Barbara Kruger
[Artist, b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
Images are made palpable, ironed flat by technology and, in turn, dictate the seemingly real through the representative.
Pictures and the words that mark or surround them seem to construct and contain us. From photos to movies, to TV, to home videos and computers, these pictures and words have the power to tell us who we are and who we aren’t, to dictate what we can and cannot be. But they also suggest that seeing is no longer believing and that what you see is not what you get.
As long as pictures remain powerful, living conventions within culture, I’ll continue to use them and turn them around. Texts, pictures, projections—I want to keep the plurality of practices going.
