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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

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

Artist Pictures Words
Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.
BARBARA KRUGER

Made Real Technology
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
All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It’s scary.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Gossip Scary
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
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
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’m living my life, not buying a lifestyle.
BARBARA KRUGER

Buying Life Lifestyle
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
As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up.
BARBARA KRUGER

Insane Media Princess
I want to speak, show, see, and hear outrageously astute questions and comments. I want to be on the sides of pleasure and laughter and to disrupt the dour certainties of pictures, property, and power.
BARBARA KRUGER

Laughter Side Want
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 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
Fashion is everywhere and about everything. It is folly, vanity and the fun of it all. It is disguise, innuendo, and cunning. It is mean, gorgeous and ambitious, and definitely the last word for the next few seconds.
BARBARA KRUGER

Fashion Fun Mean
I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Opportunity Space
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’ve always been very tied to language.
BARBARA KRUGER

Always Language Tied
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 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
We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.
BARBARA KRUGER

Language Pieces Stealing
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
I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
BARBARA KRUGER

Art Poor Rich Thinking
There 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 KRUGER

Influence Profound Tvs
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
It’s hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
BARBARA KRUGER

Class People Support
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
I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author’s rendition of events and circumstances.
BARBARA KRUGER

Artist Book Thinking

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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