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

Art in America, Nov, 1997 by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

BK: I don't necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It's just a label for certain kinds of arrangements. Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different. I noticed recently that some critics and journalists are already giving the old "been there, done that" treatment to so-called installation work. Ah, the fickleness of it all. (laughs.)

TNG: What exactly will you be showing in your upcoming exhibition?

BK: Well, it's actually split into two spaces. Uptown at Mary Boone will be sculpture and large works on vinyl and downtown at Jeffrey Deitch's new space on Wooster Street will be an installation of slides and film. I've also done a bus wrap, with the support of the Public Art Fund.

TNG: What's a bus wrap?

BK: It's one of those buses that are entirely shrink-wrapped in plastic. I always thought it was a nice medium, so I proposed a project. The bus is entirely covered with text--the sides, the back, even the top and the windows and doors. I gathered a collection of some of my favorite quotations and have emblazoned them on this city bus. I used lots of different typefaces and the words are all very big and readable. The bus will drive around the city while the shows are up.

TNG: So the bus is a kind of projectile loaded with quotations. Whose quotes do you use?

BK: Malcolm X, Virginia Woolf, Karl Kraus, Courtney Love, Aime Cesaire and more. I want the whole effect to be both compelling and funny. And using these well-known proper names connects to the show at Mary's, which also focuses on proper names as well as iconography.

TNG: In what way?

BK: I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed. And I'm playing around with the conventions of commemorative statuary--the whole larger-than-life, pedestal thing. The sculptures have the look of classically carved white marble statuary. The subjects are mostly recognizable public figures posed in unexpected ways, with the titles of the works carved into the pedestals: Family, Faith, Justice, Evil. There's Marilyn Monroe, JFK, RFK, Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, Jesus, Santa Claus and a sex doll. The walls in the gallery will be grayed to bring the white figures into relief The vinyl works are portraits, and they'll be in the small room at the gallery. They're quite big, so hopefully the effect will be one of largely looming familiar faces: Marilyn again, Eleanor Roosevelt, Malcolm X end Andy Warhol.

TNG: You seem to be doing a new kind of portraiture that melds the figurative and the biographical with the discursive. Today we've all become so conscious of the visual messages we project that it makes you feel somehow wrapped in representation; we've become walking display mechanisms, as you've put it. It's not just prominent people who experience the world this way but everyone.

BK: Yes, but the rift between body and figure is obviously most apparent when the body becomes a somebody--when the everydayness of life is siphoned out, leaving a public figure, an emptied-out vessel to be filled with projections and fantasies, with adoration and envy. Along with all this comes the delusion, the sniping, the whole celebrity culture/paparazzi thing. And this is not simply tabloid stuff. All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary. As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up. And people lap it up because they're hungry. For what? Escape, fantasy, emotional rescue. And also, beneath it all, is what Neil Gabler has called the bitter subtext of gossip: its use as a weapon of social empowerment and twisted revenge.