Remote Control: Power, Cultures and the World of Appearances (Writing Art) Book

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...

"As a visual artist, Barbara Kruger has led the way in challenging the separation of public and private life. In Remote Control, she is a talking viewer with a hit-and-run attitude. Her vivid commentary on TV and film will galvanize even the most jaded with its social clarity and its savvy sense of cultural justice." -- Andrew Ross, Director, American Studies Program, New York University "A feast of insight into gender, sex, and contemporary culture, staged as sneak attacks filled with devastating grace, acuity, and wit." -- Carole S. Vance, Columbia University

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. Barbara Kruger is an artist whose pictures and words engage issues of power, sex, money, difference, and death. In these essays and reviews, written over the last decade, she addresses that power with intelligence and wit, in the hope of engaging both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation.