Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Krugeris an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionConceptual Artist
Date of Birth26 January 1945
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism - objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.
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.
I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.
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.
Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
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.
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.
Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.