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.
I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I’m not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don’t do it. I’m not crazy about categories.
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.
It’s really hard for me to use the term ‘history’ in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I’d rather stick to the pluralness of ‘histories’ in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.
I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.
If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture – not only national culture but global culture.
I worked with someone else’s photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn’t that be my art?
Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.
The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life.
But I really resist categories – that naming is a closing down of meaning. Women’s art, political art – those categorisations perpetuate a certain kind of marginality which I’m resistant to. But I absolutely define myself as a feminist.
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.
