Barbara Kruger by Osman Can Yerebakan

OCY Besides the ideological realities of the space, architecture is another determinator of a message. How do the physical restraints of a venue contribute to your statement?

BK Architectures, the built environment, and shelter—or the lack of it—have always been areas of engagement for me. After many years of producing images and words, the possibility of “spatializing” these works was a tremendous opportunity: one that enabled meanings that were scalable from close reading to long-shot exteriors. This allowed for varying receptions of the ideas and images I work with.

OCY Someone recently told me they’re skeptical about copyright because it usually favors the powerful. As someone whose art is constantly appropriated and used without your consent, how do you see the future of copyright within an increasingly chaotic media consumption?

BK In many instances, copyright is just a euphemism for corporate control. But this is not always the case. I think it can play a pivotal role in the protection of the work of artists, writers, musicians, and other “creators.” But there are varying ideas about just what that “protection” actually means and how it operates. It was clear from the ancient days of the record industry’s early “defeat” of Napster that a wave of unstoppable change was upon us. And much of this has been truly productive. The use and misuse of the notions of ownership are ongoing and vexing. But I think the idea of transformation, the so-called public domain, and the ways that images and words are fluid and changing have been and should continue to be methods and sites that both produce and reproduce cultural lives.

OCY Animated replays in the David Zwirner exhibition activated some of your most iconic works with a puzzle effect. Puzzle in its core is a tactile manual game, but today its digital version is a popular game on electronic devices. Could you talk about your use of the puzzle form in the LED works as a means of anticipation-building and an endless cycle of re-formation?

BK In working to rethink, re-picture, and animate some of my previous work, I chose to employ both visual effects and sonic interventions. Among these devices were puzzles, aerosols, and various other distortions and cuts. In each exhibition venue, I worked to engage those particular spaces visually. But I also tried to devise ways in which audio and various soundings enmeshed the looker and listener: leaking from room to room and suffusing the spaces with voices and sonic cues and affects. And, yes, as you suggest, puzzling does create a series of anticipatory moments, which I hope work for the work.

OCY The power of rhetoric seems to have extended in the last few years with the political chaos in the US and globally. Do you let your work be somewhat formed by every era’s turmoils and rhetorics? Do you consider the work to be susceptible to the chaos, or are you always a few steps back?

BK With a few very obvious exceptions, I seldom create issue-specific works. In the broadest sense, I try to make work about how we are to one another: work that engages our adorations, contempt, pleasures, and punishments. As far as the chaos that you mention, of course my work is susceptible to the chaos. I’m susceptible to the chaos. Bodies are susceptible to the chaos. And this chaos should be a shock to no one. And if it is, they have not been paying attention, both to recent events and the world’s long history of brutal subjugation, shaming, and destruction.

OCY Text means determination; something written persists—think of the Latin saying Verba volant, scripta manent. Your texts oftentimes play with this dominance of written words, such as those inThinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You at the Museum of Modern Art. What do you think about the power of the written word today, whether in books, on Twitter, or daily communication?

BK I am an internet user and that usage is both a pleasure, a punishment, and perhaps most importantly a resource. While our online lives might too often work to fortify our silos and construct sometimes unexamined notions of what we mean by “community,” this access can force us to face what is truly looming. It is a measure of the connected world’s desires and fears. It eradicates distance and magnifies the immediacy of intimacy and the velocity of threat.

OCY Could you talk about directness? The word “you” has always appeared in your work as well as “I” and “We.” How do you shift the dynamics between a first-person address and a more general audience?

BK So-called direct address has frequently been an operative in my work. It sort of cuts through the grease. But it also raises questions of subject and object positions and relations, accusation, acceptance, and denial. And hopefully might work to further dissolve the powers and determinations of binaries.

Barbara Kruger’s work can be seen in the current Venice Biennale until November 27; Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City until January 2, 2023.