Post 5: Barbara Kruger

I'm sure you have seen the images above before. Both are Barbara Kruger's most famous pieces. Barbara Kruger took up photography in 1977 with a series of black and white images of architectures, and she would add text to it, telling the story of the statue. Two years later she stopped taking photographs, and began to use images from other sources in American media and collaged words directly over them. Kruger’s messages were feminist centered, touching on topics of sex, politics, racial stereotypes, consumerism, greed, and much more. Recently, she has taken her art to public spaces in galleries, museums, buildings, trains, and parks.

I believe that Barbara Kruger’s work is well received, especially from younger generations because of the aesthetics in her work. The words jump out at you,  even before you see the image; it captures our attention. Her work also has a lot of sarcasm, that can make someone laugh, or want to have a discussion with someone about the intent of her message. Her work is many times criticized for having messages that has no voice, or rather an ambiguous voice. Many people want to know who is speaking. I feel that this mystery is what makes her work interesting to explore. It made me want to search for all of her work to see if I can figure out, or at least speculate as to who the intended audience is and where the voice is coming from.

She is also criticized for being a hypocrite. Many of her messages demean consumerism, desire, and greed, although a lot of her work is featured in magazines, the major creators of the things she seems to detest in her work. Moreover, her messages are in many consumer goods like t-shirts, notebooks, phone cases, and so on.

How does Barbara Kruger explain her work? I’ll let her tell you:

I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices. I started very young as a graphic designer and while I enjoyed it initially, it really grew old very quickly. I basically wasn't cut out for design work because I had difficulty in supplying someone else's image of perfection. It was much more satisfying for me to try to be my own client, and to in fact try to construct my own images of perfection, to try to construct my own commentary, my own visualization of what it means to live a life. I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.