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I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

Barbara Kruger

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It’s scary.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Gossip Scary
I think what I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.
BARBARA KRUGER

Feelings Thinking Understanding
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

History Order Views
You want it, you buy it, you forget it.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buy Forget Want
The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can’t focus on longer narratives now – even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it’s an adventure film.
BARBARA KRUGER

Adventure Focus People
I’m trying to engage issues of power and sexuality and money and life and death and power. Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other.
BARBARA KRUGER

Death Issues Life Power
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Feminist Political
I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. It’s the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Girl Gun Instead Pull
I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Poor Rich Thinking
I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Ideas Trying
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Book Thinking
Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Ideas Light
Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Doe Expression
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Practice Teaching Writing
Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I’m working in.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Rehabilitation Tactics
I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.
BARBARA KRUGER

Enough Slave Space

I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

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I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

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