Tuesday, December 20, 2005

The examined life

From Susan Horsburgh's article on American artist Barbara Kruger, this year's winner of the Venice Biennale's lifetime achievement award, in today's Australian:

'In her works, Kruger aims to arouse uncertainty and knock her audience off balance. "That's to me what art can do, but that's what all commentary does to a certain degree," she says. "It's not about being political; it's just about really trying to live an examined life ... to ask questions about what it means to take another breath."'


Full text here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool - as pithy as the 'slogans' that feature in her works.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Effective, too. The next breath I took after I read that nearly suffocated me -- forgot to breathe out, because I was too busy trying to remember what I learned in matric biology about red blood cells picking up the oxygen from the itty-bitty pulmonary blood vessels and carrying them off all over the bod to do their thing.

And now I won't be happy till I've Googled to find out who it was that said 'the unexamined life is not worth living'. Thoreau, Emerson, one of those Transcendentalist dudes?

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

It was Socrates!

Oh well -- only a couple of millennia out ...

BwcaBrownie said...

Hi PV - I love your cat - a star!
I am a genealogy freak in Ballarat - and so were your ancestors apparently-

Botany Bay to Ballarat: Thomas Chipp & Jane Langley 1788-1998
www.familyhistorybookshop.org.au/category405_1.htm - 70k - Cached - Similar pages

My Home page By brenda lawless
This site is dedicated to the research of the Lawless & gosstray family history incl Chipp, Langley.
www.users.bigpond.com/brendal/