My infatuation with Barbara Kruger reached it’s climax as I concluded my final paper for my Photography and Social Change class. I originally wanted to explore Kruger’s influential style on today’s web culture, but somehow I thought it would’ve been a stretch to try and find academic studies on the subject, and otherwise, would’ve had to conduct my own extensive research. Something for which I didn’t have the time, or the patience.

Lucky for me, I came across Armani Exchange’s lack of originality as I ignored my (adopted) pseudo principles and shopped on Black Friday. That experienced served as the opening scene for my paper and a perfect backdrop for the development of the ideas behind Kruger’s work from the 80s.

Since this is graduate school, I decided to overachieve and laid out the paper magazine-style. If you have 10 minutes to spare (or waste) download it here [PDF]. You’ll find the full text and some illustrations I created to go along with it after the jump (consider the work under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license).

You Don’t Get It

The subversive art of Barbara Kruger and its impact (or lack thereof) on our image-saturated society

As I neared completion of my research for this analytical essay on the work of conceptual and visual artist Barbara Kruger, I took a break from work and drove to a nearby shopping mall to engage in the most American of traditions: early-bird shopping on the Friday after the Thanksgiving Holiday. Dubbed Black Friday, this post-holiday event is a holiday in and of itself; a right-of-passage for young mothers and fathers who’ve been conditioned by the shopping seasons of yesteryear to expect the lowest prices at the earliest possible opening times. Fitting that as I made my way through the crowded mall, with a heavy dose of Barbara Kruger-isms freshly uploaded to my memory bank through hours of reading, I spotted a very peculiar store arrangement. From outside the store, one that sells a popular brand of men’s and women’s fashionably chic apparel, I could see large signs, bearing messages in a familiar second-person singular tone, written with a familiar Futura Bold Italic type font, in snow white pressed against a bright red background.

Beyond the irony of engaging in the “sheeple” practice of shopping on Black Friday, a habit that has been perpetuated year after year by a strange combination of tradition, relentless advertising, and native capitalistic impulses deeply ingrained in our psyche, and one that would fit beautifully on the reflective end of Barbara Kruger’s signature composition, the “I shop, therefore I am” staple; I gawked at the store front for a few minutes, mesmerized at the blatant lack of originality (or something worse that I still cannot decipher) in deciding to use the signature style of an artist that spent a great part of her professional career creating works of postmodern art that challenged the very ideas and messages that brands and stores like this one spent millions of dollars trying to sell, and were very successful at doing so. If at some point in her career Kruger co-opted the “found” images in fashion magazines and advertising to subversively introduce her message into the mainstream; the fashion world was now firing back, co-opting her signature style, one that essentially defined her as an artist, into a marketing campaign that tried to obliterate the questions she herself had raised a decade or so ago.

My understanding of Barbara Kruger’s work was feeble before embarking on research for this essay. More than being aware of her individual compositions, which gained prominence during the 80s, too early for my young cognitive curiosity to even acknowledge them, I was aware of the methodology she employed to create her pieces as I had seen them here and there. Using the type font Futura Bold Italic, she embeds a message on white letters set against a red background, on top of a photograph she has converted to black and white, and that “broadcasts ready-made aspects of modern American culture” (Squiers 148). The resulting composition delivers a resounding message, generally grounded in the copy that Kruger inscribes, a pointed statement with aphoristic essence in second-person singular, which bounces against the idea conveyed through the original photograph.

The strong contrast generated from the white letters and red background, against the black and white image, allow the viewer to concentrate on the photograph first, only to have its perception invaded by the blunt one-liner. If I were to try and relate the effect in terms of semiotics, Kruger’s words (signifiers in their own right) obliterate the original signified of the photograph, but only after it has been presented to the viewer at face value.
This methodology can be traced to Kruger’s early work professionally, artistically, and commercially. After a short stint at Syracuse University as an art major, and another at Parson’s School of Design, the New Jersey native landed a job with Condé Naste Publications in Manhattan as a second designer for Mademoiselle magazine. Within a year, she became the head designer in 1967, a position she kept for the next four years. Her venture into the art world began in 1969, working as a professional artist until 1975. She took a break to study the “intellectual and artistic challenges presented by the increasing importance of ideas from structuralism, semiotics, and the Frankfurt school,” for two years, after which she returned to art making, concetrating on working with words and images (Squiers 140).

Kruger’s early pieces, however, did not use photographs from other sources, but rather images she captured herself, where she photographed the insides of bathrooms, stranger’s cars, and the exteriors of apartment buildings in and around Berkley, Los Angeles, and Deerfield Beach, Florida. The images, that made up her first self-published collection, titled Picture/Readings, were presented alongside text she wrote specifically for each photograph. “Kruger was looking for something no modernist photographer wanted to produce: a dialectic between the empirical fact of architecture as a kind of stage se and the social interactions and private reveries that might occur within its walls” (Squiers 143).

A second foray into her own photography saw Kruger produce images inside hospitals, where she would shoot close ups of plastic containers of wooden tongue depressors, stainless-steel tray tables, light fixtures, examining tables, and trash bins. Once again, she would present each photograph accompanied by text that suggested unequal relations of power and authority, in serialized panels that conveyed a linear story. “The progress of the panels in the Hospital series is episodic, with the words and pictures building upon one another. As a whole the series suggests the way fear and rationalization allow disjointed moments of clarity to surface during the blank stretches when life is stripped down to its essentials” (146).

At this point in her career, Kruger continued pairing photographs and text, mixing and matching in search of ways to be more economical with her work while at the same time amplifying her message. She then drew from her experience as a magazine designer, using “found” images, or photographs that were made readily available to advertising and magazine designers for use in their publications. Her use the red banners, with white letters and black and white photographs as the backdrop, is not exactly original, as it is one of the most eye-catching color combination (think Coca Cola, Life Magazine, or even the Nazi emblem). “Kruger did not merely adapt conventional advertising techniques in order to parody mass media, she tapped into a universal graphic expression that gave the public read access to her ideas” (Heller 112). And this is where the root of Kruger’s influence lies: in her ability to exploit traditional means of marketing, branding, and merchandising to perpetuate her message. Kruger was able to recognize that her message and its medium needed to work intricately and in unison; that in order for the effectiveness of the message to be evident, it needed to be broadcast in a practical, ready-to-consume manner. As Arthur C. Danto wrote in the October 2, 2000 edition of The Nation, in regard to the fact that her “I Shop therefore I am” piece was printed on thousands of shopping bags, “The Inscription condemns the object it ornaments and, in its sly way, gets under the skin of she who carries it! From this perspective, it is obvious that [the piece] is far more effective on a shopping bag than on archival paper, framed on the museum wall.”

Kruger’s work was thought-invoking because she promulgated ideas much like products of mass production are promoted, but with a very different intent. “What Kruger accomplished in melding art and graphic design – indeed art as graphic design– made art more populist, enabling a wide audience to consume social and cultural dynamics that in other at might be more inaccessible” as Steven Heller explains in an essay written to commemorate the release of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s first comprehensive volume of Kruger’s exhibitions.

Her work, however, is not transparent; in fact, it’s anything but. One of the singular aspects of any Kruger composition is the thought process that the viewer is invoked to engage in when facing them. Her copy incites thinking by poking at the viewer’s curiosity, stimulating attention at the parts that are literally absent from her photo-illustrations; the very interpretations that she draws from the viewer through his or her direct participation in the system of semiotics she has created around the words and images in her works.

The brilliant simplicity with which she reaches to the inner ego of an individual to extract the most intimate of self-doubts is the grammar of her words. Each piece talks to us, it addresses our questions and thoughts, it accuses us of failing to take up her cause, and it feels contempt for our reluctance to understand the message. The force of Kruger’s accusatory messages, explains Danto, depends on the second-person singular. She explains this particular method in an interview with Lunne Tillman, which appeared in the same MOCA volume commemorating her work:
Direct address has motored my work from the very beginning. I like it because it cuts through the grease. It’s really economic and forthright approach to the viewer. It’s everywhere and people are use to it. They look at each other when they talk (most of the time). They watch TV. Talking heads and pronouns rule, in the best and worst sense of the word. I’m interested in how identities are constructed, how stereotypes are formed, how narratives sort of congeal and become history.

So as I stood in before the designer store on that Black Friday, I noticed most of the literature around the store was designed in Barbara Kruger’s style. But what caught my attention was a display in the storefront, a life-size mirror, with the words “You make me feel” in Futura Bold Italic type font, center-aligned, written in Kruger red across the middle. The immediate effect is to transform anyone looking at the display into an instant Kruger-like posterized advertisement, the difference being the lack of substance behind the copy. There is no questioning of powerful authority, there is no questioning of gender roles, no absolute declaration of one’s body being a battleground; instead, there is an ambiguous message appealing the least possible common denominator in human pathology in hopes of generating a sale. I don’t think letting her style be used for meaningless merchandising was what Kruger had in mind when she thought commercialization would be the most practical method to distribute her message. Without it, the medium is void of all meaning, becoming simply a clichéd style of design.

To be one hundred percent fair, Kruger most probably would not mind this particular use of her signature style. In fact, as Heller suggests, she is rarely perturbed because when her style is stripped of its meaning and used only for its graphic surface, it validates her critique of the entire system.
The question is, however, has the world adopted Barbara Kruger’s message through use and recognition of her style, or has society co-opted her design in spite of her message? The fact that the aforementioned designer-brand clothing store blatantly used the Kruger meme isn’t the issue; it’s the fact that it barely registered with the public.

Writing for the Melbourne Sunday Age in 2005, Gina McColl raises an interesting point. Kruger has been known to refuse being photographed. It’s a strategy, she told McColl, to keep the focus on her work, and in a sense, an extension of the work to highlight the media’s dependence on “image” in the celebrity and lifestyle sense. “We live in such a celebrity-oriented culture based on the person and the body, and I really happily decline being a player in that,” she said. Her reluctance to be the representative icon or as a celebrity, ceding the spotlight to her work instead, has perhaps inadvertently made her work a casualty of the same commercialized trends whose methods of distribution she used to disperse her work in the 80s and 90s.

In 2005 she was invited to show work at the Venice Biennale. She proposed doing her then-current video installation Twelve, but instead, was asked to do the façade of the pavilion – in her characteristic text slogans. “Maybe Kruger is being skewered by the very thing she has been troubling us with all these years” writes McColl. “Our determination to be seduced by stereotypes and trademarks.” Maybe that’s it; maybe society consumed Kruger’s message and left it for a fad, in which case, we failed to understand it’s importance and it’s impact, in short, we didn’t get it.

Bibliography

• Danto, Arthur C. “A Woman of Art & Letters: Barbara Kruger” The Nation Pg. 36 October 2, 2000.
• Dieckmann, Katherine “Barbara Kruger, Gal of the People” as it appeared in Barbara Kruger, a publication that accompanied the exhibition by the same name and published by the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) and MIT press, 1999.
• Gever, Martha “Like TV: On Barbara Kruger’s ‘Twelve’” Art Journal 66 No. 3 Fall 2007.
• Heller, Steven “Barbara Kruger, Graphic Designer?” as it appeared in Barbara Kruger, a publication that accompanied the exhibition by the same name and published by the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) MIT press, 1999.
• Indiana, Gary “The War at Home” as it appeared in Barbara Kruger, a publication that accompanied the exhibition by the same name and published by MIT press, 1999.
• McColl, Gina “The Artist as a Brand” Sunday Age (Melbourne, Aus.) First Edition, Preview section, pg. 4, December 4, 2005.
• Squiers, Carol “‘Who Laughs Last?’: The Photographs of Barbara Kruger” as it appeared in Barbara Kruger, a publication that accompanied the exhibition by the same name and published by the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) MIT press, 1999.
• Tillman, Lynne “Interview with Barbara Kruger” as it appeared in Barbara Kruger, a publication that accompanied the exhibition by the same name and published by the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) MIT press, 1999.