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

Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances collects essays, reviews and prose poems by the artist Barbara Kruger, including her commentary on television programs and current films.

MIT Press issued the paperback in 1994 in its Writing Art series. The catalogue copy says the pieces were written over about a decade and frames them around the questions of who speaks, who is silent, who is seen and who is absent, and how pictures and words build a culture. Publishers Weekly, reviewing it in July 1994, found Kruger “mostly on target as a social and cultural critic.”

Kruger was born in 1945 and has worked since the late 1970s with images, text and technology to question established power structures and social constructs, according to her gallery, David Zwirner. Her 1990 work Untitled (who speaks?/who is silent?) uses the same wording as the book’s questions.