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
One thing I learned working at magazines was that if you couldn't get people to look at a page or a cover, then you were fired. It was all about how you create arresting works, and by arresting I mean stop people, even for a nano-second.
It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.
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.
I've never worked in advertising - my experience was as an editorial designer for magazines - but you could say, in the bigger picture, that magazines are vehicles for colour advertising.
I didn't finish college; my parents didn't graduate college - we didn't have a pot to piss in. I'm from Newark, New Jersey. I had to work. I didn't think it would be possible for me to be an artist without having a job.
I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.
I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices.
Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.
Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.
I think that designers have an incredibly broad creative repertoire. They solve. They create images of perfection for any number of clients. I could never do that. I'm my client. That's the difference between an artist and a designer; it's a client relationship.