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I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

Barbara Kruger

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
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
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Good Hard Mind Practice Time Work
All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.
BARBARA KRUGER

Illustration Stereotype Violence
Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me… the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture’s power to construct our days and nights.
BARBARA KRUGER

First Love Moving Night
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Delusion Drag Surround Yourself
It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it
BARBARA KRUGER

Clean Small World World
What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing – the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.
BARBARA KRUGER

Add Artist Technology
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
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Mean Musical
I don’t necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It’s just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.
BARBARA KRUGER

Labels Thinking Way
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Battle People Thinking
Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Practice Two
I have no complaints, except for the world.
BARBARA KRUGER

Complaints Except World
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
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Cities Country Culture Production

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

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I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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