Few creatives can claim the Museum of Modern Art and Rage Against the Machine as fans and collaborators. Yet that’s the unifying force of 77-year-old conceptual artist Barbara Kruger’s work: It’s immediate, impactful and, as her legion of imitators have proven, looks great on a tee.
Known for iconic lyrics proclaiming “I shop, therefore I am” and “Your body is a battlefield” — the latter given new life last spring as an incendiary cover for New York magazine — the artist remains ever humble. “I believe that no work of art is as brilliant, amazing, great and great, nor as failed, ridiculous, terrible and second-rate as it is written,” she told the Guardian. “All hyperbolic statements, judgments, anointings, and condemnations are as symptomatic as the works to which they refer.”
Krueger, who first gained widespread recognition for her banners for the Women’s March on Washington for legal abortion in 1989, has been a tireless advocate for reproductive freedoms for more than four decades. Her work is known for challenging society’s views on beauty, identity, social constructs, and how we perceive our power (or lack thereof) within societal structures. With the Supreme Court’s recent move to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade decision, disabling the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, Kruger’s art has never been more relevant. Even if that recognition may come as bittersweet.
The first thing one hears upon entering the David Zwirner Gallery in New York’s Chelsea is the metallic thump-thump of a working typewriter. The sound, part of Krueger’s immersive installation and larger show of the same name, is jarring and pierces the silence that usually envelops the stark white space. Yet the art on display is as urgent as the cacophony erupting within its massive walls. On display through August 12, the exhibit is a homecoming for the Los Angeles-based, East Coast-born pioneer whose fiery, anti-capitalist textual collages and multimedia works helped define activist aesthetics in America for nearly half a century.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Cast of Characters), 2016/2020. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
The most extensive showing of an individual in Zwirner’s history, the exhibition boasts both canonical and new works and coincides with Kruger’s large-scale site-specific installation Barbara Kruger: I’m Thinking of You. I mean me. I Mean You – on view at Moma’s Marron Family Atrium in New York from July 16. This month also concludes Lacma’s tribute to Krueger and a genesis showing at Sprüth Magers of her early “stick-on” guerrilla collages.
“My work is rarely about specific incidents or events, but tries to create a commentary on the ways in which cultures construct and contain us,” she says, responding to the timeliness of the displays. “I’ve always said I try to deal with who we are to each other. I see this as an ongoing project.” Kruger, who began her career in the design department of Condé Nast in the 1960s, learned early on the power of words and pictures and the immediacy of visual elevator as an image-based call to action. In the decades since, her work has taken on a life of its own, making cameo appearances in films and “inspiring” Supreme’s sleek black, white and red logo, sparking the legendary Hypebeast trademark war, with Kruger branding her imitators as “a ridiculous bunch of completely awkward pranksters”.
For her show at Zwirner, classic works are reconfigured with a digital facelift using video and sound, LED screen care and smart edits. For example, in Oath, Will, Vow (1988/2020) – also included in the 59th Venice Biennale – fragments of the Pledge of Allegiance are introduced to high effect and reconfigured on screen, hinting at the sense that our current history has been edited, rewritten, and sometimes even completely discarded by an unknown hand.
“The works at Zwirner are primarily moving image installations that have been created and re-created over the past three years,” Kruger explains. “They were all responsive to the particular architecture and built environment that contained them,” she continues, noting her engagement with the challenges of the spatial spatial creation of her work. Despite the difficulty of making these installations, which Krueger still prepares by hand, it feels like a huge privilege. “I feel lucky to have these amazing opportunities to create works in these places. I never take that for granted because what is seen and what becomes known is often so cruelly arbitrary,” she says, noting the amplification of some artists over others, the result of “historical conditions, brutality of social relations, limiting categories’, as well as the fickle vagaries of the often fickle art market. “I so appreciate the current visibility of my work and welcome it as we approach our centenary.”
Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate/David Zwirner
For his latest works, Kruger, who once infamously wrapped Kim Kardashian’s naked body in his trademark Futura font on the cover of W magazine, focuses on how celebrities, technology and social media shape our attention and consumption patterns. “My image/text works try to show and tell the stories of bodies and minds. How they can be presented and how they imagine themselves,” she says. “In this time of huge collisions of voyeurism and narcissism and heightened attention, I feel very engaged with the self-presentation and direct addresses that social media offers. How millions of us are pleased, desired, idolized and shamed by these images.
Simultaneously, on the streets, her works took on a new dramatic presence, with Kruger impersonators appearing on signs and billboards at abortion rights protests across the country. It would be easy for a less modest artist to feel the need to claim ownership. “As someone who never thought anyone would know my name or my work, it’s both amazing and satisfying and haunting, and it can only happen at a time when the virality of images is so accelerated,” she says of the spread of her work, “And, appalling, when the virality of plague, war, and discontent is so punitively prevalent.”
Ultimately, Krueger’s art excels when it allows the viewer to shift their perspective, often on the overlooked or misrepresented. “My work constantly focuses on the vulnerability of bodies. About how power flows across cultures. About how the choreographies of hierarchies and capital determine who lives and who dies, who gets kissed and who gets punched, who gets praised and who gets punished,” she explains.
Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/David Zwirner
As for how the artist feels about Rowe’s recent decision, she has some choice words for those just getting involved. “The repeal of Roe should not come as a surprise,” she warned. “Anyone who’s shocked by what’s going on hasn’t been paying attention,” she says, pointing to the U.S.’s storied history of suppressing minority rights while promoting white supremacy. “Any surprise at the present state of affairs is the result of a failure of imagination. Of not understanding the power and punishment of what has happened and, even worse, what is yet to come.” She believes this failure of imagination has contributed to what has become, in her words, “an increasingly volatile time of reckoning and revenge.”
Instead of shame, she hopes to build community. “More than ever, it is important to simultaneously engage the contests around race, gender, and class,” she states. “To not compartmentalize, isolate, and hierarchize these issues, but to see the interconnectedness of the forces that define what it feels like to live another day.” To hurt or heal, to nurture or destroy.”
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