Barbara kruger essay

Love for Sale The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger Text by Kate Linker

Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York

Introduction

F or nearly a decade Barbara Kruger has made provocative objects: pictures that entice and beguile only to accost us with accusatory words. Typically large, her works incorporate photographs taken from different media sources that she has

cropped, enlarged, and juxtaposed with strident verbal statements or phrases. Art historically, these works belong to the realm of montage, but they resist the smooth coherence associated with that genre. For there is no complacency to her art, which is assertive, aggressive, and argumentative. Kruger’s is an art of interference, of semiotic conflict.

Kruger’s practice reflects the discovery, evident throughout contemporary art, of the formative power of images, the capacity of signs to affect deep structures of belief. However, she applies this realization to a political agenda. Her art is concerned with the positioning of the social body, with the ways in which our thoughts, attitudes, and desires are determined by society’s dictates. Through her arsenal of visual devices, Kruger proposes to intervene in stereotypical representations, disrupting their power, displacing their hold, and clearing a space for enlightened awareness. To this end, she operates within the multiple sites through which signs circulate, produc­ ing books, posters, and billboards as well as such popular consumer objects as T-shirts and matchbooks. Her works demonstrate the intrusion of the public into the private, much as they mingle major and minor media. They attend to the peregrinations of power, as it places, positions, imposes.

In consequence of these activities, Kruger is at once a social commentator and a political agitator. Her work has both a place and a strategic role within contemporary artistic discourse. On one hand, it testifies to the recent broadening of artistic practice, pointing to the expansion of culture into politics. But it also evinces changes, wrought in the last two decades, that are inextricably linked to the phenomenon of the postmodern. For Kruger, as for many contemporary theorists, postmodernism is not a style succeeding the dissolution of modernism but rather a historical condition, marked by new philosophical relations; it signals a rupture with the notion of sov­ ereign and transcendent individuality inherited from the Enlightenment. The post­ modern self is not the centered and controlling subject, set apart from and “master” over history; indeed, inasmuch as postmodernism emphasizes the regulating power of social forces, it can be said to describe the decentering of the self. Its major focus is less the modernist theme of the creative subject of production than the production of the subject, for it inquires into the ways in which our identities are constructed by representations in society. Kruger investigates the underside of this process, examin­ ing how representation legislates, defines, subjects.

Kruger’s art exhibits other features that are trademarks of postmodernist

practice. Like many of her generation, she develops images by reproducing other images, appropriating the media’s picturings so as to extend and amplify their rhetoric. Her wily manipulations elude aesthetic categorization: no formal criteria can explain them, just as they do not lodge easily within the established traditions of posters, art photography, and so on. In a characteristically postmodernist manner, she erodes classifications, merging images and words, multiplying media, and annex­ ing concepts from other disciplines.

In Kruger’s art this process is extended, for hers is a “splintered” practice that avoids the unity and integrity that are common to an artist’s oeuvre. In addition to her customary role, Kruger has occupied the positions of editor, curator, teacher, and organizer of lectures; she is also an accomplished writer who has been the monthly film critic for Artforum since 1982 and, since 1987, the author of the magazine’s television column. Her conventional activities as an artist are augmented by her work as a designer of posters, book covers, and announcements for political groups, individ­ uals, and institutions. Most recently, Kruger has engaged with architects and land­ scape designers in collaborative projects for highly innovative parks. These activities are not supplemental, but rather fundamental, to a practice that courts multiplicity of sites and meanings. It is a practice that, characteristically, begins elsewhere, outside the artistic frame.