Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.
Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
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.
I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.
I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.
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.
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.
What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing - the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.
Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag. Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes.
Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.
I didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they're my terms, and they're not.
I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
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.
Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in.
