![“EGG: You incorporate text into your works, but more than that, you use a particular voice. Is there a Barbara Kruger language?
BK: I think that the so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me. I worked as a graphic designer at fashion magazines for a long time, and that was where I developed my fluency and my comfort with pictures and words. And that is very much reflected in my work. Also reflected in my work is the seriality involved in the page-turning of magazine reading, and also the direct address of it: the reach-out-and-touch-someone-ness of it, and the availability of it. Basically, we live in a world bombarded by images and sounds, and for some of us, it’s been an interesting activity to try to consider what the meanings of those images and sounds could be, rather than just receiving them, which we do; we’re not immune to them on any level. But part of my self-assignment is to play with the possibilities of meanings, the multiplicity of possible readings in each image, in each text.”
EGG: Why is your work considered art and not graphic design?
BK: I always say that I’m an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it’s writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don’t make any separation in terms of those practices. I started very young as a graphic designer and while I enjoyed it initially, it really grew old very quickly. I wasn’t cut out for design work because I had difficulty in supplying someone else’s image of perfection. It was much more satisfying for me to try to be my own client, and to in fact try to construct my own images of perfection, to try to construct my own commentary, my own visualization of what it means to live a life. I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we’re visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what’s been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.
EGG: Why are words so important in your work? What does language have to do with power?
BK: There’s one phrase I used, “Doubt tempers belief with sanity.” And I sort of like that one, because it really suggests how belief, at its extreme, can be very scary. It seems sort of crazy for me to look at a camera and explain why words are important when I’m using them. Of course, I see my practice as a type of communication, so why cut off one way of communicating when doing it. Words are powerful, and we speak them every moment, so why not exercise that medium. But I’m really interested in questions more than answers. Everybody’s got answers, and I think it’s more generative and engaging for me to think about questions and to think about doubt. Not to the point that it becomes crippling and self-destructive, but it’s a definite balancing force. Power slices in lots of ways, you know. And it can deal with the inequities of money; it can deal with the inequities of color; it can deal with the inequities of gender. And how some voices have been unheard, and some faces unseen, and I’m interested in how that plays out in culture, and how it changes, and how that change changes culture, and how America is a different place now than it was thirty years ago because of those changes, and how those changes in fact become [of] global and not just national interest. But we’ve seen how the battles around difference, around sexuality, around color, around nationalism, are daily changing the character and the balance of power globally.”
“EGG: Do you think art is capable of that kind of resistance?
BK: I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level. Right now, for example, I am fascinated with celebrity because it seems to be available to everyone, you know, we each have, what, our twelve minutes now? Twelve seconds of fame? A magazine is sort of a visual envy parade — the photographs are extraordinarily seductive and the models edgy to the point of death, you know? Myself, having worked at Conde Nast for so many years, I saw firsthand the power of magazines, fashion magazines as vehicles for color advertising. In the art world of the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was actually a discourse around representation — how pictures can tell us who we are and who we aren’t and what we want to be and what we can’t be. It’s incredible how that dialogue has been forgotten. People have fallen totally to the thrall of representations without any critical commentary. E! Entertainment Television has become a paradigm for all the other networks, this veneer of glamorous expenditure, constant disposable income. It’s sort of extraordinary how the representations parade on and on and on, you know.
EGG: So is the media an unavoidable trap, or can you subvert its influence?
BK: That reminds me of something I read in a book on Walter Winchell — how gossip is empowering because it has to do with getting even, a leveling [of] the playing field, a vindictive will to bring down the powerful. But it is a complex issue. For example, walking around cities, walking past statues and monuments, the whole notion of heroism is constructed through proper names and national histories. If you understand these contructs, how can you say that that’s not an inevitable influence? If you enter the culture to a any degree, of course it is. Or HARDBALL or GERALDO or CROSSFIRE — they are narratives that are entertaining, but they also encapsulate the public in a way. They push the public into so-called political discourse in a way that really didn’t happen before. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it’s bad.”
ALL IMAGES OF WORK BY BARBARA KRUGER FOR LEVER HOUSE, 2009, VIA ANIMAL NEW YORK AND LEVER HOUSE; INTERVIEW TEXT VIA PBS’S EGG: THE ARTS SHOW ARCHIVE; IMPETUS VIA SCOTT HUG/ THE K48 BULLET](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr2rv61zaJ1qz93lzo1_500.jpg)
“EGG: You incorporate text into your works, but more than that, you use a particular voice. Is there a Barbara Kruger language?
BK: I think that the so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me. I worked as a graphic designer at fashion magazines for a long time, and that was where I developed my fluency and my comfort with pictures and words. And that is very much reflected in my work. Also reflected in my work is the seriality involved in the page-turning of magazine reading, and also the direct address of it: the reach-out-and-touch-someone-ness of it, and the availability of it. Basically, we live in a world bombarded by images and sounds, and for some of us, it’s been an interesting activity to try to consider what the meanings of those images and sounds could be, rather than just receiving them, which we do; we’re not immune to them on any level. But part of my self-assignment is to play with the possibilities of meanings, the multiplicity of possible readings in each image, in each text.”
EGG: Why is your work considered art and not graphic design?
BK: I always say that I’m an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it’s writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don’t make any separation in terms of those practices. I started very young as a graphic designer and while I enjoyed it initially, it really grew old very quickly. I wasn’t cut out for design work because I had difficulty in supplying someone else’s image of perfection. It was much more satisfying for me to try to be my own client, and to in fact try to construct my own images of perfection, to try to construct my own commentary, my own visualization of what it means to live a life. I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we’re visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what’s been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.
EGG: Why are words so important in your work? What does language have to do with power?
BK: There’s one phrase I used, “Doubt tempers belief with sanity.” And I sort of like that one, because it really suggests how belief, at its extreme, can be very scary. It seems sort of crazy for me to look at a camera and explain why words are important when I’m using them. Of course, I see my practice as a type of communication, so why cut off one way of communicating when doing it. Words are powerful, and we speak them every moment, so why not exercise that medium. But I’m really interested in questions more than answers. Everybody’s got answers, and I think it’s more generative and engaging for me to think about questions and to think about doubt. Not to the point that it becomes crippling and self-destructive, but it’s a definite balancing force. Power slices in lots of ways, you know. And it can deal with the inequities of money; it can deal with the inequities of color; it can deal with the inequities of gender. And how some voices have been unheard, and some faces unseen, and I’m interested in how that plays out in culture, and how it changes, and how that change changes culture, and how America is a different place now than it was thirty years ago because of those changes, and how those changes in fact become [of] global and not just national interest. But we’ve seen how the battles around difference, around sexuality, around color, around nationalism, are daily changing the character and the balance of power globally.”
“EGG: Do you think art is capable of that kind of resistance?
BK: I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level. Right now, for example, I am fascinated with celebrity because it seems to be available to everyone, you know, we each have, what, our twelve minutes now? Twelve seconds of fame? A magazine is sort of a visual envy parade — the photographs are extraordinarily seductive and the models edgy to the point of death, you know? Myself, having worked at Conde Nast for so many years, I saw firsthand the power of magazines, fashion magazines as vehicles for color advertising. In the art world of the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was actually a discourse around representation — how pictures can tell us who we are and who we aren’t and what we want to be and what we can’t be. It’s incredible how that dialogue has been forgotten. People have fallen totally to the thrall of representations without any critical commentary. E! Entertainment Television has become a paradigm for all the other networks, this veneer of glamorous expenditure, constant disposable income. It’s sort of extraordinary how the representations parade on and on and on, you know.
EGG: So is the media an unavoidable trap, or can you subvert its influence?
BK: That reminds me of something I read in a book on Walter Winchell — how gossip is empowering because it has to do with getting even, a leveling [of] the playing field, a vindictive will to bring down the powerful. But it is a complex issue. For example, walking around cities, walking past statues and monuments, the whole notion of heroism is constructed through proper names and national histories. If you understand these contructs, how can you say that that’s not an inevitable influence? If you enter the culture to a any degree, of course it is. Or HARDBALL or GERALDO or CROSSFIRE — they are narratives that are entertaining, but they also encapsulate the public in a way. They push the public into so-called political discourse in a way that really didn’t happen before. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it’s bad.”
ALL IMAGES OF WORK BY BARBARA KRUGER FOR LEVER HOUSE, 2009, VIA ANIMAL NEW YORK AND LEVER HOUSE; INTERVIEW TEXT VIA PBS’S EGG: THE ARTS SHOW ARCHIVE; IMPETUS VIA SCOTT HUG/ THE K48 BULLET
