Art and Feminism – Case Study 2Year 12 Visual Arts 2017

Barbara Kruger

“Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. Working for Mademoiselle Magazine, she was quickly promoted to head designer. Later, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark block letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground.” Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, buscards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions. She has taught at the California Institute of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.”sourced from;http://www.barbarakruger.com/biograph…

SynopsisBarbara Kruger is best known for her silkscreen prints where she placed a direct and concise caption across the surface of a found photograph. Her prints from the 1980s cleverly encapsulated the era of "Reaganomics" with tongue-in-cheek satire; especially in a work like (Untitled) I shop therefore I am(1987), ironically adopted by the mall generation as their mantra. As Kruger's career progressed, her work expanded to include site-specific installations as well as video and audio works, all the while maintaining a firm basis in social, cultural, and political critique. Since the 1990s, she has also returned to magazine design, incorporating her confrontational phrases and images into a wholly different realm from the art world. Associated with postmodern Feminist art as well as Conceptual art, Kruger combines tactics like appropriation with her characteristic wit and direct commentary in order to communicate with the viewer and encourage the interrogation of contemporary circumstances.

Key IdeasThe economy of Kruger's use of image and text facilitates a direct communication with the viewer. Within a short declarative statement, she synthesizes a critique about society, the economy, politics, gender, and culture.Kruger merges the slick facade of graphic design with unexpected phrases in order to catch the viewer's attention using the language of contemporary publications, graphic design, or magazines. Rather than attempting to sell a product, her works aim to sell an idea to the viewer that is meant to instigate a reconsideration of one's immediate context.

Kruger appropriates images from their original context in magazines and sets them as the background against which she emblazons confrontational phrases. From her use of clearly legible font to her jarring palette of red, white, and black, each element of the final artwork is crucial to its effectiveness as both an artistic expression and a protest against facets of postmodern life.

Most Important ArtUntitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989)Kruger designed this print for the 1989 reproductive rights protest, the March for Women's Lives, in Washington, D.C. Utilizing her signature red, black, and white palette, the woman's face is split along a vertical axis, showing the photographic positive and negative sides, suggesting a highly simplified inner struggle of good versus evil. The political and social implications of the work are self evident, but Kruger emphasizes the directness of her sentiment by having her subject stare straight ahead through the print, frankly addressing the viewer through both her gaze and the words emblazoned across her face. The message unequivocally addresses the issue of the continued feminist struggle, connecting the physical body of female viewers to the contemporary conditions that necessitate the feminist protest. Kruger's slick graphic aesthetic and use of dramatic found imagery also place this work within the purview of postmodernism, tying it not only to contemporary critique, but to the larger social and cultural responses within the period.Photo silkscreen on vinyl - The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

*More Art Works – Find 2 other Kruger artworks and gather some information about them.

Biography of Barbara Kruger

ChildhoodBarbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. Her mother was a legal secretary and her father a chemical technician. An only child, Kruger attended Weequahic High School in Newark, and enjoyed what was by all accounts a typical middle-class upbringing. She was accepted to Syracuse University as an undergraduate, where she enrolled in a number of art and design classes. After only one year at Syracuse, Kruger moved to New York City to take more advanced art and design classes at the Parsons School of Design.Early Training

While enrolled at Parsons, Kruger's instructors included the American photographer Diane Arbus and graphic designer Marvin Israel. Israel in particular had a dramatic influence on Kruger, encouraging her to prepare a professional portfolio when she was becoming disenchanted with art school. At this early stage in Kruger's training, she had yet to assimilate mass media imagery, language, and signage into her work, and instead focused largely on architectural photography, painting, craft, and erotic imagery. Upon leaving Parsons, Kruger found work as a designer and editor with a number of publications based in New York, including House and Garden, Aperture, and then Mademoiselle, becoming lead

designer within a year of being hired and at the age of twenty-two. Despite her early success in editorial work, she felt compelled to pursue a career in art, having said, "I basically wasn't cut out for design work because I had difficulty in supplying someone else's image of perfection." In 1973, Kruger received her first big break, when curator Marcia Tucker, who would eventually found the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, selected several of Kruger's works for the Whitney Biennial exhibit.

During the late 1970s, while living and teaching in Berkeley, California, Kruger developed an interest in the written word - poetry in particular - and began writing and performing her own poetry and narratives, while still pursuing painting. The pull of language proved too much, and Kruger stopped painting and went back to her initial interest in photographs and words. This fascination led to explorations of physical space and boundaries, manifested most notably in her 1978 self-published "Pictures/Readings." The book included photographs of building exteriors accompanied by a narrative text on the opposite page in the form of a dialogue, dilemma, or dramatic scene. Kruger's unique juxtapositions of image and text, allowing each one to inform the other however concretely or abstractly, would become the foundation of her mature, conceptualist body of work.

Mature PeriodShortly after publishing "Pictures/Readings", Kruger completed a similar photographic study of hospitals, only this time the accompanying text was far shorter and more declarative, including phrases like "Go away" and "Not that." This motif of image and text in her work would soon mature into phrases that explored issues of social power dynamics, technology, death, violence, and the human condition, often taking the form of abstract concepts and postulations, i.e. "The illumination of the physical" and "The comfort construct." A crucial change in her oeuvre also took place during the late 1970s, as Kruger decided to abandon original photography in favor of found images, most often derived from mass media sources like magazines and newspapers. By the early 1980s Kruger became more ambitious in both her use of rhetoric and imagery. Kruger would later claim that her chosen motif of overlaying pictures and words was due to their "ability to determine who we are and who we aren't." Indeed, with slogans like "I shop, therefore I am" and "Your body is a battleground," Kruger was exploring text that addressed issues of feminism, consumerism, desire, and personal autonomy. Recalling the context in which she created her critical works, Kruger stated, "People write about the art world of the '80s as a glitzy time - it just makes my head explode - because it was also a time when issues of criticality came to the fore." Her use of a reduced red, white, and black palette and clear typography is influenced by the aesthetics of the Russian Constructivists, in particular Alexander Rodchenko.

Another significant shift in Kruger's career took place in 1991 with her self-titled solo exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in which she transitioned to immersive installations, covering nearly every inch of the gallery's interior with text accompanied by images, effectively transforming a white-cube gallery into a red, white and black "arena of hostility." Of note, Kruger was the first female artist signed to the blue-chip Mary Boone Gallery, in 1988, which was best known at the time for representing macho, Neo-Expressionist male artists. The 1990s also marked for Kruger a return to magazine design, creating covers for publications like The New Republic, Ms., Newsweek, and Esquire, among

others. Using her work within an entirely commercial medium carried with it a sense of irony, as much of her text can be seen as a direct challenge to consumerist culture.Within the last two decades Kruger's oeuvre also expanded, quite literally, to include large-scale installations for museums and public spaces around the world. One such example was the landscape architecture piece Picture This (1995) for the sculpture park at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She maintains her criticality of contemporary life, still asking viewers to re-consider their contexts, and has stated of her work, "I think that art is still a site for resistance ... I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level." Kruger has taught at California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a member of the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. She has also written a number of critical essays and reviews for publications like The New York Times, Artforum, and The Village Voice. In 2005 Kruger participated in The Experience of Art, the 51st Venice Biennale - the first Biennale curated by two women. The artist splits her time between New York City and Los Angeles.Legacy

Barbara Kruger's work has an integral place in the history of feminist, postmodern, and conceptual art. Connected with this, Kruger dissects contemporary culture in her unique combinations of image and text, often targeting multiple oppressions or hypocrisies. Kruger's aesthetic is among the most recognizable of contemporary artists, along with the likes of Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Damien Hirst. More importantly, as a successful artist in both the commercial and high art arenas, Kruger continues to influence many artists who struggle to make that same crossover. A clear connection to Kruger's approach is found in the work of artists like Shepard Fairey, the Guerilla Girls and Lorna Simpson, through their use of image and text, as well as cultural critique. Kruger's wide variety of work, from her early prints, to her magazine covers, installations and t-shirt designs, has ensured that she has and will continue to have a wide influence on artists and non-artists alike.

Websites to read:http://www.thebroad.org/art/barbara-kruger/untitled-your-body-battleground

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/33251/1/barbara-kruger-interview-2016-pop-culture-reality-tv

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/womens-march-abortion.html?_r=1

http://pai.org/gag-rule/

http://www.bagtazocollection.com/blog/2016/3/24/x2ko25z2u85va5csjq3q5yiqielnup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xi9qQb2SHU