KRUGER, BARBARA 1945-

Artist

Potential

Barbara Kruger later admitted that she left Syracuse University after one year because she "felt like a Martian." From a middle-class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, Kruger could not relate to her more privileged classmates. "I was the only woman on my dorm floor who hadn't had facial surgery and who knew words other than Pappagallo and Evan Picone." She transferred to Parsons School of Design in New York City and began studying photography under Diane Arbus and graphic design under Marvin Israel, art director of Harper's Bazaar. While Arbus served as Kruger's first female role model, the demanding Israel told the young artist she was "capable of anything" and encouraged her to put together a graphic-arts portfolio. In 1967 she presented her page designs to the head of the art department at Condé Nast Publications and was hired to work on the magazines Seventeen and Mademoiselle. By age twenty-two she was chief designer of Mademoiselle. During the next ten years she also worked as a teacher, a freelance photography editor, and a designer for book jackets.

Early Work

Kruger was alienated by the macho posturing of the male-dominated New York art scene, describing the art hangout Max's Kansas City, circa 1969, as "a zoo of retching and male hysteria." She turned toward feminist art forms, and during the early 1970s she created fabric wall pieces whose shapes, colors, and designs were "highly sexualized." By middecade she had started writing, an invigorating experience that made her view her earlier work as something akin to arts and crafts. "I felt like I was giving my mind Demerol," she said. Inspired by punk poet Patti Smith, Kruger began giving readings of her poetry in 1974. She also found a group of young artists, including Eric Fischi and David Salle, who treated female artists as equals. In 1977, with the help of an art grant, Kruger began a disquieting new series of works that combined photographs and cryptic bits of text. By 1979 she had found the form she would use for her work throughout the next decade: superimposing pieces of type directly on top of photographs she had appropriated from magazines. Kruger first attracted serious attention in a 1981 group show that also featured works by Keith Haring and fellow word artist Jenny Holzer.

Style

Like Holzer, whose Truisms were ominously worded mock-quotations such as "Money created taste" and "Murder has its sexual side," Kruger used words in a way that evoked both advertising and clichés. While Holzer used contradictory statements to create ambiguity, however, Kruger's visuals and word choices made her work confrontational and political. Her juxtaposition of text and image—such as "You are an experiment in terror" with a hand holding an exploding firecracker—was often jarring merely from a graphic standpoint, and the accusatory tone of her words added to the disturbing effect. Her choice of black-and-white photographs over-laid with bold-face red type and surrounded by brilliant red frames suggested the "power" look of old Russian or German political posters. Much of Kruger's best work has feminist messages. She emblazoned an image of a seated woman with giant needles embedded along the outline of her spine and legs with the declaration "We have received orders not to move." The work became a subtle commentary on society's attempts to control women. In 1983 a text piece she created for the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square wryly commented on masculine obsession with sex and war. It was discontinued after two weeks because "it had no Christmas spirit." Later in the decade she created a prochoice poster that declared "Your body is a battleground" over the divided image of a woman's face.

Commodity

Kruger's art proved popular and easy to sell in the graphic-hungry 1980s, and it was easily adapted to postcards, T-shirts, and posters. Many critics grumbled that her work made more sense as advertisement or poster art than as expensive gallery pieces. "These were objects," she responded. "I wasn't going to stick them on the wall with pushpins. That's what the frames were about: how to commodify them. It was the most effective packaging device." In 1987 her work appeared on canvas shopping bags that read "I shop therefore I am." Kruger freely admitted her interest in the commercial culture and enjoyed the feeling of creating a commodity. "Outside of the market there is nothing—not a piece of lint, a cardigan, a coffee table, a human being," she commented. In 1986 she began exploring the use of color photographs and silk screens, and in the late 1980s she began to create in-your-face billboards in large cities with messages such as "Surveillance is your busywork" and "Your money or your life." She also continued to write. The movie critic for Artforum since 1982, she became television critic for the magazine in 1987. Her work in the 1990s continued to be political, from AIDS posters to magazine covers for Ms. ("Women + Rage = Power") and Newsweek.. (For a 1992 story on family values she created a cover that asked, "Whose values?")

Sources:

Barbara Kruger, Love for Sale, with text by Kate Linker (New York: Abrams, 1990);

Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Culture, and the World of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).

Kruger, Barbara (1945– ). American Conceptual artist and designer. She had a successful career as a magazine and book designer in New York before turning to art in the mid1970s, initially with fibre hangings influenced by Magdalena Abakanowicz and then with paintings. In 1977 she began using the form for which she is best known—black-and-white photographs or photomontages carrying texts challenging social stereotyping, particularly of women. Penny Dunford writes that ‘Many of the slogans are addressed to an unidentified but often malevolent audience referred to as “You”. Although Kruger is a feminist, these slogans are not specifically addressed to men or women … By using mass-media images she aims to communicate ideas about social and political power to people who are not familiar with art, and for this reason a number have been reproduced and pasted on advertisement hoardings in cities in Europe and America’ (A Biographical Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and America Since 1850, 1990).