Barbara Kruger

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: I’m at the Serpentine Gallery speaking to Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger: The work is like a game.

LG: Certain work that you’ve done seems to imply that maybe people make things part of themselves and there are points that need making that are clear observations about relationships.

BK: I think it’ so funny because I know in all the years that I’ve been teaching, you would say to students ‘what does this mean in the work, why is this here?’ and they say, ‘Well, I can’t talk about it. It’s personal’, so there’s nothing else that you can say to that person about what they have shown.

LG: But isn’t that a reasonable thing for them to say?

BK: No, I just think it’s very binary that there’s a personal and an impersonal; there’s a public and there’s a private. Why does one choose to make work at all, what in fact are you showing or saying. Maybe you shouldn’t show it if it’s personal. I don’t see stuff like that.

LG: I agree to the extent that I think that is an interesting way to function as an artist, to operate in certain gaps; to reframe things and re-invent things. But there’s also an aspect of art making which is about communication and you can be re-framing things and moving around in the gaps as much as you like. You used this language of display in order to communicate an idea, rather than seeing the role of the artist as something that makes things more obscure.

BK: But I think Americans have done both those things and many more, you know. Certainly there are things that it’s hard to speak of as national cultures, national film cultures, national art cultures. Sure there are things that do happen in cultures because there are differences. So I would say, for instance, the fact that America has a different investment made me wonder how my book would read here in Europe, because television does not mean the same here as it means in America. It does not mean the same in France. It’s sort of extraordinary that Baudelaire when he wrote about television in ’72, was as prescient as he was considering there wasn’t even television then, you know.

LG: We get two types of American TV here one of which is the sort of responsible comedy with a moral, like Roseanne and The Cosby show and this kind of thing that shown, it’s almost like art TV, on Channel 4.

BK: Liberal Hollywood.

LG: Exactly and then the life styles of the rich and famous. Isn’t it incredible that people, Americans actually believe this kind of rubbish?

BK: Well that’s because this is a much more ironic culture. I was talking to someone last night about irony that seems to come out, in its full bloom, of two places mainly: and that’s the very privileged who use it with contempt, you know and the pariahs who’ve had to objectify their lives and objectify their experience simply to keep on breathing and exist. There are people who do, and that middle makes up a large part of American culture. So basically in the book it’s hard to know how that stuff is going to read here, when people don’t know those programmes. My TV thing was not supposed to be about specific programmes, which meant that I found myself repeating these sort of grand themes about what the medium is. Most art reviews are easier to write because they have an object. So you spend a lot of words on description, you fill up that page with description, but criticism without an object is difficult, but when it’s good it’s really wonderful.