If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they’re my terms, and they’re not.
BARBARA KRUGERIf 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.
More Barbara Kruger Quotes
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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.
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I don’t necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It’s just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
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What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing – the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.
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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.
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What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition.
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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.
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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.
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GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU’LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF.
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It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.
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I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it’s the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
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Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.
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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.
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I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.
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It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it
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I’m an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.
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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