WEBVTT 00:00:17.520 --> 00:00:22.020 ["Barbara Kruger: Part of the Discourse"] 00:00:26.420 --> 00:00:29.520 How come any piece of canvas with pigment on it 00:00:29.520 --> 00:00:30.660 gets to be called art? 00:00:32.760 --> 00:00:35.660 There are so many ways of making art, 00:00:36.760 --> 00:00:40.580 some of them more available to a general public than others. 00:00:42.660 --> 00:00:45.260 I remember going to galleries when I was young-- 00:00:45.260 --> 00:00:46.820 totally intimidated! 00:00:47.640 --> 00:00:50.420 Certain works have to be decoded. 00:00:51.240 --> 00:00:55.239 I think the availability of my work was important to me, 00:00:55.239 --> 00:00:58.670 because I was that viewer who didn’t understand-- 00:00:58.670 --> 00:01:00.300 who didn’t know the codes. 00:01:15.240 --> 00:01:17.140 Performa approached me, 00:01:17.140 --> 00:01:19.729 and the skatepark came up in conversation. 00:01:19.729 --> 00:01:22.200 I just go, "Oh that would be so cool." 00:01:23.000 --> 00:01:24.079 "Money talks." 00:01:24.620 --> 00:01:25.680 "Whose values?" 00:01:30.180 --> 00:01:32.280 These are just ideas in the air, 00:01:32.300 --> 00:01:35.200 and questions that we ask sometimes-- 00:01:37.280 --> 00:01:40.100 and questions that we don’t ask but should ask. 00:01:44.440 --> 00:01:46.409 I grew up in Newark, New Jersey. 00:01:46.409 --> 00:01:48.270 My mother and my father, 00:01:48.270 --> 00:01:50.660 neither of them have college degrees. 00:01:51.960 --> 00:01:53.980 We lived in a three-room apartment 00:01:53.980 --> 00:01:55.360 and I slept in the living room. 00:01:57.060 --> 00:02:01.770 I was always very aware of how where we’re born, 00:02:01.770 --> 00:02:04.540 what we are given, and what is withheld from us 00:02:04.540 --> 00:02:06.960 determines who we can be in the world. 00:02:08.360 --> 00:02:10.120 I came to New York. 00:02:10.120 --> 00:02:12.040 Went to Parson’s for a year. 00:02:12.520 --> 00:02:14.880 Started working as a billing clerk 00:02:15.520 --> 00:02:18.060 and then a telephone operator. 00:02:19.200 --> 00:02:21.500 Living in Newark and later New York, 00:02:21.519 --> 00:02:24.360 maybe you didn’t read the tabloids but you saw them everyday 00:02:24.360 --> 00:02:27.049 in the subway and everywhere. 00:02:27.049 --> 00:02:30.260 All of a sudden, I heard there were jobs at Condé Nast. 00:02:30.260 --> 00:02:31.409 I was lucky-- 00:02:31.409 --> 00:02:34.540 I got hired as a second designer. 00:02:34.970 --> 00:02:36.920 If you didn’t get people to look at those pages, 00:02:36.920 --> 00:02:37.800 you were fired. 00:02:38.250 --> 00:02:39.260 Cropping pictures. 00:02:39.260 --> 00:02:40.520 Choosing fonts. 00:02:41.400 --> 00:02:44.320 When I first started I thought, "Oh I want to be art director," 00:02:44.320 --> 00:02:46.020 but it was a different world. 00:02:46.540 --> 00:02:49.880 I was like a chimney sweep compared to the other people who worked there. 00:02:50.800 --> 00:02:52.140 I really took time off 00:02:52.140 --> 00:02:56.200 and tried to figure out what it might mean to call myself an artist. 00:02:57.200 --> 00:02:58.700 I remember saying to people, 00:02:58.709 --> 00:03:02.829 "Can I just be an artist by working with pasteup and magic marker?" 00:03:02.829 --> 00:03:04.260 "No, you can’t do that." 00:03:04.760 --> 00:03:08.080 I realized I could use the fluencies as a designer 00:03:08.080 --> 00:03:09.440 to make my work. 00:03:10.510 --> 00:03:13.200 I like fonts that cut through the grease-- 00:03:13.200 --> 00:03:17.400 the, sort of, clarity of those sans serif fonts. 00:03:19.220 --> 00:03:22.420 I felt that red capture one’s attention. 00:03:24.600 --> 00:03:27.820 In most cases, I could not afford to print these images in color. 00:03:28.660 --> 00:03:32.380 I used to go to used bookstores and find old magazines, 00:03:32.380 --> 00:03:34.280 and I converted them to black and white. 00:03:35.620 --> 00:03:39.300 For us, in 1981, '83, 00:03:39.300 --> 00:03:42.799 showing your work was about being a part of the discourse. 00:03:43.160 --> 00:03:47.040 When my peer group first started being discussed, 00:03:47.049 --> 00:03:48.650 and our work was being sold, 00:03:48.650 --> 00:03:54.920 I thought, "Well if my work is developing this commodity status, I had to address it." 00:03:59.680 --> 00:04:02.860 Issues about power, value, 00:04:02.860 --> 00:04:04.920 unfortunately do not grow old. 00:04:18.840 --> 00:04:20.820 Architecture is my first love. 00:04:21.320 --> 00:04:23.600 I just spatialize ideas. 00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:31.380 I know what areas to engage 00:04:31.380 --> 00:04:35.480 to activate a space with images and with text. 00:04:42.440 --> 00:04:43.320 "Think like us." 00:04:43.320 --> 00:04:45.240 "Hate like us." "Fear like us." 00:04:45.320 --> 00:04:47.400 I want my work to create commentary. 00:04:47.400 --> 00:04:49.140 [PROTESTOR] --Right to life, your name’s a lie, 00:04:49.140 --> 00:04:50.600 --you don’t care if women die. 00:04:52.840 --> 00:04:56.700 [KRUGER] I made "Your body is a battleground" to get people to go to the march. 00:04:56.700 --> 00:04:58.620 This was for women’s reproductive rights. 00:04:59.700 --> 00:05:03.960 I remember calling Planned Parenthood and offering my services, 00:05:03.960 --> 00:05:06.240 and they didn’t know who the eff I was. 00:05:06.520 --> 00:05:09.380 They said, well they were working with an advertising agency. 00:05:09.380 --> 00:05:10.560 Oh okay, alright. 00:05:11.640 --> 00:05:14.820 So I used this printer named Quirky. 00:05:15.500 --> 00:05:17.860 I used to print all these posters with him. 00:05:19.600 --> 00:05:22.260 I went out at one or two in the morning 00:05:22.260 --> 00:05:25.060 and put these posters up all over town. 00:05:29.800 --> 00:05:31.600 Well, of course I’m a feminist. 00:05:32.340 --> 00:05:38.440 But I have never been able to consider gender or sexuality apart from class-- 00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:41.440 and never thought of class apart from race. 00:05:42.180 --> 00:05:44.560 Something to really think about 00:05:44.560 --> 00:05:48.390 is what makes us who we are in the world that we live in, 00:05:48.390 --> 00:05:51.520 and how culture constructs and contains us. 00:05:52.240 --> 00:05:54.960 There are stereotypes of the artist 00:05:54.960 --> 00:05:57.040 or of the musician. 00:05:57.560 --> 00:05:59.860 Those are the kinder stereotypes. 00:06:04.600 --> 00:06:07.620 People ask me all the time, can they come to my studio? 00:06:07.620 --> 00:06:10.140 And I say, do you want me to put a beret on 00:06:10.140 --> 00:06:12.000 and you can photograph me with a big table? 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:13.380 I said, no-- no. 00:06:13.380 --> 00:06:15.620 I just don’t want to be that person. 00:06:20.920 --> 00:06:23.600 There’s enough visual record of me. 00:06:24.040 --> 00:06:26.120 You don’t need a million pictures. 00:06:27.500 --> 00:06:30.420 What it means to point a camera at another person, 00:06:30.420 --> 00:06:32.800 I think that there’s a brutality about that. 00:06:45.020 --> 00:06:45.740 "You." 00:06:47.660 --> 00:06:50.960 "You know that women have served all these centuries" 00:06:50.960 --> 00:06:54.940 "as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power" 00:06:54.940 --> 00:06:59.650 "of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." 00:07:00.200 --> 00:07:01.640 It’s a Virginia Woolf quote. 00:07:04.620 --> 00:07:06.120 I just had to use that.