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I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

Barbara Kruger

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

Art Poor Rich Thinking
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
What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing – the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.
BARBARA KRUGER

Add Artist Technology
All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.
BARBARA KRUGER

Illustration Stereotype Violence
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
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 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

Feelings Thinking Understanding
I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become.
BARBARA KRUGER

Pictures Want Who 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
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 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 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
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
The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can’t focus on longer narratives now – even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it’s an adventure film.
BARBARA KRUGER

Adventure Focus People
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 try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

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I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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