["Barbara Kruger: Part of the Discourse"]
How come any piece of canvas with pigment on it
gets to be called art?
There are so many ways of making art,
some of them more available to a general public than others.
I remember going to galleries when I was young--
totally intimidated!
Certain works have to be decoded.
I think the availability of my work was important to me,
because I was that viewer who didn’t understand--
who didn’t know the codes.
Performa approached me,
and the skatepark came up in conversation.
I just go, "Oh that would be so cool."
"Money talks."
"Whose values?"
These are just ideas in the air,
and questions that we ask sometimes--
and questions that we don’t ask but should ask.
I grew up in Newark, New Jersey.
My mother and my father,
neither of them have college degrees.
We lived in a three-room apartment
and I slept in the living room.
I was always very aware of how where we’re born,
what we are given, and what is withheld from us
determines who we can be in the world.
I came to New York.
Went to Parson’s for a year.
Started working as a billing clerk
and then a telephone operator.
Living in Newark and later New York,
maybe you didn’t read the tabloids but you saw them everyday
in the subway and everywhere.
All of a sudden, I heard there were jobs at Condé Nast.
I was lucky--
I got hired as a second designer.
If you didn’t get people to look at those pages,
you were fired.
Cropping pictures.
Choosing fonts.
When I first started I thought, "Oh I want to be art director,"
but it was a different world.
I was like a chimney sweep compared to the other people who worked there.
I really took time off
and tried to figure out what it might mean to call myself an artist.
I remember saying to people,
"Can I just be an artist by working with pasteup and magic marker?"
"No, you can’t do that."
I realized I could use the fluencies as a designer
to make my work.
I like fonts that cut through the grease--
the, sort of, clarity of those sans serif fonts.
I felt that red capture one’s attention.
In most cases, I could not afford to print these images in color.
I used to go to used bookstores and find old magazines,
and I converted them to black and white.
For us, in 1981, '83,
showing your work was about being a part of the discourse.
When my peer group first started being discussed,
and our work was being sold,
I thought, "Well if my work is developing this commodity status, I had to address it."
Issues about power, value,
unfortunately do not grow old.
Architecture is my first love.
I just spatialize ideas.
I know what areas to engage
to activate a space with images and with text.
"Think like us."
"Hate like us." "Fear like us."
I want my work to create commentary.
[PROTESTOR] --Right to life, your name’s a lie,
--you don’t care if women die.
[KRUGER] I made "Your body is a battleground" to get people to go to the march.
This was for women’s reproductive rights.
I remember calling Planned Parenthood and offering my services,
and they didn’t know who the eff I was.
They said, well they were working with an advertising agency.
Oh okay, alright.
So I used this printer named Quirky.
I used to print all these posters with him.
I went out at one or two in the morning
and put these posters up all over town.
Well, of course I’m a feminist.
But I have never been able to consider gender or sexuality apart from class--
and never thought of class apart from race.
Something to really think about
is what makes us who we are in the world that we live in,
and how culture constructs and contains us.
There are stereotypes of the artist
or of the musician.
Those are the kinder stereotypes.
People ask me all the time, can they come to my studio?
And I say, do you want me to put a beret on
and you can photograph me with a big table?
I said, no-- no.
I just don’t want to be that person.
There’s enough visual record of me.
You don’t need a million pictures.
What it means to point a camera at another person,
I think that there’s a brutality about that.
"You."
"You know that women have served all these centuries"
"as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power"
"of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."
It’s a Virginia Woolf quote.
I just had to use that.