I’ve always been very tied to language.
BARBARA KRUGERI’ve always been very tied to language.
BARBARA KRUGERThere are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.
BARBARA KRUGERThe 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 KRUGERIt entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.
BARBARA KRUGERWarhol’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 KRUGERThere’s a moment of recognition. It’s that white-light kind of stuff that just “works.” I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it’s a movie, music, a building, a book.
BARBARA KRUGERI had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
BARBARA KRUGERI 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 KRUGERProminence 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 KRUGERArchitecture 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 KRUGERI just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.
BARBARA KRUGERWe are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGERIt’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 KRUGERLook, 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 KRUGERI 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 KRUGERDirect address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I’m working in.
BARBARA KRUGER