her New York shows.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve: You now live half the year in LA and half in New York. As a resident of both cities, how would you characterize them?

Barbara Kruger: If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture--not only national culture but global culture. You can make good art anywhere. But these two towns have an incredible density of cultural producers: people who migrate to them in order to define themselves through their work. And both places are motored by the uses and abuses of power. That makes them very compelling and very scary.

TNG: But as an artist one can live in LA now without "missing" anything.

BK: It has changed. You don't have to live in New York to get on with your career. When I first taught at CalArts in the early '80s, many students felt they had to head east, in spite of people like Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Michael Asher, Alexis Smith, Allen Ruppersberg and many more who had chosen to stay in LA Now it's just not an issue. New York is a d splay case, while LA is like London in that it's a big art school town. There's a massive student population, and in a lucky nanosecond a young artist can be transformed into the hottest of the newly hot with simply a trickle of journalistic mentions. But I like LA for the botany.

TNG: You're working on your first New York show in four years. What goes into preparing for a show, and has that preparation changed over the years?

BK: Well, I don't do many shows. Up until now, my museum support has been very sparse in that I've had almost no museum shows and few museums have purchased my work. But that's cool, because there are lots of ways to become visible and enter the conversation. My work seems to travel well and is pretty comfortable in other venues, like magazines and newspapers and billboards. Besides, I don't think that constantly firing rooms with objects is necessarily the best way to go for me. I mean, I try to figure out ways for the work to be most effective. The best ways for it to make its presence felt. And I have no complaints. I've been very lucky. Also it's really expensive to make work. It took me years to save enough money to make this show.

TNG: Really?

BK: People don't even think about that. They see things just suddenly appear in some fancy-schmanzy gallery space--like some kind of amusing magic act that you then decide to either love, hate or ignore. I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.

TNG: One somehow assumes that an artist of your stature is rolling in money and the new work just evolves from sales. What makes the production of your work so expensive?

BK: First I'd have to say that "stature" is an extraordinarily fugitive and transient sort of thing, which is ruled by taste and drama and the whimsy of history. As far as "rolling in money" goes, for someone from Newark whose family owned nothing and had nothing, and who basically grew up thinking I wouldn't have a pot to piss in, things have turned out just fine, thank you. I'm living my life, not buying a lifestyle.

What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing--the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.

TNG: When did you make your first installation?

BK: In 1990. Before then I was making objects, but I always wanted to do something along the lines of an installation.

TNG: Why is the installation format so important to you?