Interview with Barbara Kruger

Consider This... entrance: Bruce Yonemoto, Birthday Party.

If you’ve passed the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire recently, you’ve most probably noticed the monumental Mary McCarthy quote— In violence we forget who we are— curved around the golden spire of LACMA West. Rendered in towering white letters on a bold green background, this timely reminder comes courtesy of Barbara Kruger, one of the most influential artists of public spaces working in the world today. Based in Los Angeles, she designed the contemporary exhibition Consider This… (through Jan. 15, 2007) and selected the accompanying large-scale texts. Barbara Kruger recently sat down at the Village Café in Beachwood Canyon to talk about her work on this exhibition and elsewhere.

Q. How did you become involved in Consider This?

A. Bob and Kelly invited me to design the show [Robert Sain and Kelly Carney of LACMALab, which produced the exhibition]. And I sort of jumped at the opportunity, because I really like working with spaces, and it would be a pleasure to try to make spaces that would engage artists’ work and make them as sort of congenial to viewership as possible. I think that my experience at MOCA, designing my show there at the T.C. [the Geffen Contemporary, formerly known as the “Temporary Contemporary”], was a tremendous experience, and I’ve always thought spatially. And ironically I think that many times museums really—ironically, just really don’t have that much eye when it comes to designing ways to showcase the work in the best light possible. And I think that has to do with also the relationship of architects to artists, the relationship to and understanding of how a work needs a space, how it engages a space. What I really wanted was to be able to make a really strong entry, a visual entry, that would function as a kind of money shot for the show. And so I immediately thought of having this processional to walk through, leading to Bruce’s large-scale video projection [Bruce Yonemoto, Birthday Party]. You could then turn left or right into darkened symmetrical corridors. And then after walking through them you arrive at a brightened, highly activated visual space.

Project Studio: Clayton Campbell, Words my son has learned since 9-11.

Q. Your work is very focused — precise combinations of images and typography. How did it feel working with six artists and their separate visions?

A.I asked everyone what they wanted to do, what they felt they needed, and tried to accommodate that. I totally related to them and their relationship to the institution, because sometimes museums and institutions get sort of cut off from, they can’t feel, their own power. So for an artist to be able to have their work shown in a museum context is important. It was a pleasure to work with the artists and to have them know that the person designing the installation really was trying to understand the needs of their work.

Q. You can see this exhibition again and again without seeing it the same way twice. How important was it to you as the designer that the visitor create his or her own path through these works?

A.Well of course it’s important, but it’s going to happen anyway. Basically people are going to create their own meanings in front and around artworks: to make meanings of objects, songs, books and buildings. Of course there are givens, which are suggestive, and are instructive, and manipulative at times, to steer your meaning to some degree. But I don’t think there was a tremendous amount of that going on. This space, the whole first floor of the May Company building [LACMA West], is a wonderful, high-ceilinged expanse. So I really wanted to engage the verticality of the space.

Q. I like the May Company building too.

A. Every time I’m in the building, especially in the elevator, I’m waiting for announcements to say "Ladies’ lingerie," or "Hats, fifth floor"—you can just feel the history of the building there, the restaurant area on the top floor. It’s an icon.

Barbara Kruger, window treatment (exterior, LACMA West).

Q. There are questions of proper visitor behavior posed by Consider This... You know: Can we stand up there? Are we supposed to write on this wall?

A. Again, this is really Bob and Kelly’s charge. I think that all the shows that they have done there, because they involved—in the past, not this show—the Boone Children’s Museum, had to engage a certain age group, and I think that part of Bob’s interest was in this methodology of reciprocity: of doing and acting . . . that there was a reciprocity between the institution and the viewer that could be acted upon.

Q. But sometimes you see these casual spaces in museums, and you feel invited to walk in, but you’re not. When I first went into Consider This..., and the exhibit to the right is on the raised plywood platform, I didn’t know if you were supposed to walk up there or what. And sometimes you see writing on the walls and you say “Was that done by the guy who was just here, or was it done by the artist?”

A.Sure. And you ask yourself these questions, as I do, because museums are very proprietary places, and there’s this clear statement of guardedness everywhere there (quite literally). I mean, for me, every time I walk into a museum or a gallery I’m so self-conscious. Every time I walk into a gallery in New York I feel like I have to have a lint brush with me. But hopefully, because that space has such a history with the Children’s Museum, that people sort of knew there was a kind of laissez faire-ness at play.

Q. But I like that you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do.

A.Mmm. I mean basically the whole notion of the show, to some degree engages questions of identity, of place, of globalism, of doubt, of belief, of the body, of play, of fear. To me it was particularly terrific to be able to use the exterior and the windows to address some of these issues. And you know it was great to be able to put that Mary McCarthy quote out on the front of the museum, “In violence we forget who we are.”

Barbara Kruger, window treatment (exterior, LACMA West ).

Q. Did you choose the texts based on your reaction to specific exhibitions or more in reaction to the times that we’re living in?

A.Both. We had many discussions about the texts. Initially the exhibition had another title, a slightly different charge. And the artists’ projects changed over a period of four years, so the exhibition became very much a process of alteration and consideration. So all of this led to the title “Consider This…”

Q. I wanted to ask about the selection of Thomas Paine’s “My country is the world, my religion is to do good.”

A. I think that all artists, whether they’re visual or musical or textual, are basically in some way both constructed by and reflecting the world that contains them. And there is no doubt that right now the world is particularly attuned to issues around belief. And in this country it increasingly feels like doubt is going to be grounds for arrest. (laughs) I just think that there was a secularity in Paine’s comment; and it’s not just about America, it’s the world. A while ago I did a work that said, “Doubt tempers belief with sanity.” I think it echoes some of the same concerns.

Q. And in “violence,” you’re talking about the spectrum, from state to personal.

A. Yes, everything. From body to body, from state to state. You know, I always say that I try to make work about how we are to one another; and the exercise and exchange, or nonexchange of power: from over the dinner table, to the board room, the bedroom or to some star chamber. I mean, it’s everywhere.

Mario Ybarra, The Belmont Ruins (detail).

Q. Do you find yourself more engaged in world politics now than in the past?

A. No, not at all. And I really don’t consider it an engagement in world politics. I just think it’s an awareness of what life feels like now. That we’re all, those of us that are sentient and breathing right now, are all on this ride together and then we’re gone. Life is way too short. We’re all experiencing these events, and we know more about these events now than we ever did, and yet there’s no retention. You know, with the 24-hour news cycle now . . . all I see from most of my students is no retention. It’s sort of amazing. And yet, I understand that. I have a short attention span, I grew up with movies and television, and of course now with being online it’s even more so.

Q. Your work began at a time when maybe the media seemed manageable. I wonder whether it’s outgrown our capacity to defend ourselves against it.

A.Mmm. I don’t know if you saw the last installation I did, Twelve. It’s a four screen video projection, a conversation between four talking heads with a CNN-like crawl underneath, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three layers. After 9/11 we became bombarded with the multiple urgencies of those texts. And I wanted to engage how we read those multiple layers. You know, I don’t really think that our reception of information was manageable in the past, either. I think that people had different capacities back then, you know? I think that computers and the internet have changed so much of what we experience as “information.”

Bruce Yonemoto, The World Asunder (video screen shot).

Q. When I look at your work, there was a time when I would see something you had done and I would think, “That will fix that,” or, “This is a fight that’s winnable".

A. Oh no . . . I never felt that. I think the arts—the visual arts—are so marginalized in this culture, that you just do what you can, you know. But I certainly have no delusions about what visual art can do. I mean, you ask a person on the street who an artist is, nobody knows the name of an artist in this culture. Maybe they’ll know Andy Warhol. But I never underestimate the power of pictures and words as more generalized powers within a global culture.

Q. But if they’ve seen one of your works—

A.Yeah, but they won’t know it’s mine, and that’s fine. That’s good.

Q. They might not know your name, but they’ll recognize it.

A.Believe me. That’s not the way it works. If you go to Europe, there is more of a footprint for the visual arts for culture, and yet I would certainly rather live here. Unless things get even scarier in the realm of the “worst president ever.” You know, it was interesting, I read in the paper today that the mayor of Tokyo gave a press conference because the Cartier Foundation was showing their collection at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. So they had this big event, the press is there, and the mayor gives a speech, and he says in the speech, “This work is terrible. It doesn’t mean anything.” He has no relationship to contemporary art. And he’s giving a speech at the opening of this exhibition! And in many ways it’s sort of a mirror into the way many people who haven’t crashed the codes of certain visual practices feel.

Q. How do you mean, crash the codes?

A.People go to museums and galleries and feel lost if they haven’t been educated to understand the art sub-cultures and their codes of meaning. A lot of work is really rich and powerful but takes a little more understanding of what its precedents were and what its meanings are.

Philip Rantzer, The 5 Continents (detail).

Q. Given that, are you happy to be involved with this show, which does invite so much interaction?

A.I feel very good about that, absolutely. But I also feel that if you go to documenta in Germany, you see an engagement with a kind of work which is made here but doesn’t have an audience here, a kind of really immersive, intensely complex sort of conceptual work which I admire tremendously; that work has much more of an audience in Europe than it does here. It’s complexity resists the notion of immediate gratification.

Q. Where do you get that immediate gratification?

A.We get it everywhere. We get it from television. And we get it from the huge image culture that we live in. We get it from the movies, but people watch movies at home now. And we get it from the immediacy of an online life. I understand short attention spans, since I definitely have one.

Q. Was there some moment when you realized that the specific techniques of commercial design could be put to different uses, could be used to make people think rather than make people buy?

A.Well, I think you can never separate the two. And shopping itself is a complicated process. It’s not necessarily about buying. It’s also about cruising and framing your image of perfection. Having worked at Conde Nast for so many years, my job as a designer incrementally morphed into my work as an artist. I developed a fluency as a designer and used that fluency to construct a commentary, to make other meanings, to make art.

This interview was conducted by Tom Drury, editor of LACMA.org.