Barbara Kruger
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) is a feminist conceptual artist and former graphic designer based out of New York and Los Angeles. Throughout much of her work, Kruger utilizes a graphic design agitprop style that confuses the boundaries between art and marketing - a technique which helps draw attention to the role of advertising in public debate. Kruger has developed a reputation for making provocative commentaries on religion, sexuality, racial and gender stereotypes, consumerism, corporate greed, and power. Over the last two decades, Kruger's visual strategy of appropriating images from the mass media has come full circle - she has created covers for numerous magazines including Newsweek, Ms. and Esquire and has inspired a generation of graphic designers, many of whom have adopted key aspects of her visual style.
According to Deborah Wye:
Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Barbara Kruger, working as a graphic designer for popular magazines, gained recognition in the art world for photo-based images overlaid with blocks of text in a signature color scheme of black, white, and red. Her practice of culling and editing found photographs and of pairing them with phrases in provocative ways was informed by her interest in feminism and critical theory. These investigations into the seemingly innocuous and yet potentially insidious ways in which ideological messages infiltrate daily life by means of the mass media continue today, although she has more recently expanded her repertoire to include installations with video and audio components and oversized sculptures.
Contents |
Artistic Projects
Remote Control
Barbara Kruger's Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances is a collection of essays and reviews, written over a ten year period, in which Kruger critically addresses a number of important themes around power, sexual politics, popular culture and money.
According to 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.
According to bell hooks:
Critiquing the mindlessness of television in "November 1985," for example, Kruger contends, "Television tells us not of a vision but of visions. It evades singularity and loiters amidst the serial, the continual, the flow. Its interest in storytelling is peripheral yet promiscuous." These essays disrupt conventional assumptions about how we know what we know...Remote Control functions both to document and to illustrate the ways cultural criticism works politically, intervening in familiar modes of looking and knowing, challenging us to look again, to be transformed by critical insight.
See also:
Untitled (I Shop Therefore I am)
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Barbara Kruger's I shop Therefore I Am (1987) is a feminist critique of representation, specifically images of woman that are constructed by a predominantly male media and that help to shape the way women see themselves. It was an attempt to deconstruct the psychopolitical pressures of consumerism on women and to expose and challenge the notion of identity construction through acts of consumption.
According to Anthony F. Janson:
"Kruger's works are direct and evoke an immediate response. Usually her style involves the cropping of a magazine or newspaper image enlarged in black and white. The enlargement of the image is done as crudely as possible to monumental proportions. A message is stenciled on the image, usually in white letters against a background of red. The text and image are unrelated in an effort to create anxiety by the audience that plays on the fears of society."
See also:
- Mary Boone Gallery: Untitled: I Shop Therefore I am
- MoMA | The Collection | Barbara Kruger: I Shop Therefore I Am
Your Body is a Battleground
Barbara Kruger's Your Body is a Battleground (1989) is a political poster in support of a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Roe v. Wade, a ruling that formed the basis for legalized abortion in the United States. The poster was used to promote a march on Washington opposing the Bush administration's attempts to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling in April of 1989. In this poster, a woman’s face, divided into a photographic positive and its negative, stares directly at the viewer. Superimposed on this image is the text “Your Body is a Battleground,” a political slogan previously used by Vietnam War protesters during the late 1960s.
According to Rutherford:
Your body... is a warning and a condemnation, a cry to resist the way authority controls the person of a woman. Kruger's art seeks to awaken people from a troubled slumber: 'Propped up and ultra-relaxed, we teeter on the cusp of narcolepsy and believe everything and nothing.' ...Her nightmare of a soft fascism - not at all uncommon these days - grows out of the ways in which a new technology of power has organized the democracies of the late twentieth century.
See also:
- The Broad Art Foundation: Barbara Kruger
- Kritikos: Looking to the Left: Politics in the Art of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer
