Up Above the Clouds with Barbara Kruger

By Erika Houle

Photographs by Sam Muller

 

 

For more than four decades, Barbara Kruger has been decrypting the nature of our existence as humans in the world—how we dress, eat, shop, think, treat one another, and beyond. From the 77-year-old artist’s signature red rectangular templates and white Futura fonts, to the fierce grasp she holds on the weight of words, images, and how exactly they might land in jarring juxtapositions, her legacy is not only a reflection of her brilliance and meticulous observation, but an ongoing act of choice to ignite change. 

Kruger’s reach spans buildings, buses, classrooms, clothing, magazines, matchbooks, mugs, museums, and skateboards around the globe, interconnecting and calling into question systems of power in media, consumerism, and politics: “Talk is cheap.” (1985) “I shop therefore I am.” (1987) “Who becomes a ‘murderer’ in post-Roe America?” (2022). Ironically (or not), it has also opened the doors to an endless inflow of corporate copycats—Supreme, to start—but her razor-sharp delivery of her own line of thinking has proven impossible to be co-opted.

In the 60s, Kruger left art school and began working for magazines in New York, designing, illustrating, and photo editing in the pre-digital era. Though she might not have known it at the time—Kruger says she felt like a “tourist” flipping through depictions of the ways other people were living at House & Garden—she was honing a fluency. But the gigs were severely underpaid. In order to make rent, she sought out short-term teaching jobs, subletting her loft and traveling across the US to work for one semester at a time. It wasn’t until around 2002, when Kruger had already established herself as one of the most influential figures in her field, that she landed her first job as what she calls a “real-life” teacher—a role she upheld at UCLA until earlier this year, and a title that, through her tremendous output, she’ll hold onto forever.

Kruger’s latest exhibition, Thinking of You. I mean Me. I mean You., organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on through January, 2023, is a wall-to-wall representation of a career loaded with hard-hitting statements about authority, deception, identity, and desire. Still, the Los Angeles-based visionary continues to ask herself today: “What does it mean to call yourself an artist?” Over the phone, Kruger very generously shares more about what informs her perspective, her early (and quickly averted) dream of becoming “art director of the world,” and her refusal to be shocked by absolutely anything.

Thank you, Barbara.

 

Were you always questioning things as a kid? At what age did you begin to look at the world with a critical eye?

I make no claims for myself or my work in any way, the only thing I will stake claim to is that I’ve always had a pretty good internal GPS. I’ve always had some kind of organic understanding of where I am in the world. I think part of that informs my work—where I’m from, Newark, New Jersey, and my awareness of class and hierarchy and how that fits into making us who we are.

 

What parts of growing up in Newark were you most fond of? Where do you think that internal GPS came from?

It had to do with me understanding the limitations of our circumstances, of coming from a working class family, of never owning property, of growing up in a three-room apartment in a very crisis-driven city, plagued by white flight to the suburbs, blockbusting, no real capital revenue at that time. I believe that’s changed to some degree, but that informed my childhood. It didn’t make it sad, necessarily, but it’s not like I had an affection for Newark. I just understood it.

 

Was your family having conversations about those kinds of things?

There was no real conversation about any of that. I don’t come from an academic, intellectual family. We just tried to make it through to another day.

 

How has living in Los Angeles repositioned your perspective?

I think that where we wake up and go to sleep, and the cultural containments—whether built environment, or anything, really—changes the feel of our lives. After Newark, I moved to New York, and that was different, living on my own in a small apartment. Moving to LA was huge because I didn’t have any bougainvillea in my life in Newark, or New York. It was a change that I really wanted to make because life is short and I had seen the movie in New York, you know? I have no undergraduate degree, no graduate degrees, so I was out of school by the time I was 19. That was what my early years were like: working 9-5 jobs in New York.

 

Have you ever worked in a field where you had to sell product? What was your very first job?

I think my first job was working as a telephone operator. I got a job doing page design at little magazines. Then I got my job at Condé Nast as a third rank designer at one of their fashion magazines, and then became a picture editor. These jobs paid absolutely nothing. $85 per week. It was crazy, but Newark was a cheaper place then. Coming from Newark informed my understanding of the way capital flows through cultures and determines our identities.

Working at fashion magazines, and certainly House & Garden really made me aware of body objectification, merchandising, lifestyle, and I always felt like such a tourist looking at all the pictures I was selecting. I was thinking, “Oh my god, this is the way people live,” but it didn’t make me envious. It foregrounded—in the second case—my interest in the built environment and architecture, but also [ideas] about who gets what? Who owns what? Who eats what? Who wears what? All that stuff. [Laughs] It wasn’t an angry attitude, it was more anthropological in a broader sense.

I’m wondering what your headspace was like while you were working for Seventeen and Mademoiselle.

Seventeen was a commercial illustration job where I did little back page drawings of socks and shoes and bracelets. At Mademoiselle, it was more designing, first back-of-book and then main book, working with photographers and picking the pictures and doing layouts.

 

Was it difficult to separate your role as a creative in a corporate environment from your own way of thinking?

I didn’t think of myself as a creative. That’s a term which has only gained usage in the past 20 years or so. You were either a designer, or an artist. I didn’t know how to call myself an artist. The art world was 12 white guys in Lower Manhattan. It was a very closed circle. I didn’t consider myself a designer. I’d never studied design, I’m not a fonthead or anything like that. It was pretty organic. When I first started doing design work at a magazine, I thought, “Oh, I want to be art director of the world,” but I soon realized I simply didn’t have the skills to do that. Designing is a client-based experience where you’re creating these images of perfection for different clients, so you’re answering their needs, and I was incapable of doing that. I wanted to make meaning for myself, but first I had to figure out what kind of meaning I wanted to make.

 

Did you ever experiment or play with placeholders in the work that you submitted?

It was pre-digital at magazines. It was all paste-ups. I made pages of mock type, they didn’t say anything. It was abcdefg, and the copywriters would write to the amount of type that fit in the design. I think my commentary began years later, when I started to use the fluency I had developed working at magazines as a way to make my own commentary. I wasn’t a trickster working for a magazine. I didn’t have that much agency or idea of who I was or what I wanted to do.

 

So you never got into any trouble…

I also had no romance about being a rebel or anything like that. I think that romance comes from another kind of upbringing than what I had. [Laughs] We were just trying to get by, you couldn’t afford to lose a job.

 

Are there any print publications that you’ll always be a fan of? Any you still collect?

The absolute disappearance of print—it’s incremental, of course, and it’s interesting because I remember being at meetings at Mademoiselle, which no longer exists, where the “big shots” would come in, ”the guys,” and they were talking about how television was this huge threat to magazine culture. This was 50 years ago, and in fact, television was not a huge threat to magazine cultures. It was the internet, and digital culture.

I see the difference when I read stuff hard copy. I read much more rigorously, on a certain level. I subscribe to newspapers. I used to buy The New York Times every day when I lived in New York, and then got it delivered here, but the delivery people couldn’t get it to the right place, and somebody would steal it from the street. Nobody would steal a newspaper now—they couldn’t give a flying fuck about it, but I would read everything. I’d start with the news section, then the business section, then the sports section. I know the few magazines I still get in hard copy, I read absolutely front-to-back. Even articles I think I might not be interested in, I read. Online, people have their silos of interest, and their go-tos, and their bookmarks, and in many ways, they’re not very expansive.

 

Can you describe the current state of your visual archive? Things you always want to hold onto, or new things you’re seeing and saving for the future—do you have a certain room in your house designated for that, or is it all categorized in folders somewhere?

I have no assistants. No real studio. I do have a collection of things that I’ve put aside in plastic folders. I know, “You’re never supposed to leave your stuff in plastic folders…” I mean, please. I have that, and there’s a big archive in my head, not only images but ideas and words and pictures. I used to be a big restaurant writer, or café writer. I used to love to go to places with a notebook. I would never, ever go to a café with my computer—especially in this town, where everybody’s got a screenplay that’s going to be huge, or it’s going to be streaming in six months. No.

What elements of skateboarding culture are you most fascinated by?

Over the decades, the way it has emerged in a really visible way, outside of a subculture into a broader culture, affiliated not only with sport but with fashion, and how its consciousness has allowed it to sprout in certain neighborhoods and certain spaces, certain struggles around real estate and cities and how aware they are of built environment and pleasure. These were not always discussed, 20 or 30 years ago, the way they are now. They’ve become part of urban planning in some places. The way it has moved, to a certain degree, but only partially, from this rogue, rebellious appropriation of public space for a certain kind of usage, to being institutionalized as a skatepark, as part of a civic, money-allotted-to build. That’s changed.

 

In addition to your installation at LES (Coleman) Skatepark for Performa 17, you collaborated with Volcom to create skateboards that read: “Don’t Be A Jerk,” which originally sold for $65. One of them is now listed for $1000 on a resale streetwear site. The seller’s username is “poopieface.”

That’s nothing compared to what I suffer from in terms of auction houses. I hate auction houses more than I hate Redbubble. Works that I made 40 years ago, that I literally made $200 on once I made the frame or the print are selling or speculating for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which I don’t get a penny from. That’s for all artists—we might as well be dead in terms of the secondary market.

Performa approached me with doing a city-wide project. RoseLee Goldberg, Sasha Okshteyn, Esa Nickle, and Job Piston thought that we could include a skatepark, which I thought was fabulous. They connected me with Steve Rodriguez, who was a designer and an important figure in New York. He was the founder of 5BORO. It was Steve who walked me through Coleman and a few other skateparks and really gained the respect of the community. I did not want to affiliate with a big brand—Supreme, Vans, whatever. Those proceeds went to Performa, which was important to me, because it’s always a struggle for them to come up with huge, performative events every two years.

 

You mentioned Supreme, and I’m mostly kidding, but have they sued you for copyright infringement yet?

No, no. I mean, they had reached out to me for years, years and years ago to do something, and I said, “Why? You already got—no, I don’t think so.” [Laughs] I didn’t need to be appropriated by them. I thought it was funny—not funny, but absolutely appropriate that somebody who sort of takes on the mantle of the rebel, or “badness,” is in fact just a corporate player. It’s par for the course.

 

Have your opinions on streetwear or the fashion industry changed at all recently?

I worked in the fashion industry early on, before so-called “street style.” When I worked at Condé Nast it was something else. It was always an appropriative industry. What’s compelling to me is less the fact that this merch is produced than the fact that people so slavishly want to be labelled by it and be part of it. Again, it’s an anthropology of groupness, of centrality and marginality, of the romance of marginality even when it becomes corporatized. These are all interesting things to me. They’re not judgements, they’re observations. It’s so perfect in so many unfortunate ways, but so predictable.

 

Unsurprising has been the theme for so long.

Unsurprising and unshocking should be the theme for our everyday life now. I’ve said many times, people who are shocked by all the politics of the past eight years haven’t been paying attention. If you’re shocked at anything, it attests to your failure of imagination.

 

What led you to want to teach?

Early on, I was in New York and I couldn’t pay my rent, even though I had jobs, I didn’t have a pot to piss in, and unfortunately no inheritance. No one knew who I was in terms of being an artist. I didn’t even know what I was doing. These places wouldn’t hire women as tenure people, but they would hire visitors who would come in for a semester. I taught at Wright State for six months, Ohio State for six months, Chicago Art Institute for six months, CalArts for six months—these weren’t real jobs, but they paid enough for me to sublet my loft in New York because I couldn’t afford the payment. It wasn’t until 2002 that I got an actual, real-life teaching job.

 

I’ve read reviews on student platforms by people who have taken various courses of yours at UCLA, and there was one in particular that was very thorough about the quality of work that you were looking for, what was expected inside and outside of the classroom, and how your approach was not for those who are “lazy, uninterested, and uninvolved” with their work. The last line was “She’s the shit.” How important was that kind of feedback to you?

What’s most important to me is that 50% of the grade had to do with contribution to class conversation. I did not run a class by talking at people and being like, “the teach.” There were times where I said almost nothing, I wanted to really hear people. Some folks wanted to talk about their own work and they wouldn’t contribute to anyone else’s. It was important to have a conversation about what the hell we were doing, and what it means to call yourself an artist. That’s something that didn’t come to me organically, I had to figure that out. It’s still a quandary, on a certain level: What does it mean to call yourself an artist? I don’t mean just visual art—making films, making music, building buildings, making clothes. All those things can be encompassed in that term to me, it’s very broad.

 

You’ve described your work as “a scrutiny of how we are to one another.” As that relates specifically to that last few years, in what ways have you remained hopeful?

I think the last few years have brought out the extremities of how we adore or abhor one another, or anything in between. It’s been a time of global extremity in so many continuing ways, enabled by digital culture for both good and evil and everything in between. And by a raging market economy that is immune to the most horrific things that are happening in the world.

 

I’ve noticed your “daily reminder to unclench your jaw” recirculating online. I was wondering if you had any other everyday prompts—for yourself or for others—that you’ve been turning to lately?

I have no lessons to be learned. I deal with the everyday with as much pleasure and pain as anyone else. I think we should be as vigilant as possible and understand who we are in the world, whether we can change that, who has placed us there, what is our agency to make liberatory change around that, and to be ever mindful of both the pleasures and punishments of being human, because they’re coming at us every day.

 

Where do you go when you’re seeking pleasure?

It’s not necessarily a site. I think getting outdoors and taking a walk, or looking at a tree, or looking at the water. Anything other than a screen might be helpful to give us some perspective and a reminder, waking up every morning, to appreciate the sun on your face. To appreciate the next breath. Stuff like that—basic, in a good sense, not basic in a punishing sense. I’m not talking about any bullshit, wellness shit, which is so class-based. Even in the most intense urban environment—just looking at the sky.