"Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in." -- Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black and white photographs overlaid with declarative captions...in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases in her works often include use of pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they".
"All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.""Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.""As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up.""Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.""I don't necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It's just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.""I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.""I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.""I just say I'm an artist who works with pictures and words.""I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.""I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. It's the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.""I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.""I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.""I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.""I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.""I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.""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. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.""I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.""I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.""I'm living my life, not buying a lifestyle.""I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.""I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.""If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture.""It's good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can't be personalized.""Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.""Look, we're all saddled with things that make us better or worse. This world is a crazy place, and I've chosen to make my work about that insanity.""Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag. Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes.""There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.""There's a moment of recognition. It's that white-light kind of stuff that just "works." I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it's a movie, music, a building, a book.""Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.""Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot.""What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing - the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.""You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice."
Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. She initially worked at Mademoiselle Magazine and later at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications.
Much of Kruger's work engages the merging of found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark white letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.
She juxtaposes her imagery and text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in Kruger's work. The text in her works of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t." A larger category that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. The importance of appropriation art in contemporary culture lay in its ability to play with preponderant imagistic and textual conventions: to mash up meanings and create new ones.
For the past decade Kruger has created immersive video and audio installations. Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, her work is consistently about the kindnesses and brutalities of social life: about how we are to one another.
Kruger has had exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Yvon Lambert , Paris; and Sprüth Magers Berlin London.
In 1980 she had her first solo exhibition at P.S. 1, Long Island City, New York. In 1985 she joined the prominent contemporary art gallery of Mary Boone, and has had eight solo shows there since. In 2005 Kruger was honored at the 51st Venice Biennale with the "Golden Lion" for Lifetime Achievement. Kruger is currently a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.
In 2007, Kruger was one of the many artists to be a part of South Korea's Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in Seoul. This marked South Korea's first women's biennial. In September 2009, Kruger’s “Between Being Born and Dying”, a major installation commissioned by the Lever House Art Collection, opened at the New York City architectural landmark Lever House.
Kruger's words and pictures have been displayed in both galleries and public spaces, as well as framed and unframed photographs, posters, postcards, t-shirts, electronic signboards, billboards and on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France.
