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Raphael Rubinstein

Since 1986, art criticism has appeared in Arts, Art News, Art in America, Flash Art, Artforum and other magazines. At present, writing appears regularly in Art in America.

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Barbara Kruger at the Whitney Museum
( Published2001)

Author: Raphael Rubinstein

Back in late August, as I was about to begin this piece, I read a line in another critic's review of Barbara Kruger's retrospective that convinced me to put off writing about the show for several months. At the end of a perceptive review in the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz posed a question to Kruger skeptics: "In four months, we could elect another Bush as president. If so, who you gonna call?" Yes, I thought, one's evaluation of Kruger's work might indeed be colored by the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. This, after all, is an artist whose work came to maturity in the early years of Reagan's first term, and who subsequently pursued a critique of the rightward turn of American politics, as well as targeting sexism and violence.

The Whitney show (which originated at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art) allowed one to track Kruger's own shift by beginning with two early works that pair photos and texts, Hospital and Picture/ Reading (both 1978). In Picture/ Reading, which Kruger published as an artist's book in 1979, shots of building exteriors are flanked by typeset micronarratives of events that might be happening inside the houses in the photos. At the time, such narrative-based text-and-image work was a thriving mode (one thinks of Bill Beckley or Victor Burgin, among others), and in Picture/Reading, Kruger created a classic of the genre. The 10 photos in the piece expertly evoke a certain American suburban environment even as they cleave to the dry style of Conceptual photography, while the rather well-written texts (imagine Alain Robbe-Grillet transplanted to southern California) supply sharp vignettes of alienation.

The next year Kruger stopped taking her own photos and began to work with preexisting images. Another significant step came in 1980, when the text, reduced from a paragraph to a single word or a brief phrase, migrated from adjoining panels onto the photograph itself, where it was applied with Letraset or paint. Finally, instead of exhibiting collages, Kruger began to photograph her image-and-text collages and simply show prints of increasing scale. In 1981, the year Reagan took office, Kruger established the visual style that has served her well ever since: pronoun-heavy phrases in blocky letters (Futura bold italic) silhouetted against a solid-color strip (usually red), with a powerful, high-contrast, black-and-white photo behind them. As well as including many of Kruger's graphic images, the Whitney presented a number of the large-scale installations the artist has been making since 1990. Also on view were all sorts of newspapers, magazines and objects (T-shirts, shopping bags, matchbooks, etc.) carrying Kruger images. Whatever the format, the themes are consistent: the denunciation of the daily mythologies--from consumerism to traditional gender roles--of which so many lives are constructed.

Artist: Barbara Kruger
“Untitled (You can't drag your money into the grave with you)”1990. 109" by 153" photographic silkscreen/vinyl

Interpreting Kruger according to presidential politics has its limits, however. Neither the victory of Bill Clinton in 1992 nor his reelection in 1996 persuaded Kruger to tone down her political critique. If anything, during the Clinton years it became more strident and specific. I'm thinking, for example, of her 1994 photo-and-sound installation that took aim at religious intolerance or her heavy-handed Kennedy brothers-Marilyn Monroe and J. Edgar Hoover-Roy Cohn sculptures of 1997, which constitute her only significant departure from her signature, two-dimensional style and are in my view the worst work of her career [see A.i.A., Nov. '97].

Although Kruger's art has grown in scale and ambition over the last decade, I've sometimes had the impression, standing in the middle of one of her blaring installations, that the artist was raising her voice (bigger photos, bigger words, loud soundtracks) because she feared people weren't listening the way they once had. But now, since the nation has indeed elected another Bush (though "elected" may not be the right word), and the reins of government are again in the hands of 1980s-style militarists, fundamentalists and supply-siders, Kruger may find a newly attentive audience. Her phone has probably been ringing off the hook.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_3_89/ai_71558215/pg_1

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