Few creators can claim the Museum of Modern Art and Rage Against the Machine as fans and collaborators. However, this is the unifying power of the work of conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, 77: it is immediate, powerful and, as its legion of imitators has shown, also looks great on a t-shirt.
Known for iconic textbooks proclaiming “I buy, then I am” and “Your body is a battlefield” (the latter received new life last spring as an incendiary cover of New York Magazine), the artist always remains humble. “I think no work of art is as brilliant, amazing, amazing and important, or as failed, ridiculous, horrible and minor as it is written,” he tells The Guardian. “All hyperbolic claims, trials, anointings and convictions are as symptomatic as the works they address.”
Kruger, who garnered widespread recognition for her banners for the 1989 Women’s March to Washington for legal abortion, has been a tireless advocate of reproductive freedoms for more than four decades. His work is known for challenging society’s views on beauty, identity, social constructions, and how we perceive our power (or lack thereof) within social structures. With the recent Supreme Court move to overturn the historic Roe v Wade decision, disabling the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, Kruger’s art has never been more relevant. Although this recognition can be bittersweet.
The first thing you hear when you enter the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, New York, is the metallic noise of a typewriter. The sound, which is part of an immersive installation and a larger eponymous show by Kruger, is shocking and pierces the tranquility that normally envelops the austere blank space. However, the art on display is as urgent as the cacophony that erupts within its huge walls. The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 12, is a homecoming for the LA pioneer and born on the East Coast, anti-capitalist text collages and multimedia pieces have helped define activist aesthetics in America. for almost half a century.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Cast), 2016/2020. Photography: courtesy of the artist
The exhibition, the most extensive exhibition of an individual in the history of Zwirner, features both canonical and new works and coincides with the large-scale installation of Kruger, site-specific: Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I mean me. And Mean You: will be on view at the Marron Family Atrium in Moma, New York, starting July 16th. This month also marks the end of Lacma’s homage to Kruger and a genesis shown to Sprüth Magers from his first “patched” guerrilla collages.
“My work is rarely specific to incidents or events, but it tries to create a commentary on how cultures construct and contain us,” he says, responding to the topicality of projections. “I’ve always said I try to work on how we are to each other. I see it as an ongoing project.” Kruger, who began his career in Condé Nast’s design department in the 1960s, soon learned the power of words and images and the immediacy of a visual pitch elevator as a call to action based on images. In the following decades, his pieces have come to life, making cameos in movies and “inspiring” the Supreme logo in black, white and red box, provoking a legendary Hypebeast trademark war, with Kruger famously denouncing it. his imitators as “a ridiculous group of absolutely great jokes.”
For his show at Zwirner, the classics have been reconfigured with a digital facelift with video and sound, LED screen care and smart editing. For example, in Pledge, Will, Vow (1988/2020), also included in the 59th Venice Biennale, fragments of the Pledge of Allegiance are strongly written and reconfigured on the screen, alluding to the feeling that the our current history is being transformed. edited, rewritten, and sometimes even discarded by an unknown hand.
“Zwirner’s works are mostly moving image installations that have been created and recreated over the last three years,” Kruger explains. “All of these responded to the particular architecture and the built environment that contained them,” he continues, noting his commitment to the challenges of spatializing his work. Despite the difficulty of creating these facilities, which Kruger still cares for by hand, he feels an immense privilege. “I feel lucky to have these amazing opportunities to create works in these places. I never doc it for granted, because what is seen and what is highlighted is often so cruelly arbitrary,” he says, noting the amplification of certain artists. on others, the result of “historical conditions, the brutality of social relations, category restraints” as well as the whims of the often mercurial art market. “I am very grateful for the current visibility of my work. and welcome as I approach my centenary. “
View of the installation, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner. Photography: Kerry McFate / David Zwirner
As for her most recent work, Kruger, who once wrapped Kim Kardashian’s naked body with her characteristic Futura font on the cover of W magazine, explains how celebrity, technology, and social media make up our attention and our consumption patterns. “My image / text works try to show and tell the stories of bodies and minds. How they could be represented and how they represent themselves, “he says.” In this age of massive collisions of voyeurism and narcissism and faster attention, I feel very committed to the self-presentation and direct direction it offers. the social networks. How millions of us are happy, wanted, adored and ashamed of these images. “
Simultaneously, on the streets, his works have had a dramatic new presence, with the imitation of Krugers appearing on signs and billboards in protests for abortion rights across the country. It would be easy for a less modest artist to feel the need to claim ownership. “Like someone who never thought anyone would know my name or my work, it’s amazing, satisfying and disturbing at the same time, and it could only happen at a time when the virality of images is accelerating so much,” he says of the proliferation. of his work. “And, horribly, when the virality of the plague, war and grievance is so punishing.”
Ultimately, Kruger’s art excels when it allows the viewer to change their perspective, often on what has been overlooked or distorted. “My work has constantly focused on the vulnerability of bodies. Of how power is transmitted across cultures. About how the choreographies of hierarchies and capital determine who lives and who dies, who is kissed and who is slapped, who is praised and who is punished, ”he explains.
View of the installation, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner. Photography: Maris Hutchinson / David Zwirner
As for how the artist feels about Roe’s recent sentence, he has chosen words for those who have just tuned in. “Roe’s repeal should come as no surprise,” he warned. “Anyone who is surprised by what is happening has not paid attention,” he says, noting the intense history of the United States of suppressing minority rights while fostering white supremacy. “Any surprise at the current state of affairs is the result of a failure of the imagination. Of not understanding the force and the punishment of what has happened and, worse, what is to come ”. She believes that this failure of imagination has contributed to what has become, in her words, an “increasingly volatile time of retirement and revenge.”
More than shame, he hopes to build community. “More than ever, it’s critical to simultaneously involve responses about race, gender, and class,” he says. “Not to separate, separate and prioritize these issues, but to see the interconnectivity of the forces that determine what it feels like to live another day. To hurt or to cure, to nourish or to destroy ”.