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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

I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.
BARBARA KRUGER

Bucks Moving Thinking
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
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Culture Irony
Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.
BARBARA KRUGER

Different Ideas Space
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
All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.
BARBARA KRUGER

Illustration Stereotype Violence
Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.
BARBARA KRUGER

Made Real Technology
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
the art world has always been an unrelenting taste machine, but now flavors of the month have morphed into flavors of the minute. Again, all a reflection of a wider cultural condition. I mean, the art world is slow compared with the music and movie businesses.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Mean Reflection
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
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
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
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
Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art School Teaching
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
It’s hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
BARBARA KRUGER

Class People Support

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.

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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.

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