Artists & Works

STYLE: mass media, feminism, printmaking

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. She attended Syracuse University and the Parsons School of Design for brief periods, eventually leaving school to enter the world of commercial graphic design in New York City. In 1969, after four years spent designing Mademoiselle magazine layouts, Kruger began to make art on a full time basis. Her first works were large fiber hangings, and sewed canvas wall pieces. Later, in conjunction with her poetry and other writing, Kruger began to make abstract paintings, a phase which quickly died out when, in 1976, she began reading social and cultural theory by writers like Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. In 1977, she stopped painting, and began to make works based on words and photography. Because she felt that daily life and the social relations around it were repressed in most art, her own work increasingly focussed on these issues. "Rather than abstracting or repressing daily life into busywork, I became a reporter...I couldn't continue being an artist turning out estheticized objects." In 1980-81, Kruger's black-and-white works began to be a powerful presence in both the New York art world and beyond. Since that time, her work has appeared on Spectacolor signs in Times Square, and many other public and private spaces throughout the world. She has received solo exhibitions at New York's Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and many other galleries and institutions.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Carol Squiers, ARTnews, 2/87
"Like her contemporaries, Kruger uses information and influences from the culture at large in her art, drawing on movies, television, advertising, and politics, as well as her former occupation as a graphic designer for Conde Nast Publications. She also culls images from old photographic annuals, how-to handbooks and magazines rather than taking her own pictures—another signature postmodern technique. But in a significant departure from most traditionally successful art making, she literally spells out her ideas, overlaying the pictures with powerful satirical mottos derived from popular wisdom, political double- the words and the words don't define the pictures. The works are tremendously elegant, but they lack the self-satisfied repose of graceful esthetics.Walking through Kruger's shows is like a trip across a battlefield...'I think the division between notions of public and private, work and spare time are spurious,' says Kruger. The conjunction between her art and her daily life is consequently, seamless; every human interaction, every news item and every box of cereal offers the artistic material from which she continually builds her catalogue of raw data, What she achieves is a brilliantly concise form of art that incorporates yet undermines the social dictums that work to determine our thoughts, our desires, and our very identity...Kruger calls her work, 'a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome the female spectator into the audience of men.'...'Most of the things we see as representations in film and TV and most art are really undifferentiated addresses to a male audience, a male spectator,'Kruger explains. 'So to propose difference—that there's more than one viewer and more than one subjectivity—is really important.'..The accusatory You is one of the single most powerful devices in Kruger's bag of tricks. For the insolent pronoun brings the viewer flat up against her work with lightning speed...There is no comfy aesthetic distance here. This is war...At the age of 22 she was single-handedly designing a national fashion magazine [Mademoiselle for four years]...She had started writing poetry and going to poetry readings and from 1970 on she was 'tremendously influenced' by poet and sometimes rock n' roller Patti Smith—'by her transgressive female presence; by her delightful wallowing in sexuality, language and music'...Kruger started reading the social and cultural theory that would greatly influence her generation: Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno...'I found that when I was writing I was right on the edge of my intelligence. When I was making those pictures, it was busywork—putting my mind on hold...I couldn't be an artist turning out aestheticized objects...These were objects. I wasn't going to stick them on the walls with pushpins. I wanted them to enter the marketplace because I began to understand that outside the marketplace there is nothing—not a piece of lint, a cardigan, a human being. That's what the frames were about: how to commodify them. It was the most effective packaging device.'...Once she has the pictures [choices informed by the years she spent at Conde Nast, 'if you didn't make people look at that page you were fired.'] she sits in her studio and writes a number of different phrases...Writing the phrases and making them work with her images in a 'rich' way is what she considers the hardest part of her art making...Because Kruger's art making is so much a part of her daily life, her work process is neither linear or predictable and any chance occupance can provide inspiration...But whether her work appears as outrage or as comedy, her goal is always the same. 'Look,' she says...,'Basically I want to be effective in making changes in power relations, in social relations. And my area of acuity is working with images and words. I grew up looking not at art but at pictures. I'm not saying it's wrong to read art history books. But the spectators who view my work don't have to understand that language. They just have to consider the pictures that bombard their lives and tell them who they are to some extent. That's all they have to understand."

Jennifer Barrows, Niagara University student essay, 5/20/88
"'Untitled' forces the audience to question the adage that children should be seen and not heard."