I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it’s the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.
There’s a moment of recognition. It’s that white-light kind of stuff that just “works.” I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it’s a movie, music, a building, a book.
The different aspects of my activity, whether it’s writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don’t make any separation in terms of those practices.
It’s good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can’t be personalized.
I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author’s rendition of events and circumstances.
I’m an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.
I’d always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.
I’ve always thought that it’s good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that’s how consensus is constructed.
The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.
