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

Art in America, Nov, 1997 by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

TNG: What will you be showing downtown?

BK: I'm projecting texts onto the walls and floor of this huge space. The ceilings are 22 feet high, so the sense of scale and textual containment should be pretty intense, I hope. The texts are both conversational and direct address, and they change about every 10 seconds. There are also three tunnels which contain film loops. Well, I shot on film, but the projections are in video. I did a smaller-scale rendition of this piece at the Museum of Modern Art at Heide in Melbourne, Australia.

TNG: What are the films like?

BK: Lots of tightly cropped talking heads, talking about love, hate, taste, sex, anger and rejection. I wrote a script and found the right people to say the words. I shot and edited the films at the Wexner Center at Ohio State University. I'd been an artist-in-residence there, and couldn't have realized this project without their generosity and great facilities.

TNG: How much footage did you shoot, and how much did you end up using?

BK: Each of the three films is about 10 minutes long. I made sure I had plenty of coverage. But basically it was a simple shoot. I used actors, students and people who worked at Ohio State. I worked with teleprompters, which turned out really well.

TNG: Did you rehearse the actors?

BK: Not too much. I wanted things to be real conversational, so I wrote stuff in that tone. I'm always listening to people, what they say and how they say it. So I had lots of material to work with. I guess the results can be pretty brutal. I wanted to capture how social life is molded by the power of words, and how this sometimes results in a culture that veers crazily between tenderness and verbal violence.

Direct Address: Cutting through the Grease

TNG: Your art is about the rhetoric of the image as well as the rigor and volatility of the word. You're a visual artist and a word artist.

BK: I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.

TNG: What I'm getting at is that you have a respect for what words do and mean, and the ways that language creates our histories, that is attuned to how writers work.

BK: Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans. I really have a very short attention span. I watch TV and think that commercials shouldn't be longer than 10 seconds at the most. I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.

TNG: Can you give examples of artists who are successful at this kind of rigor?

BK: Mike Judge and Matt Groening are really interesting artists. And I think their work is quite rigorous. Matt Groening does "The Simpsons" and Mike Judge does "Beavis and Butthead" and is now doing "King of the Hill." These shows are really smart and funny. They understand certain aspects of American culture and show us who we are in ways that are both wacky and brutal. I've always hated cartoons and animation, but this stuff is brilliant. The writing on "The Simpsons" and on "King of the Hill" is just so quick and so good.