ART AS BRAND.

Barbara Kruger 

Whitney Museum of American Art 

New York, New York

Organized by The Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 

July 13-October 22, 2000

Barbara Kruger

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999

268 pp./$40.00 (hb)

During the 1980s, the postmodern penchant for recycling the imagery and objects of mass media and popular culture reached epic proportions and unleashed 'a juggernaut of debate among critically inclined members of the art world and academia. Were appropriation, quotation and pastiche simply the latest in stylistic gimmicks or were they viable tools for cultural criticism? Did this new work disturb or merely reinforce the complacency endemic in late-capitalist culture? While visual art lumped under the rubric of "postmodernism" typically accessed a shared matrix of cultural tropes and formal devices, it often differed radically in intent from work to work. Detractors and supporters alike recognized the ambiguous nature of much postmodern art and attempted to define the various kinds of postmodernism in circulation, whether critical, reactionary or stylistic.

At the time, Barbara Kruger seemed to unambiguously epitomize an oppositional or politicized postmodernism. By appropriating advertising's overlay of text on image, Kruger disrupted the "rhetoric of the image" (to use Roland Barthes's phrase) of the photographs she lifted from preexisting sources such as fashion magazines and medical manuals. Consistently using Futura Bold Italic font with a red, black and white color scheme, Kruger produced works with strong graphic appeal whose aphoristic phrasing guaranteed their accessibility to a diverse audience.

Unlike many artists and cultural theorists who paid lip service to confusing "fine" and "applied" categories of art, Kruger not only embraced the look of commercial graphic design, but also aggressively pursued venues for her work outside of the traditional gallery-museum system. Beginning in the early 1980s, a torrent of billboards, public announcements, posters, magazine layouts and op-ed pieces deluged passersby, riders of public transportation, and magazine readers across the United States and Europe. In startling contrast to the commercial advertising to which they bore resemblance, Kruger's captioned images demanded that we rethink our xenophobic, sexist and racist proclivities. Rather than sell products, Kruger's designs sold ideological critique. On occasion, the artist's insistent but generalized cultural commentary gave way to more substantial political action. The billboards and posters for the March on Washington in support of legal abortion in 1989 and the Women's Work Project on Domestic Violen ce in 1992 remain two of Kruger's most compelling projects, having collapsed the distinction between public service and public art. Kruger's ubiquitous "Your body is a battleground" design acquired a heightened urgency when considered in light of the backlash against women's reproductive freedom then sweeping the nation. The primary slogan used for the Boston and Miami domestic violence project, "Don't die for love," concisely summarized the possible fatal consequences of remaining in an abusive relationship.

In her attempts to reach as many people as possible, Kruger eventually followed this strategy through to its logical conclusion--logical, that is, for someone who had worked in commercial graphic design, as Kruger did from 1967 through 1976. T-shirts, shopping bags, matchbooks, baseball caps, magnets and coffee mugs soon joined her repertoire of photographic-based imagery. Soho galleries, public transit, magazine covers and people's bodies provided a formidable array of locales for her work. In short, Kruger not only succeeded in blurring the boundaries between high art and mass media: she also went further than any previous artist, including Andy Warhol, in the merchandising and "branding" of her art production. As with the Doritos or Tide logos whose familiarity signal to shoppers from shelves bursting with similar products, Kruger's signature font likewise achieved product recognition and brand ubiquity.

This "brand" quality of Kruger's collected works proves to be its primary weakness in the context of a museum retrospective. Occupying eight galleries at the Whitney, the first three devoted to installations, "Barbara Kruger," organized by Museum of Contemporary Art curator Ann Goldstein, presents two decades of Kruger's photographs, photographic silkscreens on vinyl, video, audio, posters, engraved metal plates and merchandise. Only a fraction of the 60 works on display represent pre-trade-mark Kruger: otherwise, room after room assails museum-goers with a cacophony of red, black and white images and text that--despite their much-touted graphic punch--dissolve into a mind-numbing homogeneity. Given the artist's decades-long concern with probing the vicissitudes of violence, one could argue that the differentness-yet-sameness of Kruger's medium and message is precisely the point. Unfortunately, any critical acumen that individual works may offer is severely compromised by both their juxtaposition with one an other and their occupation of institutional rather than public space. The slogans staring down at viewers from the walls and up from the floors have more in common with bumper-sticker politics than cogent cultural critique. The simplicity and brutal directness of the Kruger statement--designed to be processed without a lot of cogitation--works best when encountered in the frenetic environment of the city street or while flipping through the pages of a magazine rather than in the contemplative atmosphere of the museum. Laudable as it is to question hierarchies between high art and mass production and the separation between art and daily life, all contexts and venues are not equal--something any corporate marketing director could tell you.

Kruger's works are effective in public because they play off their surroundings. One highly successful example of this interaction occurred in 1990 when Kruger designed a billboard in conjunction with a project for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. For the billboard, Kruger plastered her "Your body is a battleground" slogan across a black and white photograph of a woman's horror-stricken face. Shortly after it went on view, the adjoining billboard took on an announcement paid for by a pro-life group. This ad consisted of an image of a fetus accompanied by text which read: "ALIVE & GROWING: heart beats, brainwaves, fingerprints, feels pain." The presence of the pro-life billboard added significant weight to Kruger's work by situating it within the realm of a widespread moral, ethical and political debate fraught with concrete social consequences.

While the Wexner situation represents an ideal instance of critical interpellation, even the milder exchanges between Kruger's public works and their surroundings imbue them with a force that is largely absent from the retrospective. The gallery devoted to the documentation of the public and media-situated works conveys, albeit in muted fashion (due in part to the precious manner of displaying the magazines, books and merchandise in glass vitrines), the work's dynamism in the public realm. Overall, however, in the minimal setting of the gallery the collected works become caught in an incestuous circle of self-referentiality. The slogans, wall and floor texts and audio at times resort to sweeping generalities about the hate of other and self that are too far removed from the complex realities of people's experience.

The installations in particular reveal the pitfalls of merely mirroring in one's art practice the subject of one's critique. One large gallery was devoted to an untitled floor-to-ceiling 1994 installation targeting various types of intolerance, ranging from religious to sexual. Stamped across images of angry, masked or freakish looking people, captions such as "Hate like us," "Fear like us," and "Pray like us" provided the textual counterpart to the audio track, which alternated between the rants of a xenophobe, crowd noise and retching sounds. A black and white backdrop of a crowd functioned as "wall paper" on which the individual image-text pieces rested. The layers of image, text and sound--executed in trademark color scheme and font--served to create a frenzied atmosphere of hate and bigotry. Amounting to little more than a caricature of the zealot's mind-set, the installation sacrificed analysis to indulge in a fair amount of self-righteous finger-pointing. Beaten down by the graphics and sound, the vie wers were left feeling more like victims than perpetuators of intolerance. After suffering through the assault, most people could no doubt congratulate themselves on their own open-mindedness. While nerve-racking, the installation ultimately let the viewer off the moral hook.

The Kruger formula is not infinitely adaptable. The elegant simplicity of the earlier posters, billboards and photographs as singular statements triumphs over the clutter of the installations. This disparity is apparent not only in the exhibition, but also in the catalog, where many of Kruger's works from the '80s such as Untitled (Your Comfort is My Silence) (1981) prove their staying power. The catalog is well designed and thorough in its documentation of Kruger's body of work from the '70s to the present. The essays are well representative of Kruger scholarship. Reflecting the diversity of Kruger's body of work, the essays take a number of historical, critical and theoretical approaches and discuss her production in relationship to graphic design, photography, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, semiotics and deconstruction. Goldstein's essay is a useful source for basic information on Kruger's biography and development as an artist and writer. Carol Squiers's essay provides a welcome look into Kruger's earl y photographic practice. Squiers connects Kruger's late '70s photo-and-text works to '60s conceptual photographic projects by Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham. However, more explication is needed concerning Kruger's abandonment of an "original" photographic practice in favor of manipulating found imagery. The decision to embrace preexisting imagery marked not only a watershed moment for the artist but also for postmodern photographic practice as a whole. The interview with Lynne Tillman finishes the catalog on a strong note: Kruger cogently lays out the major concerns and aims of her art practice. The interview makes a welcome addition to Kruger's previous artist's statements, which typically reflect the clarity and directness of the best of her art practice.

WEENA PERRY is a freelance writer and lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College.