Mastery of Mantras in Futura Bold Oblique. Declaritive. Iconic. Empowering. I’m really frustrated that I missed her show in NYC last month. Yes she created “this” style. Barbara Kruger, here’s to what you accomplished, yes, Pre-Digital… You and George Lois need to have a kid, please.
From the NY Times on her recent show at Skarstedt Gallery:
“Truth through advertising” could be a blanket title for much of Barbara Kruger’s art from the 1980s, which used the stripped-down graphs and punched-out language of commercial promotion to deliver political warnings and admonitions. The phrase “Your manias become science” stutters across a photograph of a mushroom cloud; the spaced-apart words “Your body is a battleground” nail down the image of a bifurcated female face.
Ms. Kruger came to this work from several directions. In the early 1960s she studied at Parsons School of Design; Diane Arbus was one of her teachers. From school she quickly became the chief designer at Mademoiselle but at the same time created covers for small-press political books and pursued an interest in poetry. The 44 collages in the Skarstedt show bear evidence of all these interests.
Although we’ve come to expect large scale from Ms. Kruger — billboard-size paintings, gallery-filling installations — everything in this show is small, roughly the size of a book or magazine page. Each piece takes the form of old-style cut-and-paste mechanicals, long since made obsolete by computer software but once assembled by hand using printed galleys, an X-Acto knife and paste. Many of Ms. Kruger’s best-known pieces are enlarged versions of these originals,
Some people complain of feeling hectored and bullied by Ms. Kruger’s work, but it’s hard to tell why from what’s here. Hers is a calculatedly theatrical form of aggression: a kind of performance through pictures and texts. The prevailing tone is a sardonic, noirish Arbusian humor, with melodramatic pronouncements set against often outlandish period images. As is true of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages, many of Ms. Kruger’s images appear to date back to the era of her childhood and project a kind of Hitchcockian version of cold war paranoia.
That said, the phrases she uses can be moving. The most resonant of them — “Your comfort is my silence,” “Who will write the history of tears,” “Admit nothing. Blame everyone. Be bitter” — recall the plain-spoken, politically probing poetry that Adrienne Rich was writing in the 1970s and ’80s and that Muriel Rukeyser was writing before her. Ms. Rich’s poems from that time, with their stark, passionate discontinuities, have retained their potency. So has Ms. Kruger’s art.
HOLLAND COTTER
