With so much injustice in the world, how do you choose what to tackle? What’s the selection process when you’re making new work?
Käthe: Sometimes it comes from something going on that we just feel we have to attempt to find an effective way to address. Sometimes people just ask us. For instance, we’ve done a lot of work at museums criticizing the museums themselves, and in those cases, the museums have actually asked us to do it. They open the files and information to us; some of it, not all of it.
Frida: We can’t deal with everything, even though we have opinions about broader, larger political issues. We have an audience that we know we can influence and so we tend to stick with that. Although, we have done several projects, national and international, about the election and the past election.
Käthe: For decades, we’ve been working on issues around abortion, we’ve made work about the Supreme Court, human rights, civil rights, homelessness, war… We’re best known for our art examination work, but we’ve taken on so many other issues. I wish we could have taken on more, but when we find a way into an issue that we know might be able to convince people, we just go for it.
I think it’s really interesting that you have reworked pieces through the decades, such as, Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into The Met Museum? which has been applied to museums across the world with their own statistics. It really highlights that your work is ever necessary.
Frida: Something else that would make our work take on a larger importance in the world of politics is that the art world is a perfect microcosm of what’s wrong with our late capitalist colonialist society. Everything that’s wrong with an art museum you can see is wrong in society at large.
Käthe: There’s something else, too, which we really can’t forget. It’s totally true, the system sucks, but what’s also true is that artists are fantastic. You cannot stop them from making their work, people are creating game changing work and spending their whole life doing it. And it’s not just true in art, it’s true in other creative fields, too. And without that, we wouldn’t have a culture. So, part of our work has always been to make it clear that you can’t let institutions define what our culture is.
