Barbara Kruger; ( An Artist working with words)

Early life and career

Kruger was born into a lower-middle-class family^[3][4][5] in Newark, New Jersey. Her father worked as a chemical technician for Shell Oil^[6] and her mother was a legal secretary. She graduated from Weequahic High School.^[7] She attended Syracuse University, but left after one year due to the death of her father.^[6] After spending a year at Syracuse University, in 1965, she went on to pursue a semester at Parson's school of Design in New York. Over the next ten years, Kruger established herself whilst pursuing graphic design for magazines, freelance picture editing, as well as designing book jackets.^[8] By the later 1960s, Kruger gained interest in poetry, and began attending poetry readings and writings. Kruger studied art and design with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel at Parsons School of Design in New York. Kruger soon obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications.^[2] There after, Kruger was awarded the head designer for that following year. She initially worked as a designer at Mademoiselle and later moved on to work part-time as a picture editor at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications.^[9] She also wrote film, television, and music columns for Artforum and Real Life Magazine at the suggestion of her friend Ingrid Sischy.^[6]
Kruger's earliest works date back to 1969. These works were large wall hangings made out of different materials such as yarn, beads, sequins, feathers and ribbons. These pieces represented the feminist recuperation of craft during this period.^[10] Kruger crocheted, sewed and painted bright-hued and erotically suggestive objects, some of which were included by curator Marcia Tucker in the 1973 Whitney Biennial.^[5] They were inspired by Magdalena Abakanowicz's show at the Museum of Modern Art. Although some of these works were included in the Whitney Biennial, Kruger became detached and unsatisfied with her working output.^[8] In 1976 she took a break from making what had become more abstract works, feeling that her work had become meaningless and mindless.^[6] She then moved to Berkeley, California where she taught at the University of California and became inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes.^[6] In 1977 she returned to artmaking, working with her own architectural photographs and publishing an artist's book, Picture/Readings, in 1979.^[11] She was inspired to photograph architecture from her family "looking at family homes [they] could never afford."^[12]
At the beginning of her art career, she was intimidated to enter New York galleries due to the art scene which was an atmosphere that, to her, did not welcome "particularly independent, non-masochistic women."^[6] However, she received early support for her projects from groups such as the Public Art Fund that encouraged her to continue art making.^[12] She switched to her modern practice of collage in the early 80's.

Artistic practice

Addressing issues of language and sign, Kruger has often been grouped with such feminist postmodern artists as Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman.^[11] Like Holzer and Sherman, in particular, she uses the techniques of mass communication and advertising to explore gender and identity.^[13] Kruger is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.^[14]

Imagery and text

Belief+Doubt (2012) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Much of Kruger's work pairs found photographs with pithy and assertive text that challenges the viewer. Her method includes developing her ideas on a computer, later transferring the results (often billboard-sized) into images.^[5] Examples of her instantly recognizable slogans read "I shop therefore I am," and "Your body is a battleground," appearing in her trademark white letters against a red background. Much of her text calls attention to ideas such as feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, frequently appropriating images from mainstream magazines and using her bold phrases to frame them in a new context.
Kruger has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren't."^[15] A larger category that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. In describing her use of appropriation, Kruger states:

Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.^[16]

Her poster for the 1989 Women's March on Washington in support of legal abortion included a woman's face bisected into positive and negative photographic reproductions, accompanied by the text "Your body is a battleground."^[5] A year later, Kruger used this slogan in a billboard commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts. Twelve hours later, a group opposed to abortion responded to Kruger's work by replacing the adjacent billboard with an image depicting an eight-week-old fetus.^[17]
Kruger's early monochrome pre-digital works, known as 'paste ups', reveal the influence of the artist's experience as a magazine editorial designer during her early career. These small scale works, the largest of which is 11 x 13 inches (28 x 33 cm), are composed of altered found images, and texts either culled from the media or invented by the artist. A negative of each work was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial 'paste ups'.^[18] Between 1978 and 1979, she completed "Picture/Readings," simple photographs of modest houses alternating with panels of words.^[5] From 1992 on, Kruger designed several magazine covers, such as Ms., Esquire, Newsweek, and The New Republic.^[19] Her signature font style of Futura Bold type is likely inspired from the "Big Idea" or "Creative Revolution" advertising style of the 1960s that she was exposed to during her experience at Mademoiselle.^[6]
In 1990, Kruger scandalized the Japanese American community of Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, with her proposal to paint the Pledge of Allegiance, bordered by provocative questions, on the side of a warehouse in the heart of the historic downtown neighborhood.^[5] Kruger had been commissioned by MOCA to paint a mural for "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation," a 1989 exhibition that also included works by Barbara Bloom, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince. But before the mural went up, Kruger herself and curator Ann Goldstein presented it at various community meetings over the time period of 18 months.^[20] Only after protests did the artist offer to eliminate the pledge from her mural proposal, while still retaining a series of questions painted in the colors and format of the American flag: "Who is bought and sold? Who is beyond the law? Who is free to choose? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?".^[5] A full year after the exhibition closed, Kruger's reconfigured mural finally went up for a two-year run.^[20]
In 1994, Kruger's L'empathie peut changer le monde (Empathy can change the world) was installed on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France. One year later, with architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson and landscape architect Nicholas Quennell, she designed the 200-foot-long (60 m) sculptural letters Picture This for a stage and outdoor amphitheater at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.^[5] Between 1998 and 2008, she created permanent installations for the Fisher College of Business, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Price Center at the University of California, San Diego.^[21] For a site-specific piece that she produced at the Parrish Art Museum in 1998, Kruger placed across the upper range of the museum's Romanesque facade stark red letters that read, "You belong here"; below, on columns separating three arched entry portals, stacked letters spelled "Money" and "Taste."^[22] As part of the Venice Biennale in 2005, Kruger installed a digitally printed vinyl mural across the entire facade of the Italian pavilion, thereby dividing it into three parts—green at the left, red at the right, white in between. In English and Italian, the words "money" and "power" climbed the portico's columns; the left wall said, "Pretend things are going as planned," while "God is on my side; he told me so" fills the right.^[23] In 2012, her installation Belief+Doubt, which covers 6,700 square feet (620 m²) of surface area and was printed onto wallpaper-like sheets in the artist's signature colors of red, black and white, was installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.^[24]

Barbara Kruger at ACCA, Melbourne

Other works

Since the mid-1990s, Kruger has created large-scale immersive video and audio installations. Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, the work continues her questioning of power, control, affection and contempt: still images now move and speak and spatialize their commentary.^[25] In 1997, Kruger produced a series of fiberglass sculptures of compromised celebrities, including John F. and Robert Kennedy hoisting Marilyn Monroe on their shoulders.^[5] For a concurrent show that same year in New York, she had city buses wrapped with quotations from figures such as Malcolm X, Courtney Love, and H.L. Mencken. For her first retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, she created 15 billboards and countless wild postings, executed and installed in both English and Spanish.^[5] For a public awareness campaign to promote arts instruction in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Kruger covered a bus with phrases like "Give your brain as much attention as you do your hair and you'll be a thousand times better off"; "from here to there"; "Don't be a jerk"; and "You want it. You buy it. You forget it."^[26] In 2016, Kruger created a work protesting the election of Donald Trump for the cover of New York Magazine and participated in a January 20, 2017 inauguration boycott.^[27][28]