Who speaks? Who is silent? Who is seen? Who is absent? These questions focus on how cultures are constructed through pictures and words, how we are seduced into a world of appearances: into a pose of who we are and aren't. On both an emotional and an economic level, images and texts have the power to make us rich or poor. In these essays and reviews, written over the last decade, Barbara Kruger addresses that power with intelligence and wit, in the hope of engaging both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation.  Barbara Kruger is an artist whose pictures and words engage issues of power, sex, money, difference, and death. Her work has appeared throughout America, Europe, and Japan in galleries, newspapers, magazines, and museums and on billboards, matchbooks, TV programs, t-shirts, postcards, and shopping bags. She has written about television, film, and cultures for Artforum, Esquire, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.

Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances

Arts & Photography

Kruger, Barbara

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

In these essays and reviews, written over the last decade, Barbara Kruger addresses that power with intelligence and wit, in the hope of engaging both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation.
Who speaks? Who is silent? Who is seen? Who is absent? These questions focus on how cultures are constructed through pictures and words, how we are seduced into a world of appearances: into a pose of who we are and aren't. On both an emotional and an economic level, images and texts have the power to make us rich or poor. In these essays and reviews, written over the last decade, Barbara Kruger addresses that power with intelligence and wit, in the hope of engaging both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation.

Perhaps more than any other recent writer, Craig Owens explored the relations among the discourses of contemporary art, sexuality, and power. His familiarity with the New York art world and its practitioners in the 1970's and 1980's makes his writing an unparalleled guide to one of the most riveting periods of contemporary culture.

Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture

TILLMAN, Lynne

Owens, Craig

Bryson, Scott

University of California Press

A seminal volume celebrating the career of influential American artist Barbara Kruger, made in collaboration with the artist. Bold, philosophical, radical, subversive: the art of Barbara Kruger focuses on decoding the social-psychological messages embedded in popular culture. Marrying pictures to words in a variety of media and sites, Kruger raises issues of power politics, sexuality, and representation. Borrowing slogans and phrases from the lexicon of thought, and using the potent weapon of pure graphics, Kruger’s art offers up powerfully distilled messages of word and image. This beautifully designed book is the most comprehensive volume on Kruger’s body of work to date. The book explores her work over the past thirty years, including many previously unpublished works. Aptly designed to embody a manifesto-like aesthetic, the book also presents bold spreads of the artist’s large-scale works and public projects, which confront such controversial and weighty topics as abortion, consumerism, spirituality, and identity.

Barbara Kruger

Rizzoli

Craigie Horsfield

Photography & Video

Ica Editions

Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Deutsche, Rosalyn

Whitney Museum of American Art

Goldstein, Ann

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art

The Culture of Violence presents a broad interdisciplinary approach to the subject of violence as it arises in the media, the lives of children and their families, and in the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman, Ida Applebroog, Mel Chin, Kristin Oppenheim, Lucinda Devlin, Gregory Green, Leon Golub, Richard Misrach and Sue Williams. Organized around thematic categories that traverse class and gender, and that range from political to personal expressions of violence, including terrorism and hate crimes, government-sanctioned execution, youth and gang violence, street crime and domestic violence, The Culture of Violence includes a conversation on violence and culture in medieval epics and contemporary media, and a proscriptive essay on coping with family violence.

The Culture of Violence

Green, Gregory

Jenkins, Henry

Cohen, Elizabeth

Canada, Geoffrey

POSNER, Helaine

Golub, Leon

Gonzalez-Torres, Felix

Diggs, Peggy

Coe, Sue

Applebroog, Ida

Wilson, Marion

CAIN, James

Harper, Sharon

Talley, Michael

Chin, Mel

Harkavy, Donna

Leininger, Michael

B, Beth

Cole, Willie

Davlin, Luninda

Kaplowitz, Jane

McCallum, Bradley

Oppenheim, Kristin

Tisdale, Daniel

University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Photography has become an increasingly pervasive medium of choice in contemporary art practice and is even employed at times by artists who do not necessarily consider themselves to be photographers. How did this come to be? The Last Picture Show will address the emergence of this phenomenon of artists using photography by tracing the development of conceptual trends in postwar photographic practice from its first glimmerings in the 60s in the work of artists such as Bernd &amp; Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman, to its rise to art-world prominence in the work of the artists of the late 70s and early 80s including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. Intended as a major genealogy of the rise of a still-powerful and evolving photographic practice by artists, the checklist will include a wide array of works examining a range of issues: performativity and photographic practice; portraiture and cultural identity; the formal and social architectonics of the built environment; societal and individual interventions in the landscape; photography's relationship to sculpture and painting; the visual mediation of meaning in popular culture; and the poetic and conceptual investigation of visual non-sequiturs, disjunctions and humorous absurdities. Bringing together a newly commissioned body of scholarship with reprints of important historical texts, The Last Picture Show seeks to define the legacy that has produced a rich body of photographic practice in the art world today.

The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982 (WALKER ART CENT)

WEISS, David

Graham, Dan

Beuys, Joseph

Baldessari, John

Dibbets, Jan

Nauman, Bruce

Flood, Richard

Anselmo, Giovanni

Gronnert, Stefan

Lee, Pamela

Batchen, Geoffrey

Fischli, Peter

Bochner, Mel

Charlesworth, Sarah

Export, Valie

Acconci, Vito

Ader, Bas Jan

Boltanski, Christian

Broodthaers, Marcel

Oppenheim, Dennis

Lewitt, Sol

Walker Art Center

The cover and back have some creases

No progress in pleasure

CEPA

Barbara Kruger: 7 January to 28 January 1989, Mary Boone Gallery.

Mary Boone Gallery

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Books by Kruger, Barbara