I’ve always been sort of critical of artists who go in and do a quick read of a place and then do a work with the people there. Most artists will never make money off their work, but that spark, that need to create commentary, to visualize, textualize, and musicalize your experience of the world will continue whether it’s a hot commodity or not. For me, decades are weird. The only scary thing—and this is true with most cities everywhere—is that there’s no room for the working-class and middle-class people here anymore. I made $75, maybe $80, on each of those works. Do you follow the evolution of advertising? T. Mitchell Interview with Kruger have always been represented rather than tried to represent ourselves. The conceptual artist, educator, and writer Barbara Kruger is one of the most fastidious readers of American culture as we know it today. I first showed that work in L.A., at Gagosian.
They sold for $1,200; I got half, but I paid for the frames and the prints.BOLLEN: The text in many of those pieces have taken on many lives of it own—”I Shop Therefore I Am.” In making those pieces, was the text something you wrote separately, or did that happen in the studio, in immediate relation to the found image? THEY SOLVE. To me, the ’80s began in 1975 and ended in 1984—’84 or ’85 is when the market changed, when things really heated up. Barbara Kruger is an artist who works with words and pictures.
I liked her as a teacher. Usually, we are all of the above.Kruger famously—and perhaps, at first, inadvertently—got her training as an artist the hard way: through a full-time job as a magazine designer at Condé Nast, starting out at Kruger lives and works in both New York and Los Angeles (where, since 2006, she has taught art at UCLA). You don’t have to pay $12 to walk in the door like you do at a museum. And David Lang, who did I remember going into galleries and seeing this thing called conceptual art Barbara KrugerBOLLEN: Can I ask you about your decision to resign from the board of MOCA in L.A.? [KRUGER: So Diane was one of the first female role models I ever had that didn’t wash the floor six times a day. I understand that. That’s why I curated the show at MoMA years ago that nobody even thinks about anymore, “Picturing ‘Greatness’ ” [1988], where I went through their portrait collection.
But when I first came here, the only people who’d been on Chambers Street were Yoko Ono; [acid pioneer] Owsley Stanley; and Ken Jacobs, the filmmaker. I never did. These floors and these buildings were empty. I met her in New York for breakfast on a Sunday morning in January at one of her old downtown mainstays, the Square Diner on Leonard Street.CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: You’ve lived downtown since the mid-’60s, so obviously you’ve seen a lot of change in New York—how it’s increasingly become less of a place for artists and more of a place to show expensive art.BARBARA KRUGER: Yes, but I’m not into it when people say, “Oh, I remember the gritty ’70s.” I feel like, Oh give me a break. We’re meeting now. If you look at I never say I do political art. Do you see your works as universal messages? But artists are more direct or overt in their messages, or maybe they’re not as manipulative.KRUGER: I don’t know about that.
Why are people—or at least young women—starting to speak that way?KRUGER: I’d hear it and I would think, What am I hearing? As part of a collaboration with Art21, hear news-making artists describe their inspirations in their own words.As a young girl growing up in New Jersey, Barbara Kruger found art confusing and galleries intimidating.
There can be an abusive power to photography. Kruger has insisted, however, that she does not characterize her work as “political art,” telling Interview in 2013, “I never say I do political art. “Your Body Is a Battleground” was originally done as a poster for the 1989 pro-choice march on Washington. It’s the way all markets function, and it’s just become another market.BOLLEN: Finally, about translation. And those that do better save it because it’s fickle and brutal, and what’s hot will be not in two seconds. I have a repertoire, an archive, as they say today, of images.KRUGER: From hunting and gathering, yeah. Resisting Reductivism & Breaking the Bubble: An Interview with Barbara Kruger by Ian Forster Barbara Kruger shares her media diet, what she sees as art’s role in contemporary society, and the inspiration behind two of her earliest works.
I couldn’t make an edition; I didn’t have the money. People who are calling themselves artists are people of all colors and persuasions and genders. Nor do I do feminist art. I was just a beginner in that. And it’s true with amassing an archive—a seriality of images, a seriality of texts. You know, artists did not gentrify this neighborhood. Now that I have crashed the code, I understand and support all this work. You just try to figure out instrumentally how the work does its work and what’s the most congenial site for it. Now that I’ve been educated in conceptual art, I understand it. I’m still very much in touch with that the same way you probably feel about your younger self and who that person was.BOLLEN: When you attended Parsons, Diane Arbus was one of your teachers. .
When you work in magazines, it’s a serial process, it’s about seriality—and so is photography. I’m not nostalgic.
You have to go in knowing that. I could never do that. The group I eventually did connect with, in the ’70s, were the beginning graduating classes from CalArts. Barbara KrugerBOLLEN: There have been moments where you’ve applied your work directly to political movements and events.
I got involved with someone who had just settled in that building. There’s just no way I’m cut out to create someone else’s image of perfection as a profession.” Eventually I was doing front-of-book.