Barbara Kruger interviewed by Merylyn Tweedie, Priscilla Pitts, and Robert Leonard during her recent visit to Auckland.
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Robert Leonard: Once you were seen as an image scavenger, denying authorship. Now, the red frames, the Futura bold italic, and your distinctive caption-writing style have become ‘Krugerstyle’. How do you feel about being an author, an original?
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Barbara Kruger: I never spoke about the denial of authorship. I never used the term ‘image scavenger’, so there’s no change. How can there be a denial of authorship when you see bylines everywhere and everything is a commodity and our name is on our pay cheque? No, I think it can be an interesting theoretical construct, but, in terms of real-life social relations, the denial of the proper name is an interesting phantasm but certainly that.
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Leonard: There aren’t bylines on your posters when they appear on the street.
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Hopefully, hopefully. Sometimes there are, but that’s the institution’s inability to give up the objet d’art status of the image, but that doesn’t mean anything. The reason I got those things in the street is because I’m an inflated proper name for at least thirteen of my fifteen minutes.
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Leonard: What about the earlier posters, before you were a name?
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Yes, sometimes they functioned without the proper name, though people in New York sometimes knew whose they were, depending on the neighbourhood. I don’t see the notion of the denial or death of authorship as an issue for me at all. I think that everyone has investments in different issues. If people have an investment in that as a theoretical construct—because it helps their career or they’ve written a few articles and felt intelligent using that buzzword—that’s good for them. It doesn’t hurt me. I can clarify by saying that I think that we live in a society which is based on the proper name or its transformation into a number vis-a-vis computer technology, but we’re still very much named.
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Leonard: But there was a certain anonymity to those earlier posters that was quite important in the way they functioned, because, as it were, you didn’t know where they were corning from.
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Yeah, I think that’s still the case in many places. If you put them up in any place in America outside cities, or even in cities on roadways, as I did Las Vegas, nobody knows who I am.
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Merylyn Tweedie: Do you consider your work as speaking from the margins?
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No, I don’t think there are margins in America. I think that everyone is located within a marketplace that is virulent and erratic and—I’ve said this before—just because something doesn’t sell doesn’t mean it’s not a commodity. I think the volume of the homeless in America, which is burgeoning because of the Reagan administration’s non-social policy, is certainly not a margin. It’s prevalent and very visible. Just because it doesn’t exist as a huge wage-earning force doesn’t mean that it’s marginalised. I don’t know what the margins are. I don’t fit into the section in the books under ‘marginalia’. I don’t know who does.
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Leonard: When art galleries show your work, they often appropriate aspects of your style to advertise and frame those shows. The fact that the institution is mediating your work is thus concealed. Does that concern you?
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No, as I’ve said before, I don’t use the term ‘appropriation’. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I felt ripped off? Wouldn’t it be a total misunderstanding of the social relation implicit in my work? I take pictures. I’m not interested in copyrighting my own work. I don’t own Futura bold italic. When I was working at Mademoiselle, this was a strategy of working long before I made it part of the vocabulary of my artwork.
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Priscilla Pitts: So, you see those exchanges as being between equals?
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I can’t speak of equals and non-equals. There is a certain degree of reciprocity and exchange going on. I haven’t measured whether it’s equal or not but …
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Pitts: So, it’s a two-way thing, and either way is as good as the other?
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Well, if people haven’t looked at design work and popular imagery, if they don’t know that I’ve worked at magazines, they’ll see an ad in the paper or something they’ll say, ‘Oh look! they’re like ripping you off’, not knowing that that was an already existing style.
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Leonard: I was thinking not of advertising in general, but specifically the ways that art galleries have used aspects of your style as your style, not just as a design style. I mean they’ve used Futura bold italic not as Futura bold italic but as Kruger bold italic. My point was less that they’re ripping you off, than that they’re framing you in a particular way while pretending to be complicit.
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Sure. I’ve felt that and I think that Jenny Holzer might have experienced that too. We’ve talked about it. I just wish that people would do it well, so it looks like us on a good day, not a bad day.
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Tweedie: How concerned are you to keep one step ahead of your assimilation back into magazines?
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Well, it’s not one step ahead. If it says good stuff, the more the merrier, then do it. I just think that what I’m most concerned with is being effective in reaching the viewer/spectator, making, suggesting ideas, or trying to displace things.
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Tweedie: How do you know when you’ve reached the viewer? How do you measure your effectiveness?
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I think it varies from viewer to viewer. There are some images that are successful for one viewer, but somebody else just doesn’t get. You know, like it’s a series of attempts. You sort of feel it out. You sort of know when you’re making points. You’d have to be comatose not to know it sometimes.
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Pitts: You obviously get feedback from art critics and people in that sort of milieu, but what about those people who see your work when they ride the subway or drive down the freeway.
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Well, it’s hard to know. When I did all those billboards in London, Scotland, and Ireland, John Carson spoke to people—he did a lot of tapes—and I’d say it was like six of one and half a dozen of the other. Some people, a lot of women, really felt moved. And some people really got defensive. Someone wrote ‘Bitch’ on a billboard. And yet sometimes it was positive. In America, after ‘We don’t need another hero’ someone wrote ‘U.S. out of El Salvador’. Stuff like that. It varies. And some people just couldn’t care.
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Pitts: When you were working as a graphic artist did you ever try to subvert …
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I’d rather not use the word ‘subvert’. It’s too romantic: trench coats, getting away with something, spy movies. I prefer maybe ‘displace’ or ‘nudge’. I don’t think there’s that underhand aspect. I don’t think I’m getting away with anything. I’m very forthright in the presentation of what I’m doing. I think, if I believed in the subversion thing, I’d be a little deluded.
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Pitts: Well, when you were a graphic designer, did you ever consider making those little nudges?
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I started when I was nineteen. I didn’t go to college, so I was in a very different place. I still was very female defined. I didn’t have my consciousness raised in the 1970s. So, no, not really. I think it took a while for me to thrash out what it was going to mean to call myself an artist.
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Tweedie: So, when did you have your consciousness raised?
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It didn’t happen, what I’m saying is it didn’t, in fact. It’s always something that I’ve just lived with, with coming from the neighbourhood I came from, just growing up in a very poor black city and not having an inheritance and always needing to have a job. And I always had a lot of support from women, so it wasn’t like I’d been male defined and saw the light, which I’m not putting down either, but if you’re asking me about my experience it was less about a kind of apocalyptic …
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Leonard: You say the idea of subversion is romantic.
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I’m saying that for me it would be.
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Leonard: That takes me to another question. You seem to draw on the style and imagery of some Russian avantgarde art. I’m thinking of the kind of images you use, the red frames, the agit-prop mix of image and text, etc. Do you see your use of this Russian avantgarde imagery as political or as a parody of the political?
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I was totally unaware of constructivism. I had no art-history education. You know, somehow I feel that your questions were really constructed with someone else in mind, which happens a lot when you become amplified as a proper name. I didn’t know what constructivism was and how it functioned as a style. The same thing happened with John Heartfield. I curated a show at the Kitchen in 1981, Pictures and Promises, which I called a gathering of pictures and slogans, talking about the convergence of so-called art and the strategies of advertising banks, of corporate ads, male ads, female ads, and then artists’ work. And someone asked me why Heartfield wasn’t in the show and I didn’t know who Heartfield was. What I’m saying is that I just worked as a designer. I did not know. Now, I see books on constructivism and Soviet design work, some of which is gorgeous, but then I was not aware of constructivism.
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Leonard: Are there aspects of nostalgia in your work which cut against your political project
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I think that might happen at times. I try to stay as generic as possible with the images. Sometimes, they are more nostalgic than I’d like them to be. They might bother me, but for other people it works so who knows.
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Leonard: Some of your works use suggestively violent or explicitly violent imagery, for instance the tooth-pulling in You Are a Captive Audience, the bleeding face in I’m Just Looking/Our Prices Are Insane, the scalpel blades in I Am Your Slice of Life. There’s an odd mix of seduction and violence in some of these works.
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If art—or if working with pictures and words—has been somehow a visual or textual representation of how our days and our nights structure who we are, then it stands to reason that I should be interested in using photographic technology to represent that structure, since it’s so much a part of the world that we live in. And I use that technology to talk about the world that I’m in, which is always a combination of seductions and betrayals, and violences and benevolences, right?
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Tweedie: How do you find your images?
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I’m looking all the time. Working for many years as a picture editor, you develop this hawk eye that can really find something, then you crop it, then do whatever you have to do. But things change too. I’ve done works that are in the show in Wellington that are different, that are not just photographs, that have other components. But I don’t just consider myself this person who blows up pictures and puts red frames on them. I also teach and organise these panel discussions in New York. I did two panels last year: The Regulation of Fantasy: Sexuality and the Law and Journalism and the Construction of the News. And this year, I organised a series of monthly lectures on the re-making of history, with anti-ethnographic scholars, architects, and town planners. In fact, this month, the one I’m missing is Judith Williamson, who will speak on media and advertising and sexuality. I consider that is part of my work.
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Pitts: So you’re saying really that the emphasis of your work is not so much in producing objects, though you do that too.
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Well, I do produce objects.
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Tweedie: Do the objects finance the extension of your imagery into mass media?
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Well, they don’t finance it per se, but it’s made my name more available for institutions to say ‘we’d like you to do billboards’, for instance, which perhaps wouldn’t happen without that.
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Pitts: Jean Baudrillard, in the catalogue for your recent exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery, asked what is the point of confronting a masculine that no longer exists and argued that there is no power relationship or political contradiction strong enough to produce a radical and antagonistic challenge to power. Do you agree with that?
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I think I replied to him in my own essay, in the Flash Art interview, and in as many places as possible. Baudrillard has been really important for me. I read him for the first time in 1978 and started using him as a teaching tool at CalArts, mostly the earlier books. And I still use him. Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign has some excellent essays. Some of the later writings I find much more problematic. But, because I disagree with him on gender, doesn’t mean ‘he’s wrong’.
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Pitts: You seem to be interested in confronting the Reagan situation though, in some way responding to it.
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And in a funny way Baudrillard is too. In the writing it doesn’t come out, but in speaking to him … I think that what I said in Flash Art was that the notion that power and the masculine no longer exist sounds like a terrific script for a 1990s screwball comedy. I have to take it with some degree of humour, obviously. I am interested in very concrete social relations. I’m interested in trying to alter that with my work on a certain level. However I do think Baudrillard in his writing, which is frequently science-fiction writing, has an incredible ability to really see the world. You know, you get very involved in the concreteness of struggle, but you’ve got to stand back a little and see how ludicrous it gets also, the great self-righteousness of liberalism, and being on the right side as opposed to the wrong side. I’m not into those binary oppositions. I think they’re frequently just as silly and screwball as his comments. I think also his ability, considering he’s in France—which is like being here (in New Zealand) to me, there are only two TV stations—for him to write as presciently about television as he did, without knowing what it actually feels like, was incredible.
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Tweedie: Who do you want your works to empower?
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I’m interested in welcoming the female spectator into the audience of men, but it’s not just a female audience. I’m not interested in that. I’m not a utopian. I’m not a separatist. I don’t believe that men are bad and women are good. So, I think it would be nice to think of that construction of a female viewer. It would also be nice to make suggestions to other others that there can be different ways of being represented and that we can represent ourselves, whether it’s people of colour, or people from other classes in America.
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Leonard: You’re well known for the billboards you’ve done, and you’ve done some in Wellington. But in Wellington, we don’t have a billboard culture to intervene in. Billboards had to be built specially. We built billboards so you could intervene in a billboard culture that doesn’t even exist. Does that disturb you?
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It doesn’t disturb me at all. People see them. People walk down the street and read ‘We don’t need another hero’. No, that doesn’t disturb me.
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Leonard: Have you ever thought of intervening in the mass media of feature film or television?
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Intervening … (murmur). It’s just the language. Of course, I’d love to, but you’ve got to hustle some barracuda on Sunset Boulevard for like six years trying to get this money together. It’s not easy. You don’t intervene in Hollywood. That’s some sort of theoretical fantasy. You make movies and to make movies you have to get into the social relation of that milieu and you have to kill a few brain cells.
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Tweedie: What about making a film outside the Hollywood system?
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What other system is there? There’s no funding in America for independent film. You can spend six years making a movie and there’s no distribution for it. There’s no Edinburgh Festival there. Besides, I’ve already done museums. My work’s already there. I don’t want to make a black-and-white film with words over it. I don’t consider myself an avantgarde artist. If I did a film I’d want to make a movie that gets distributed.
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Tweedie: Chris Kraus, a New York filmmaker, was out here recently. She said that, in New York, women artists become known at a much later age. I think  women here do have some recognition coming out of art school, but, she said, over there it’s like late 30s, 40s.
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America’s the best place to be an artist if you’re a woman. I mean a lot of stuff has to get better but I could never live in Europe and be an artist. I could have lived in Germany and been a filmmaker until Kohl started cutting expenditure to film, but, wow, I mean in America there’s still problems with galleries, getting your work shown and stuff, but the basic fabric of social life is so different. I find the men far more supportive. They don’t go to their own bars and drink. I’ve gotten tremendous support from male artists and so have so many women that I know. The old cowboy trip died hard but it’s almost all gone.
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Pitts: At the last Sydney Biennale, the Swiss artist Miriam Cahn said she was just amazed that people should expect there to be so many women artists included. She said five percent in a show in Europe and you’d be lucky.
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People in Wellington said, ‘oh, it’s so terrible here’, and I said, ‘hey, a lot of towns in Europe, you walk down the street and you’re not going to run into a women’s bookstore’. I go to the bookstore here and there are so many books on New Zealand women artists. I really think it feels better than a lot of places I’ve been to. In Germany, there are male curators and dealers who can’t even establish eye contact with a woman who calls herself an artist, because women can’t be artists—they don’t have the genetic proclivity! And in the States, that just doesn’t happen in the same way.
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Leonard: To what extent is the increasing size of your gallery works a response to the inflation of your proper name?
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The first reason for the larger scale of my gallery works is that I started doing billboards, and it didn’t cost me money to do billboards. They were printed up in eighteen pieces, and all of a sudden I saw how great that looked. That was what it was. But it was four and a half years ago when I started doing the 8’ x 12’ pieces. What really allowed me to work bigger was to some extent the proper name—because these pieces are more expensive—but, more importantly, I had found a new technology. The other large photographic pieces on paper could only be done in three parts to get them large, but these vinyl works are silkscreened. There’s this place in Canada that I use, where you can do it in one piece and roll it up. That was an incredible discovery on my part. Even if I hadn’t been an inflated proper name, I would have saved some money and made one of those.
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Leonard: In the Wellington show, there’s a work on mirror glass which reads ‘If you’re so successful, why do you feel like a fake?’ You’re so successful. How do you feel?
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I feel like a fake a lot of the time, but not in the terms of, like, fakery and fraudulence. I think that if you’re working critically, which I believe I am, questioning the very construction you’re working in, you have to think about that proper name and the inflation of it and how it becomes a powerful force, for a time anyway. It doesn’t last forever. It’s a fickle system. But I think I have to use that power, use it to work towards certain areas that interest me and displace those things, absolutely. I see myself in that mirror too. It’s not like I do my work and everybody else is there and I’m over here. I did the piece because of that. It’s not like I believe all my own press.
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Pitts: Just as well probably.
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Oh God, I’d really be heading for a fall.
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[IMAGE: Barbara Kruger, Shed 11, Wellington, 1988]