Barbara Kruger

EO

What were you doing before your artistic career flourished?

BK

I’m aware of how absolutely arbitrary the makings of so-called careers are. And how pre-constructed by social, class, and race hierarchies they are—the networking, the buzz, the brutality and fickleness of it all. I’m aware that I have become, for some time but probably not a long time, a proper name. I never thought that would happen. I’ve said that before, and it sounds disingenuous, but it’s true. I always felt marginalized, especially at a time when the art world was twelve white guys in lower Manhattan. Of course, it was much broader than that. But, in terms of proper names and notoriety, that’s how it was construed.

EO

Why did you feel marginalized? What were the conditions that produced that feeling?

BK

This isn’t about the marginalization per se, it’s about difference. I have no college degrees at all. No undergraduate, no graduate. I left Parsons when I was about 19 years old and started working because I needed a job. Before that, I attended Syracuse for a year, but I felt like a Martian there.

EO

Did Syracuse then position you to go to New York City? Did you learn anything from those experiences?

BK

At Syracuse, not necessarily. It was a foundation year and, therefore, very broad. I knew nothing approaching it. I went there because I heard they had a good art department. I didn’t know what it would mean to call myself an artist, and it was not the place for me. It was filled with sororities and fraternities. Because I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, going to New York was what I could do. My father was dying, and my mother was also not in great shape. I moved back home, and I applied to Parsons. I got in, and I lived at home for the first few months. Commuting became impossible, so I moved and lived in a dormitory for six months on University Place and then on Fifth Avenue, and then I quit school altogether.

At that time, Diane Arbus was teaching at Parsons, so she was my photography teacher. Marvin Israel was teaching, and he was a tremendous influence on me. This was all during my foundation year there, too. Israel was a designer. He had been the art director of Harper’s Bazaar and worked with Avedon and invited many artists to collaborate. He was very charismatic and strange but a powerful guy. Meeting him prompted me to think about editorial design as a way of making my life.

EO

What was the landscape at the time? Did you know the promise of going to school at Parsons? Why were magazines where most people gravitated towards?

BK

At first, I thought because I was one of the few kids in school and could “draw,” I’d become a fashion illustrator or something like that. I remember the newspapers were mostly full of charcoal drawings then. Photography was not used that much in fashion. During the short time I was at Parsons, my eyes were opened to other possibilities in the creative industry. Indeed, when I quit school, I worked at various little magazines doing layout so I could support myself. About a year later, I got an entry-level job at Condé Nast working for Mademoiselle. I moved into my first loft in Tribeca on Reade Street in 1967.

EO

Did you have any expectations or desires?

BK

No, I didn’t know anything about the art world. I was working a normal job, taking the subway to work every morning and dealing with deadlines at the magazine. I learned to work with pictures, words, and paste-ups. It was everyday life, I had no conscious ambitions about being an artist. The art world was very intimidating to me.

EO

What made up the fabric of your everyday life?

BK

It was a 9 to 5 job. When you get home, you’re tired. I made a few friends and went to some parties—that’s how I found my first loft on Reade Street. I went to a party down there, and there was a loft available. I think Yoko Ono lived on Chambers Street. Dr. Owsley, the guy who invented LSD, lived there too. There were two lofts on each block where artists lived, so it was a much different landscape.

EO

What was the fascination with having a loft?

BK

I couldn’t even call it a fascination. When I had gone to events or parties at these spaces, I thought, “Wow...The rent was very low.” That’s how that happened. I met people there, but again, it wasn’t art world-focused. Not at all. I got thrown out all the time by landlords who were notoriously horrible. I lived on Reade Street for about three years and then Greene and Canal for a year and a half. Then, I lived on Leonard Street. I remember on Leonard Street, I was the only person in the building. There was no glass in the windows. There was no AC current; it was only DC current. Artists really didn’t gentrify those spaces. These were empty buildings that small businesses like envelope stoppers and horsetail gatherers had left. The landlords wanted to fill them up, and they were perfectly happy giving them to young people who could go without heat. I’m so phobic about the cold now because there was hardly any heat during those years, and it was intense.

EO

You say you’re not educated, but what was your media diet?

BK

I developed a fluency pretty organically. I never studied design. I knew nothing about fonts, type, or design. At the time, I wasn’t reading very much. I wasn’t aware of important texts or things people were reading and discussing. That wasn’t part of my life at all. It was just going to a job and going to parties, but I was no party animal. There was just an everydayness to my existence. I always say I’m interested in the moments between events. It’s the events that freak me out. It was just the everydayness that I still cherish in my life.

EO

Can we talk about Ingrid Sischy? When she and Janet Malcolm collide, it is an important point of reference for me—the way Malcolm preserved or fabricated a history.

BK

Ingrid didn’t come into focus until much later. By the time I got to Leonard Street, I had made some friends who were artists, most of whom were from the first or second CalArts graduating class. The so-called art world was a very different place. There were strong  hierarchies in the beginnings of the SoHo art world—who was hot, who was not, who was hip, and what the cliques were. It drove me crazy. I could never ingratiate myself. Even the most kooky, so-called avant-garde groups had their affiliations, hierarchies, and judgments. I never felt part of that at all.

EO

Who were your artist friends?

BK

The first CalArts group I came in contact with were young artists like David Salle, Ericka Beckman, Ross Bleckner, and Julian Schnabel. Cindy Sherman and Jim Welling were part of the group but didn’t come out of CalArts. Later, I became close with Sherrie Levine, Marilyn Lerner, Nancy Dwyer, Louise Lawler, Jane Weinstock, Sarah Charlesworth, Laurie Simmons, Carol Squiers, Judith Barry, Jenny Holzer, and Richard Prince. David, Prince, and I worked at small magazines during those years. I met Lynne Tillman a bit later, around 1977.

It’s interesting because art history is like all history. It’s arbitrary: what gets written, who witnesses, who emerges, and who disappears is almost horrifyingly predictable. I’m considered part of the “Pictures Generation,” but I was never in the original Pictures show in 1977, even though that group was mine on a certain level. My work was never Metro Pictures’ work. Sherrie was also one of the first people I met. Sherrie, Cindy, and I bonded as friends, but that’s been fictionalized in history. I was part of that, but I really wasn’t, at least not in terms of what my actual practice was.

EO

How did you meet Julian Schnabel?

BK

I met Julian in 1972. He sublet my loft when I had to take a job somewhere. He was in the Whitney Independent Study program at that time.

EO

How were these events configured? Were you around Donald Judd in that SoHo milieu?

BK

No. At first, I had such a hard time supporting myself, but I started to get lucky and kept getting these visiting artist jobs. I would sublet my loft. First, I went to Berkeley for a semester, then Ohio State. Later, I went to CalArts for two semesters and then The Art Institute of Chicago for another two. I would leave to make money. I would always say they were “visiting girl jobs” because, at that time, nobody would tenure a woman on their faculty.

EO

How did you pivot, and how did traveling inform your practice?

BK

I loved weaving and stitching. I did that work for a while. It was cathartic, but it was like a narcotic. It put me to sleep. It was the repetition and labor intensity of it all. I was not in the art world. I was very influenced by the Magdalena Abakanowicz show at MoMA PS1 in 1993, and I loved Gunta Stozl’s weaving, but I couldn’t continue doing that work.

I had to think about what it meant if I wanted to be a so-called artist and not a designer. I was incapable of being a designer on a certain level because I didn’t have the tools and could not supply other people’s image of perfection, which is what client-based relationships demand. So, I started taking photographs of my first love, architecture. I took pictures in Florida and California. When I went out there to teach at Berkeley, I started writing along with those photographs, which became a book called Picture/Readings. I gave a reading at Artists Space. I started doing readings of poetry and prose work.

EO

What possessed you to seek out those artist residencies at those different schools?

BK

They weren’t residencies, they were jobs so I could continue living. I had no money in the bank. I couldn’t afford rent in New York unless I sublet my loft and took these jobs.  I was still searching for what it might mean to call myself an artist. I remember it was during these jobs that I started reading and I discovered texts by Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. I began thinking in a way that I’d never thought before. I’m an autodidact. It became a huge period of discovery for me.

EO

How did you go from no education to then teaching at these places? How did you find those opportunities?

BK

I applied for a million jobs, even though I had no degrees. I would send slides of what I was doing. I think an interesting breakthrough for me happened while I was at CalArts. This was in 1980. They were looking for a visiting person, and I had been taking photographs. Doug Huebler came to my studio, and I barely knew his work, but we had a nice discussion. He hired me to teach at CalArts. I’d been at the Art Institute in Chicago in 1978 and 1979. So, by then, I was working year after year.

EO

Do you think you educated yourself by teaching others?

BK

I don’t think I was educated by teaching. I was educated by realizing all of a sudden that reading and ideas were important. This was something that was not a part of my life because I didn’t last in school, so I didn’t learn by assigned reading. I figured stuff out from the small group that I had developed in New York with my friends, we started reading stuff together. That was the beginning for me, and an influential moment in my life. I met Ingrid around that time. She was hired by Sol Lewitt to work as the inaugural Director of Printed Matter, the publisher and bookstore. Jack Bankowsky was the book boy there. He would carry books up and down the stairs. It’s when Printed Matter was on Lispenard Street. We met because Ingrid asked me to do a typographical work for the storefront for Printed Matter when Printed Matter was downtown. Then, when she left to work at Artforum, she asked me if I wanted to write for the publication. She was aware that I was writing because I went to movies a lot, so that was a breakthrough.

EO

It’s wild because in 1978, in between Printed Matter and Artforum, Ingrid did that 15-month curatorial internship at MoMA, working with John Szarkowski in the photography department. Then, ten years later, you curated Picturing “Greatness.”

BK

Yes, Picturing “Greatness” came a bit later. Susan Kismaric was a curator there. I’m glad you mentioned it because, to me, most people don’t even think of that show and moment. Though MoMA is not as important to me, I haven’t been involved with it for 40 years, and they own one work of mine that they bought in 1981 for $2,500: You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece. What pleases me is that I have inched toward canonicity without support from the museum. I did the Atrium show at MoMA in 2022, but believe me, I fought for that. I was told I could only go up to 10 feet in the Atrium, which is tiny considering the huge scale of the space I thought I was invited to engage. They canceled my PS1 show. I know how important it is in terms of people’s notion of the entry into discourse and proper name-ism. For me, it was not a visible force at all, but Susan Kismaric invited me to curate a show. It could have been in any department.

I curated that show because I was interested in stereotypes, picturing, and how we see is determined through our vocations on certain levels. That’s how Picturing “Greatness” came about.  Later, MoMA did a series of artist-curated shows, but my show was never included. What I did at MoMA, more recently, was because of Lanka Tattersall, who I knew here at MOCA before she went to MoMA, and Peter Eleey, but it wasn’t their usual cadre of curators.

EO

Why did you feel you were excluded?

BK

There are many artists and not that many museums and curators. I always remind my friends who are curators, who feel they're such small cogs in the system of donor culturism, that they do have power. If you don’t have curatorial support, you’re invisible. I remind people that when a curator goes to an artist studio, it is an effing big deal. Some artists give great studio visits. They’re performative, they know how to do it. For some artists, it’s hard. I was not on anyone’s menu at MoMA or any other New York museum, for that matter. My entry into understanding how institutions work didn’t start until I came to Los Angeles.

EO

How has living in California influenced your practice?

BK

The first time I’d ever been to Los Angeles, I was in my mid-20s. Then, I got the job at Berkeley. I had never been to Northern California before. The first night, I was staying at a faculty club, and there was an earthquake. It was the first experience I’d have of that. I lived on Dwight and Ellsworth in Berkeley. I rented an apartment. There was a corner store that sold sandwiches with all these veggies, sprouts and jack cheese. I’d never heard of this stuff before. It was so Californian. I discovered the Berkeley Museum, and I went to the Pacific Film Archives all the time, which was an amazing place.

Then, I got the job at CalArts. The first semester, I switched residences with Vija Celmins. She took my loft on Leonard Street, and I moved into her place near Venice. It used to be Bob Irwin’s studio. I lived there for six months. The second time I went to CalArts, I lived in Morgan Fisher’s bungalow between Santa Monica and Wilshire, which doesn’t exist anymore on Princeton Street. I just liked L.A. I remember saying to people, “I wish this place was called New York because we’re still in New York.” I soon made friends out there, and a lot of my ex-students at CalArts became very close friends of mine and still are. I got my house here in 1990. It’s amazing how many years ago that is now.

EO

What did having a practice mean to you? How were you moving through that every day? You’re saying that you weren’t interested in the art world politics. What were you concerned with?

BK

I would teach at Berkeley. I taught first-year drawing classes. I was barely doing anything remotely interesting. I was learning how to define myself. The work was removed. When I got to CalArts, I taught some classes. One called “Spectacles and Secret Operators,” which featured a lot of reading by Barthes and Benjamin. That was 1979. When I got to UCLA, I taught a drawing class my first semester there. It’s like my work now. You don’t need an MFA in Conceptual Arts to know what I’m doing. One of my colleagues at CalArts teaching was Michael Asher. He was an incredible teaching influence there and on me.

EO

Yes, 1979 is when he did the intervention at Claire Copley Gallery in West Hollywood.

BK

That was the semester before, because I wasn’t there the whole year. I was just there for the spring semester. Michael was a colleague of mine then, and John Baldessari was there too, though we didn’t really connect. It was an interesting time. I was just getting a feel for what was happening here. I watched Los Angeles become itself. At first, it was seen as a regional place—the artists were considered regional. Even Ed Ruscha and Baldessari weren’t thought of as New York artists. That’s shifted over the decades I’ve been here. It’s no longer regionalized. Artforum actually started in California, but it had a much different national profile.

EO

Yes, John P. Irwin Jr. started Artforum in San Francisco in 1962, and then Charles Cowles bought it and moved it to Los Angeles in 1965 before it eventually settled in New York in 1967. I interviewed Michael Govan recently and realized I grew up going to his LACMA.

BK

I didn’t know Michael Govan in New York. I wasn’t part of the Dia Art Foundation. I had no connection on that level. It was interesting because Michael came out here, Annie Philbin came out here, and they, like me, became the Chamber of Commerce. We became great fanboys and girls of this place. That happened with Klaus Biesenbach when he came to MOCA. Jeffrey Deitch already knew the drill. I met Jeffrey in the mid-1970s. Interestingly, he spends so much time here now, too. It’s changed here in terms of art worlds.

EO

What did New York mean to you?

BK

I still love the city. I still go there. I take the subway seven times a day. I know the city. I don’t know the outer boroughs so well. I don’t know Brooklyn since it’s been gentrified to high heaven. I knew it once. It was so interesting because I developed this coterie of friends.

EO

You talk about having no assistants.

BK

Yes, you’re right. I have no assistants. I have no studio, but I have a nice house. No one in my family ever owned property. I bought my first house in Springs, Long Island, in 1989 for $235,000. It changed my life. It was like The New York Times Fresh Air Fund, which existed for years and allowed young city people to escape to the country. My first house in L.A. that I bought in 1990 was five blocks from where I am now, and I lived there for 22 years. I’ve been in this new house for over 10 years now. I’m sitting here at my desk. The stratospheres, there’s such a difference, as you well know, between the figure and the body.

EO

How has working alone informed your practice?

BK

I don’t feel I have to go from A to Z before I get to B. I like to keep things lean. For years, I couldn’t afford to work any differently. I have honed my way of working. When I was younger, it was all paste-ups. I had my labs in New York. I always tell this story of picking up a work which had been mounted, it was 48 by 72 inches from a lab. I think it was B&H on East 52nd Street. I remember carrying it on the e-train down to Leonard Street and up five flights of stairs like it was yesterday. Out here, I developed labs that printed my work. Since then, I’ve had people I’ve worked with enlarging files to conceptualize space. I was able to spatialize my work with people in New York, which was a huge breakthrough for me. That happened in about 1991 at Mary Boone.

That was my first big wallpaper show. I’d shown photographs and writing at Franklin Furnace. I also had a show at Artists Space early on, but my first real commercial dealer was Larry, who, at that point, was not the Larry Gagosian yet. I was teaching at CalArts, and he had seen the work. This was in 1980. When I’d been going back and forth to CalArts, Larry had a poster shop in Westwood. He opened the gallery in 1979 on North Almont in West Hollywood. He had seen my work, and he wanted to come to my studio. I didn’t have a studio out here. I had my loft that I had sublet, which he came to in 1980. A year or two later, he offered me the first show of my photographic work at his space in West Hollywood.

Larry was the first person to show that photographic work. He sold it to some European dealer or collector. He introduced me to Annina Nosei, who became my dealer in New York. He had a private gallery with her on West Broadway. He didn’t have his own space in New York. I did my first new show of that large photo work with Nosei. It was at the time when Jean-Michel Basquiat was there. Jean-Michel was already way ahead.

I remember sitting at the Odeon. I was there the night of the restaurant’s opening. Jean-Michel sailed in with Mary Boone. This was before I showed with Mary. They were like royalty. He was air-kissing everybody. He was like on another planet. I was like a nudnik nothing. I used to go to the Odeon for lunch when it was a sandwich shop for taxi cab drivers called Towers Cafeteria. It was when I was still eating meat. I remember getting ham salad sandwiches on a tray. I remember always seeing this guy sitting there at lunchtime. It was Richard Serra.

EO

Was the Odeon a known hangout? What was going on there?

BK

Yes, even from the beginning. I remember being there the first few years, and the woman who used to own the cafeteria used to come there. For a while, they left a ticket machine at the door, and they would stamp if you got a sandwich or a salad. It was a place to be. I wasn’t a big shot there like  Jean-Michel was. He knew how to work it.

EO

What was it like being in that room and understanding the power dynamic?

BK

I didn’t know the power dynamic that much. I was just there, and it was like an anthropological study for me. I remember going to Max’s Kansas City, but I wasn’t part of that scene. I wasn’t part of the Warhol crew and that exclusionary insanity. I was just around.

EO

What were the conditions that allowed for these dynamics to continue?

BK

I remember all of Mickey’s spots, especially The Ninth Circle. That was on West 10th, and it was always packed. Carl Andre kind of held court. He was intimidating in his overalls, surrounded by all those guys. Warhol was around, too. I was just a kid going to meet people. It was a mob scene, and I didn’t hang around there for long. Then there was Chinese Chance, which we called One U because it was at One University Place. That was another one of Mickey Ruskin’s places. He had a bunch of them. There was The Locale on West 4th Street and then Mickey’s on University Place, which really became the spot after Max’s closed. By the time I started going to Mickey’s, Linda Yablonsky was cooking there. That’s when I was much more inside the art world. I knew Ingrid by then, and I was having conversations with Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. It felt like the center of things had shifted. Less performative, more conceptual, more rigorous.

EO

What did it feel like to be around the work Lawrence and Kosuth were creating?

BK

I remember going to galleries to see conceptual artwork and Lawrence. I didn’t get any of that stuff. I might as well have been a right-wing senator. It was an indictment of my own intelligence. I hadn’t cracked the code. I wasn’t educated in the codes of the art world, and unless you crack those codes, you can get angry at it and think it’s a fraudulent conspiracy to make you feel dumb. In fact, it’s much more than that. Once I had read and cracked the codes, I had a great respect for all kinds of work—but for someone who initially didn’t, it’s easy to get angry and feel conned.

EO

I was thinking about Jenny Holzer’s Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise. It carries a similar presence to your work—how both use language as material. When I was reading about Holzer and thinking about your practice, I noticed that they initially shared a similar design sensibility. It’s a kind of manifestation: the idea and the form are one. Good art has the integrity and intelligence of design. It needs a framework—something it operates within and against.

Conceptual art is led by the idea, but the idea doesn’t always register on multiple levels. That’s where I see a difference between your work and Holzer’s. She defines herself as a conceptual artist, and there’s often an infrastructure—assistants, production systems—between her and the final output. Your work feels more immediate. There’s no mediation, no apparatus. It moves straight from you to the world.

BK

That’s definitely true. Jenny and I share this desire, namely: to reach out and touch someone with our work. I’m talking especially about her earlier work, which was just world-changing in so many ways. The code didn’t have to be cracked. That’s not an indictment of other works. Our use of language was very different than a lot of other people who might use text. When I was trying to figure out what it meant to call myself an artist, I was engaging in the world and witnessing how power was exchanged and abused every day, how it made or broke people’s lives. I couldn’t make work about the trajectories of the art world. I just wasn’t into that. I was a news junkie and I still am, although I’ve put watching television and reading online on hold for a while. I began to see how I could make meaning and create commentary about the world that I was constructed by and contained within. That was a real breakthrough for me.

The 1982 group show that I was in at Annina Nosei Gallery was called Public Address. Jenny Holzer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring were in it, too. There is a reaching out in the work. It was about how we are to one another, how we love one another, how we destroy one another, our contempt, our adoration. All that makes for my work. That’s what drives it in many ways.

EO

What does your work mean architecturally?

BK

For me, that was one of the compelling things about Los Angeles—all that Case Study stuff. When I first got here, you could walk into the Schindler House and practically leave with the furniture. This was before the Austrians took it over. It was just rotting. I knew the Eameses and the Sorianos. I would drive myself around to see all of them because, growing up, my parents and I lived in a three-room apartment in Newark. I slept in the living room. On weekends, the fantasy was going to look at model homes. I didn’t even know what a room looked like without a velvet rope in front of it. You couldn’t walk into the room.

We never had the money to buy a house. I used to draw residential developments, laying out model houses and roads, just for fun. It was always an interest. I wasn’t good enough at math and didn’t have the money, so I didn’t study architecture. But it was always a driving force. Being in Los Angeles was real estate porn.

EO

What did space afford you? When you grow up in such a tiny space, you don’t often feel like you can take up any space. What’s funny is you make these tiny words monuments.

BK

I didn't make the work as editions because I couldn't afford to make more than 1 image of each work. That first show with Annina Nosei, Public Address, sold out. I might have made $75 on each one. They sold for $1200, but we split that, and I paid for the frame and the print. My generation of artists and those before me never thought about selling. The whole idea was by showing you entered a conversation through a public view of your work. I would tell this to my students at UCLA, where I taught for 17 years. I can’t believe it’s been that long.

Hardly any artists thought that they could support themselves through their work. In the mid-1980s, that started to change with artists, especially painters. Even though I sold my work, it didn’t change for me. I still had to take these jobs to support myself. Even though people started to know my work, it didn’t accrue with income. There was this huge gap between the body and the figure, between the supposed “lifestyle” and what the everyday was like. For artists today, a lot of them have to be professionalized through graduate school. They have these expectations and will be disappointed because they don’t take into consideration the fickleness of the market, of any market. They personalize it, and it can destroy you if you do that.

EO

Can you speak to the desire and expectation of showing at that time and what it meant? I interviewed Dan Graham, and he said that artists of his generation, the Green Gallery coterie, wanted to be writers. There’s always that one thing that a generation desires. For instance, the generations that are consumed by painting. Donald Judd was a writer, but he was also making furniture. You said that you guys were about showing. What does that mean?

BK

I started writing to get my ideas out. It was so hard to get a gallery. It was the most humiliating thing, taking your slides from one place to another and getting rejected constantly.

EO

What did that look like?

BK

You walked in, and you left your slides there. If you didn’t have the right connections, which I did not have, nothing happened. Dan Graham lived in another world from me, he had a different place in the art world. I do remember that I had edited this little book I did called TV Guides. There was also No Progress in Pleasure, which was my own work. The first was Picture/Readings, which are architectural photographs. I remember I asked Dan to do something for TV Guides, and he handed me a bunch of paragraphs that meant nothing and said, “Oh, you can put this together into something.” I imagine a lot of his writing was a result of the work by other people sewing it together. That shocked me.

He also gave a talk at CalArts when I was teaching there, and he played all this music as a way to seduce students into listening and thinking it was cool. He talked about Blondie and how she was this feminist. He plays a song, and it’s Rip Her To Shreds—of all songs to play. I raised my hand. I had enough guts to raise my hand. I said, “Of all songs, if you’re making a case for Blondie and feminism, why have you chosen Rip Her To Shreds, which is not only something she didn’t write, but also an absolute undermining of any kind of solidarity?” He looked at me and said—with all the power that a man of his proper name had—“Oh, I never thought of that.” That was his appropriation of feminism. He said Patti Smith never made good stuff until she married Fred Sonic Smith. Not to shade Dan, but let’s get the trajectory down here. His appropriation of popular culture and architecture was a powerful force that made parts of his career. It was a very sloppy appropriation, as far as I’m concerned.

Patti was such an important figure. It was before she had her band. She would do readings at St. Mark’s. She went to high school with a woman named Janet Hamill, who called herself Juan Hamill. Janet and I did a reading together at Artists Space. This must have been 1972 or ’73, and Patti introduced us. I really didn’t keep in touch with Patti. Her work at that early point was really important to me.

I remember years later going to Berkeley and hearing Horses come out of a dorm window. Robert Palmer had written that article about her for The New York Times. I just watched the growth of this person who became this very compelling figure skewering gender identity, although male-defined, but what an important figure she was and how she grew into prominence.

EO

In the 1970s, New York was completely dilapidated. What was it like being on the ground then? What felt possible? What felt urgent?

BK

It was dilapidated on a certain level. What gets me is a lot of writing that glamorizes the gritty and punky. It was falling apart, and similarly to the way cities are devolving. The day before yesterday, I walked from Main and Fourth, where an ex-graduate student of mine was having a show in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. Things are falling apart at the seams on so many levels. New York felt that way. The headline in the Daily News New York in 1975 was “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The city was in bad shape. Now I go down to Tribeca, and it’s billionaires with tiny dogs.

EO

When did writing become integral to your practice? 

BK

When I started writing for Artforum, I was only writing about movies and television. I was mostly concerned with smaller and independent films. I would go to Anthology Film Archives and the Collective for Living Cinema on Franklin Street. I reviewed a lot of the movies there, and I wrote about television. That’s what I watched. That was what I knew, I couldn’t write about the art world because I hadn’t studied art history. I didn’t know enough to do that.

EO

What did you know about television to write about it?

BK

I watched it all the time. All this stuff with Donald Trump. I watched some eight seasons of The Apprentice. I listened to him on Howard Stern for 25 years before he became—whatever, you know. I would listen to Howard constantly. One of the early articles I wrote in 1992 for Esquire was on Howard Stern. It was his first cover story. It’s in Remote Control. I remember listening to him and hearing him talk about the article and whether it was good. He was a very different Howard Stern then. He was racist, he hadn’t been psychoanalyzed. His gender was intense. I listened to him because he was so smart and funny.

EO

How do you feel having been a witness to the unfolding of Donald Trump and Howard Stern?

BK

I have no patience for anybody, even on MSNBC, who says they are shocked. It is the failure of imagination of the center, and parts of the left, that have allowed this thing to happen. Trump is a great communicator. He is performative in the most intense, far-out sense of the word. He is a brilliant and feral punisher. Nobody does it like him. This did not have to happen. I was no great Hillary Clinton fan by any means, but I voted for her. I didn’t vote for Jill Stein, I didn’t vote for Gary Johnson. All those people who voted for their conscience instead of strategically. If the Supreme Court bans abortion, don’t complain, you helped construct it this way. I can’t stand people voting on behalf of their conscience. It’s so fucking narcissistic. The world is bigger than your narcissistic conscience.

EO

Any early memories of this kind of frustration?

BK

A few years ago, I found these index cards for a speech that I gave when I was the salutatorian at Clinton Place Junior High School in Newark, New Jersey. It was a short speech all about power, privilege, and their abuse. I was a kid.

EO

What do you think radicalized you?

BK

My parents were Democrats, and they loved Adlai Stevenson, but they certainly weren’t in the world. They weren’t professionals in any real sense, and we didn’t talk politics at home, but I did grow up in a Democrat voting family. I grew up in a poor city that was block-bustered by real estate agents who coaxed white flight. I had classmates who were of different beliefs and different colors. I don’t think I’d make the work that I make now if I hadn’t been from Newark.

EO

Was it always so clear? Did you always feel it on a formal level where you felt the need to make something that can actually affect change?

BK

I didn’t feel that until much later. I didn’t come to terms with it formally because I didn’t have four years of undergraduate and two years of graduate school to experiment. I had to figure stuff out immediately. That’s somehow a result of how class, property, and capital played out in my life.

EO

When you got the place in Springs, how did that change?

BK

I think that everything that we’ve experienced in our lives, the rooms we grew up in, how our parents spoke to us, helped us or didn’t, abused us, our education, our class, color, and gender, have everything to do with determining who we are.

EO

I interviewed Arthur Jafa, and I asked him, “In terms of your education, how central is Howard to the story?” And he said, “That’s an unquantifiable question. Not to compare myself to Toni Morrison, but…to what degree did Toni Morrison become who she was because she was at Howard? I hope that gets at the complexity of your question.” [Laughs.]

BK

I was at the Black Popular Culture Conference that Dia organized in 1992 that AJ was in. He was a very young man at that time and was talking about Black sonics and editing. It’s interesting how many decades later that has manifested itself in his work. I organized a journalism conference at Dia when it had a place in an old fire station at 155 Mercer Street in Soho. The conference was on journalism and the construction of the news.

EO

In retrospect, having had all of those experiences, what do you think you got from each place? The word that stuck out to me when you first talked about the Mademoiselle is that you developed a hard skill. You learned how to show up for work. Did that work ethic shift your relationship to being consistent and assertive?

BK

No, but my work absolutely transformed from my job as a designer to my work as an artist. Those fluencies that I developed became the elements that I used to work with pictures and words. That was absolutely pivotal. At first, the work was small; I showed photographs at Franklin Furnace. There were no words in that. When I started cut and paste, that was straight out of working at Mademoiselle. That was the work I showed with Larry and the early work with Annina. It was all cut and paste. I couldn’t have done that if I didn’t have that experience in editorial design.

EO

Then you did work with the book publisher Aperture?

BK

I designed one or two issues for them as freelance work. I did a lot of book covers and worked with Harper & Row for a while. Hamza Walker reached out some time ago and asked me to send him some images—he’s compiling an archive or something—so I sent him photographs of the covers I had done. They didn’t necessarily look like “my work,” but it was another way I could support myself while doing visiting artist gigs. That was early on, so I can’t say it was a defined period. Things just built slowly.

Once Germano Celant included me in Documenta, I got on people’s radar, for reasons that were sometimes valid and sometimes just bullshit. Some people are really good at hustling vapor and becoming the flavor of the month. I don’t mind hustlers if the work is there, but if it’s not, I can’t say I have a lot of respect.

So that’s how it happened. It was incremental. I remember a collector in New York—someone who’d seen me around for years—was introduced to me and said, totally incredulously, “You’re Barbara Kruger?” Like, that work is hers? This little nudnik?

Eventually, I got some institutional support. I did a big show at MOCA in 1999 that traveled to the Whitney, though I wasn’t thrilled with the Whitney presentation. The space just didn’t suit the work. But that show brought a certain level of visibility and critical support.

EO

Can you tell me about Craig Owens? I recently revisited Beyond Recognition.

BK

Craig Owens was one of my closest friends. We met before I was really known. We just connected. I adored him because he always made room for doubt. Doubt is essential. It punctures the arrogance that can come with visibility. It keeps you grounded. It reminds you not to get too deluded about your own importance. That’s why my MoMA show was titled Picturing “Greatness.” What even is that, “greatness”? How is it constructed? Through taste? Through hierarchy? Craig and I didn’t always agree, but we were very close.

EO

Yeah. Can we talk about what inspired the Picturing “Greatness” show at MoMA?

BK

Diane Arbus might have been my teacher, but I was never necessarily a fan of her work. I always felt it was exploitative—an adventure for a very wealthy young woman. I didn’t know how wealthy she was at the time. I think about how people are fixed into stereotypes by the camera. My few years at Condé Nast taught me a lot about images, posing, how meanings are made, and what it means to look like an artist. The wall text in that exhibition was really important to me.

EO

How did you play with the text?

BK

I played with it directly—it was huge, printed across the walls. When the show went to the Art Institute of Chicago, I didn’t just reuse the MoMA material. I went into the Art Institute’s own archives of artist photographs and rewrote the wall text accordingly. At that time, there were also people of color and women. When the show went to LACMA, I did the same—rewrote the text based on their collection. That didn’t happen when it returned to New York because the show was canceled. What I did it at Zwirner later was only my moving image work.

EO

I was thinking about Picturing “Greatness” and how you primarily showed white men. I couldn’t tell from the checklist if the photos of them were also, or exclusively, taken by white men.

BK

Yes. But the real introduction, and really the core of the show, was the text. The images reflected who was in MoMA’s collection at the time. And things have changed. Institutions have shifted—for the better. Even if the transparency or the “apology tours” feel messy, it’s still progress. More people get to call themselves artists now. Subjectivity has broadened.

EO

What were you trying to communicate through the work?

BK

The canon of European art. MoMA was the great gatekeeper. Those photographs were what the institution held in its collection. My presentation of them  wasn’t to demonize MoMA, but to reflect on who was considered visible, who was considered human. By the time the show reached the Art Institute, the cast of characters who could be seen as artists had expanded. It was the same at LACMA.

EO

Institutional support was important to your career, especially in terms of expanding your resources and physically growing your practice. Did you spend much time at places like the Whitney, Artists Space, or the Urban Institute?

BK

The Whitney was always a big deal—especially the Biennial, and whether you were in it or not. I was in it a few times, but it’s haunting. It’s scary when curators come to your studio. I’ve known Lisa Phillips for many, many years. I remember when she was in the ISP, then at the Whitney, and later when she went to the New Museum. I was rarely collected by museums in New York, but that changed when I moved to Los Angeles. I was asked to be a board member at MOCA, and museums here involve artists more directly. They’re not just symbolic figures. In the beginning, I think people like John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha were more symbolic. But by the time Catherine Opie and I joined the board, and then Mark Bradford and Mark Grotjahn, we were more active. Now, Rodney McMillian, who was a colleague of mine at UCLA, is also on the board. Tala Madani and Christina Quarles are on the board with me now at MOCA, and I’m also on the Hammer board.

I came to understand museum cultures and how donor-based they are and how tied they are to money and so-called philanthropy. And these things are going to be in crisis now, given the world we’re living in. Who knows who’s going to be accused of treason next? Just think of who’s running the government.

EO

The art world used to be able to fit in one room.

BK

Well, that’s not true anymore. Institutions, even before the current administration, have been under forensic investigation because of the great historical reset around who gets to show their work. Some of it’s  an apology tour, but it’s absolutely necessary. It’s hard for regular museums that aren’t so corporatized. Insurance is expensive. Transport is expensive. Work is expensive. Everything has spiraled. The art world is kind of decomposing. The market is collapsing, which is, again, anthropology to me. For the past decade has been a market driven by disposable income and the buying of luxury goods.

EO

What have space and time afforded you in your practice and career?

BK

My teaching jobs at the University of California—first at UC San Diego and then UCLA—were like working at the post office. It was eight hours a week for undergraduates. Each class was four hours long, twice a week, plus five hours with graduate students and meetings. It’s not like teaching in an art school where you swan in every two weeks and say, “Make that green.” It was a real job. I loved it because I would never teach at a private school. It was important to teach at a public university. Most of my students’ parents had never gone to college. Many were first-generation and the first in their families to speak English. It wasn’t an art school, it was an art department. Many of the students became doctors, architects, engineers. I loved that, but it didn’t leave much time. It was incredibly time-consuming.

Now I have more time. When I started working on the Art Institute/LACMA show, I reduced my schedule to 50%. I couldn’t make work and teach full-time. The department at UCLA then included Andrea Fraser, Rodney McMillian, Jim Welling, and Cathy Opie. So many great people. Charlie Ray and Paul McCarthy had just left. Now, Cauleen Smith and Anna Sew Hoy are there. Candice Lin was there when I was still around. It’s a great department, and we give so much of ourselves to it. Art schools have been such an integral part of the Los Angeles art world. For years, being an artist here meant teaching—whether at Art Center, USD, Otis, or UCLA.

EO

Have you reconnected with Jack Bankowsky?

BK

Yes, I see Jack, but not that often. I don’t schlep up to Art Center much, but  they do have a terrific program of speakers.I’m working on a big project right now at the Guggenheim Bilbao, which opens in June. I’m in the middle of prepping all the files for that. I’m also doing a train project in Ukraine, for the Ukrainian National Railway.

EO

Do you feel like you're making art when you're making stuff, or are you responding to the news?

BK

It’s both. The only binaries I believe in are digital. One moment informs the other.

EO

You mentioned that you first started doing video work for MTV.

BK

Yes—Silence the Violence. That was part of MTV’s Art Breaks, when they were commissioning short pieces from artists. It was the first time I worked with moving image, and it completely changed how I thought about time, pacing, and delivery. I realized I could bring my language into a different register by using  motion, sound, and edit rhythm as a kind of punctuation. That was the beginning of the video work that’s now such a big part of what I do.

EO

You’ve also said you can walk into a room and immediately know how the work should exist in space. Has that sense evolved?

BK

No, I’ve always had that. That’s my love of architecture. I don’t use models. I just know what the space needs.

EO

You don’t make models. Where does the work happen?

BK

I go to the space beforehand. I knew LACMA. I knew the Art Institute of Chicago. I walked through them. I went to Serpentine—I’d been there before. I did a big show in Denmark that’s still up. I walk through the space. I take photographs. I pretty much know, once I’m there, how I’ll configure the work. How it’ll circulate. There’s a certain scalability with wallpaper and projection. It’s intuitive. It’s organic.

I love installation—it’s the most exciting part. I hate openings and dinners. I don’t do dinners. That’s punishment to me. I love the installation itself. The moments between events. I’m not into the social stuff. It’s the installation that floats my boat.

EO

How do you live with the manifestation of the idea? Does it just live in your head?

BK

It’s in my head. I work with files. People send me walkthrough videos of the spaces if I need a refresher.

EO

You don’t make digital renderings?

BK

Yes, absolutely. I need the dimensions—the exact dimensions. In New York, I work with people who’ve installed my work. They measure the spaces. I work with a company out here too. They take measurements and send numbers and I work with them and others to build vector files. For videos, it’s different, obviously.

EO

Are you having fun?

BK

It’s a great pleasure and a challenge to be engaged in work. I find myself so fortunate as I approach my centennial.

EO

How does it feel now? Does it feel hard-earned?

BK

It feels like a gift. I never take any of this for granted. It could’ve just as easily not happened. It’s a gift that I have these opportunities—to make work, to make meaning, to reach people.