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 remember going into galleries and seeing this thing called conceptual art, and I understand people's marginalization from what the art subculture is because if you haven't crashed the codes, and if you don't know what it is, you feel it's a conspiracy against your unintelligence. You feel it's fraud.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.
If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they're my terms, and they're not.
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.
Love is something you fall into.
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.
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.
... the thing that's happening today vis-á-vis computer imaging, vis-á-vis alteration, is that it no longer needs to be based on the real at all. I don't want to get into jargon - let's just say that photography to me no longer pertains to the rhetoric of realism; it pertains more perhaps to the rhetoric of the unreal rather than the real or of course the hyperreal.
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.
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.