Like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman also
belong to the first generation of TV children who were born between the
mid-forties and mid-fifties and grew up during the prosperous Eisenhower
era. During this time, television found entry into nearly every American
household; its media overload of family shows, cartoons, soap operas, and
commercials left its mark on the "American Way of Life" more powerfully
than anything had ever done before. Thus, the questions concerning power
structures, control mechanisms, and gender roles that these artists
formulate are directly connected to the power of media images and
messages.
Barbara
Kruger, Untitled (Repeat after me) 1985/94
©
Barbara Kruger
Courtesy: Monika
Sprüth Philomene Magers, Köln, München, London
During
the early eighties, each of these artists worked with appropriation:
Holzer used forms of advertising such as text banners, buttons, posters,
T-shirts, and billboards to infiltrate public space with her works; Kruger
situated her art on shopping bags, T-shirts, matchboxes, the covers of Newsweek
and Esquire, as well as on
billboards, buses, and subways; and between 1977 and 1980, Cindy Sherman
created her famous series Untitled Film Stills—69 black and white
photographs in which she personifies various different female stereotypes,
such as secretary, seductress, murder victim, and housewife. Sherman bases
her work on motifs from magazines, films, and television; each of her
figures are objects of male desire trapped in their roles and defined by
poses, make-up, clothing. With their appropriation of mass media imagery
and their interventions into the public space, these artists also call the
idea of the "original" work of art into question.
Barbara
Kruger, Untitled (Don't be a jerk), 1994
©
Barbara Kruger
Courtesy: Monika
Sprüth Philomene Magers, Köln, München, London
The
fact that Barbara Kruger also worked as a movie and TV critic for the art
magazine Artforum during this time is
only consistent. While post-feminist theory increasingly understood gender
and sexuality as constructs produced through media and social
representation, Kruger’s criticism aims at the machinery that
unremittingly indoctrinates the masses with these stereotypical images:
the advertising and entertainment industry. "As long as pictures remain
powerful, living conventions within culture, I’ll continue to use them and
turn them around," as she said in an interview.
Barbara
Kruger, Untitled (Seeing through you), 2004
©
Barbara Kruger
Courtesy: Monika
Sprüth Philomene Magers, Köln, München, London
At
the beginning of the ’80s, the New
Wave movement adapted the ’50s look in a blend of coolness and ironic
distance. Kruger used images from magazines and B-films to create a deadly
horror version of the fifties flair. As she asserts, "None of us are
located outside of stereotype. Everything about our presentation in
everyday life, in public, says something about a certain stereotype of
gesture, of look, of speech."
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Barbara Kruger, Untitled (I shop therefore
I am II), 1987
© Barbara Kruger
Kruger
took these celluloid nightmares of the nuclear family, the Wonder Bread
paradise of American backyards with their repressed middle class desires
and housewives cooking and sewing on barbiturates and Valium, and
countered them with polemical slogans brimming with personal pronouns like
"I," "you," and "we"—for instance "I shop therefore I am," and "You are
not yourself." The viewer of these works must decide which position to
assume in relation to these statements. Kruger is not merely interested in
the relationship between the sexes; she also examines the interaction
between "active" and "passive" roles.
Barbara
Kruger, Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989
©
Barbara Kruger
"Your Body is a
Battleground"—this could serve as a motto for an entire era during which
"body politics" played a key role. Originally conceived for a "pro-choice"
march on Washington in 1989, when tens of thousands of demonstrators
advocated the right to abortion, Barbara Kruger’s slogan hit the nerve of
the time. In the hedonist eighties, America played the dominant role in
extolling a merciless beauty cult. Yet while the advertising industry
suggests that the body is a material capable of limitless improvement
through aerobics and plastic surgery, the government employs its
catchphrase "family values" to make its ultra-conservative Christian
morals and repressive family and health policies prevail. When Kruger
chooses a stereotypical model’s face for her poster motif and splits it in
half vertically to create a "positive" and "negative" side, then this also
expresses a social schizophrenia—because AIDS is also splitting the nation
in two. Anger is mounting in the face of discrimination and catastrophic
health insurance prospects. When in the late ’80s groups like Act
Up and Out
Rage! went public with controversial campaigns and slogans such as
"Silence = Death," they made use of an aesthetic similar to Kruger’s early
works. To this day, the precise directness and extraordinary urgency that
Kruger’s art conveys have lost nothing of their power. This is also,
perhaps, because not much has changed in the mechanisms of violence and
power that she questions in her work. Even if feminist artists such as
Holzer, Kruger, and Sherman have become world-famous, Women in the City doesn’t
revert into a retro celebration. The discourses that began in the ’80s
have not as yet been carried to their conclusion. A work of Jenny Holzer’s
installed on a lighted panel in front of the Roosevelt
Hotel underscores this. Beneath the neon lettering "Cinegrill" reads
one of her "truisms" in small letters: "Sex differences are here to stay."
Jenny
Holzer, Truisms, 1977-79/2008, installation view,
Sunset
Boulevard, Los Angeles, project for Women in the City
Photo:
Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy West of Rome
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