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

Kruger, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262111772 ISBN 13: 9780262111775

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1993

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From Publishers Weekly

Kruger, an artist whose subversively direct works address such themes as power, sexual politics and money, is mostly on target as a social and cultural critic in these essays, reviews and prose poems originally published in Artforum , Esquire , the Village Voice and elsewhere during the last 14 years. She forcefully describes TV as a thought-control device, a powerful sedative that aims to satisfy viewers' needs for order, control and connection; and her critique is buttressed by a sophisticated analysis of documentaries, courtroom dramas and an array of popular series. Her brilliant movie reviews capture the creative ferment of experimental and international filmmaking and expose the pretensions of mainstream fare. The big and small screen predominate in this miscellany, but Kruger also has much to say on radio host Howard Stern ("crazily funny" but also an embodiment of "dangerously unexamined populism"), Andy Warhol, work, money and photography.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0262111772
• ISBN 13: 9780262111775
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 251