Barbara Kruger:
PLENTY SHOULD BE ENOUGH
Her
unmistakeable collages of text and image characterized the visual culture
of the 1980s. With an important work from this decade, Barbara Kruger is
also represented in the Deutsche Bank Collection. Her investigations of
sexism, consumerist terror, and social power structures are as relevant as
ever, as can be seen in her new video installation on Sunset Boulevard in
Los Angeles Oliver Koerner von Gustorf on the American artist,
whose slogans such as "I shop therefore I am" have long since become
important components of our collective consciousness.
Barbara
Kruger, Plenty, 2008, installation view,
Sunset
Boulevard, project for Women in the City
Photo:
Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy West of Rome
"THANKS
TO YOGA, YOGHURT, LIFE COACHES, ART, ASHRAMS, PHILANTHROPY, REAL ESTATE,
PETS, SHOPPING, AND REHAB, YOU’VE FOUND PEACE." If you happen to be
traveling through LA these days, you might have noticed this capitalist
mantra innocuously inserted into the urban landscape on billboards, LED
panels, logos, and neon signs. Plenty is the title of Barbara
Kruger’s current video installation presented on large video
screens scattered throughout the city: on the top floor of the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and on two electronic billboards on Sunset
Boulevard simultaneously commissioned for ordinary advertisement.
Kruger’s images appear one per second; they resemble fragments of ongoing
commercials selling electronic entertainment equipment and no-name
products. A gaudy silver wristwatch with fake gems sparkles before a
turquoise background; jogging shoes and rhinestone pins are presented on
revolving discs. The faces of people laughing or talking on the phone
appear in close-up. These sequences are interrupted by sentence fragments,
as though life were one endless flat-rate fee: "YOU ARE A VERY IMPORTANT
PERSON"; "HANG UP AND DRIVE"; "PLENTY SHOULD BE ENOUGH."
Barbara
Kruger, Plenty, 2008, video still,
project
for Women in the City
Courtesy
West of Rome
This work is on view in the
context of the project Women
in the City; along with Barbara Kruger, the Milan gallery dealer Emi
Fontana, curator of the non-profit organization "West of Rome,"
invited another three prominent American women artists to produce a work
for the inner city of Los Angeles: Jenny
Holzer, Louise
Lawler, and Cindy
Sherman. All four represent the first generation of feminist artists
who in the 1980s conquered not only the male-dominated art establishment,
but also, like Holzer and Kruger, the streets of the major western cities,
at the time settings of passionate battles for the rights of women and
sexual, ethnic, and social minorities. In the LA
Times, Emi Fontana said that she hopes that Women in the City will
"remind a new generation that relationships between the sexes were not
always as they are now. (…) Not dealing with feminism is for me the same
as not dealing with history," she says. "I think a good artist should
always deal with history."
Barbara
Kruger, Plenty, 2008, video still,
project
for Women in the City
Courtesy
West of Rome
Fontana is not alone with this
opinion. In the summer of 2007 there was a major celebrated exhibition of
feminist art from the ’60s and ’70s titled Wack!
Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum
of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles. Women in the City carries
this current investigation further, dedicating itself to important
post-feminist positions that made their mark in the 1980s. Thus, the
project oscillates between retrospective and reassessment. The experiment
of transplanting Jenny Holzer’s text works from the ’70s and ’80s, such as
her Truisms, into the LA urban arena in poster form, or wallpapering Cindy
Sherman’s legendary Untitled Film Stills onto huge
billboards, is both an homage and a test. The visual strategies these
artists invented have long since entered into the general inventory of
mass media. Like Barbara Kruger’s Plenty, they cannot
immediately be recognized as art in the commercialized urban landscape.
"That’s also the part that interests me," says Emi Fontana. "It’s a kind
of perverse pleasure. It’s just adding more signs to this city that
already has so many."
Barbara
Kruger, Plenty, 2008, installation view,
Sunset
Boulevard, project for Women in the City
Photo:
Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy West of Rome
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Barbara Kruger, Untitled
(We
are all that heaven allows), 1984
Deutsche
Bank Collection
And that is exactly what Barbara Kruger has been doing since
the late ’70s. She wanted her messages to penetrate the cycles of
consumerism and goods, "to enter the marketplace," as she explained in
1999, "because I began to understand that outside the market there is
nothing—not a piece of lint, a cardigan, a coffee table, a human being."
She’d
already learned the language of the market decades previously in the media
industry. After graduating from Parsons
School of Design in New York, where she studied with Marvin
Israel at the same time as Diane
Arbus, Kruger began her career in the late ’60s at Condé
Nast. As art director of Harper’s
Bazaar, Israel had already hired photographers like Lisette
Model and Richard Avedon
and also introduced Kruger to the scene. At first she worked as a graphic
designer for Mademoiselle
and Harper’s Bazaar; later, she became art director and
picture editor at House
and Garden and the influential photography magazine Aperture.
Kruger’s
early artistic works, made in 1969, were woven and embroidered wall
hangings adorned with feathers and pearls, still very much influenced by
the feminist reevaluation of the time and by a handicraft dominated by
traditional "feminine" attributes. Although she took part in the 1973 Whitney
Biennial and had her first one-person exhibitions in New York, the
works didn’t yet do justice to her self-declared aim of actively
influencing social and political discourses. It was only while teaching at Berkeley
and investigating the essays of Walter
Benjamin and the semiotics of Roland
Barthes that she began working with collages of black and white
photographs which in 1976 formed the basis for the visual vocabulary that
would soon lead to her artistic breakthrough.
Barbara
Kruger,
Untitled ((Money makes Money), 2001
© Barbara Kruger
Courtesy: Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers,
Cologne, Munich, London
Since the early ’80s,
Kruger has been working with her trademark, the Futura
Bold Italic typeface, which she combines with found images from books,
film stills, and ads. Kruger contrasts her material in a stark color
scheme consisting of red, white, and black. She creates a modern agit-prop
style reminiscent of the Dadaist montages of John
Heartfield and the raw visual language of punk fanzines, but also of
the seductive gloss of contemporary advertising. "I try to deal with the
complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual
presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty. I want
people to be drawn into the space of the work," as she explained in 1997
in Art in America.
And accordingly, her 1984 work in the Deutsche
Bank Collection appears to draw the viewer into a kaleidoscopic
spiral. A fairy-tale ballerina performs her pirouettes in a lunar
landscape, while a kind of cosmic solar whirlwind spins above her
gracefully poised hands. The word bars placed at regular intervals on the
picture’s edge read "We are all that heaven allows."
Barbara
Kruger, Untitled (This is you), 1986
©
Barbara Kruger
Courtesy: Monika
Sprüth Philomene Magers, Köln, München, London
It’s
no accident that this title recalls one of the most famous Hollywood
melodramas of the 1950s, All
that heaven allows. Douglas
Sirk’s film is centered around a woman entrapped in convention
and notions of social morality: Jane
Wyman plays a widow who falls in love with a much younger gardener
played by Rock
Hudson. At the same time, these Technicolor dramas embody the
repressive constraints of the time in which patriarchal power relations
went unchallenged and even the slightest sexual or social aberration from
the norm could only be addressed covertly and in rigidly coded scenes.
Barbara
Kruger, Untitled (Super rich/Ultra gorgeous/Extra skinny/Forever young),
1997
© Barbara Kruger
Courtesy:
Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Köln, München, London
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