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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

Look, we’re all saddled with things that make us better or worse. This world is a crazy place, and I’ve chosen to make my work about that insanity.
BARBARA KRUGER

Crazy Insanity Looks
You want it, you buy it, you forget it.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buy Forget Want
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Figure World
The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.
BARBARA KRUGER

Degrees Pieces World
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGER

Language Pieces Stealing
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
Memory is your image of perfection.
BARBARA KRUGER

Memories Perfection
I worked with someone else’s photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn’t that be my art?
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Eye Photo Way Word
I have frequently said, and I will repeat again, in the manner of any well-meaning seriality, that I’m interested in mixing the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.
BARBARA KRUGER

Better Knowing Mixing Thinking
What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition.
BARBARA KRUGER

Moments Recognition Trying
I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Pictures Words
I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist People Thinking
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
GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU’LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF.
BARBARA KRUGER

Brain Giving Hair
I’ve always thought that it’s good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that’s how consensus is constructed.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Believe Media
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 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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