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It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it

Barbara Kruger

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

Artist Rehabilitation Tactics
Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
BARBARA KRUGER

Careers Rumor Tragedy
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
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
Warhol’s images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn’t think about him a hell of a lot.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Honest Thinking
I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Poor Rich Thinking
Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.
BARBARA KRUGER

Belief Differences Doubt
Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.
BARBARA KRUGER

Hobbies Magic Photography
Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.
BARBARA KRUGER

Believe Lying World
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.
BARBARA KRUGER

Morning Race Sunday
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
I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.
BARBARA KRUGER

Night Space Thinking
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
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

Art Thinking Trying
All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.
BARBARA KRUGER

Illustration Stereotype Violence

It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it

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It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it

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