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1 Barbara Kruger's Conceptual Power Barbara Kruger’s Conceptual Power: “Signed, sealed, and delivered.” Ginger Bartush Dr. Ann Marie Leimer Midwestern State University Barbara Kruger created conceptual artwork in the 1980s that addressed issues of sexuality, gender, identity, and consumerism. During this time, President, Ronald Reagan, promoted wealth, political conservatism, and the “trickle-down” effect; he encouraged the wealthy to strive for the “American Dream,” hoping that mass consumerism would even-out the economy and support businesses. Amidst this chaotic, postmodern environment, Barbara Kruger witnessed the empty feelings of lost individuals who sought to build their identities upon commodities. Meanwhile, the threat of the Cold War loomed over Americans, and Reagan put the nation deeper into debt. Fittingly, during this controversial period, Kruger’s artwork received—and still receives—controversial feedback from audiences and critics alike. As a postmodern artist, she challenges social stereotypes by appropriating found images, reminiscent of mid-19th century advertisements; she creates new meanings by deconstructing the images’ original purposes. Armed with her personal color and composition combination, she creates iconic art pieces that strongly impact all artists, critics, scholars, and passersby of the current postmodern society. Her art will demand the attention and interpretations of future generations; indeed, the conceptual artist and her work require present and future audiences to closely study and analyze her meanings and importance. This paper investigates how Barbara Kruger captures America’s postmodern, consumer culture through appropriation, and demonstrates how Kruger uses rhetoric and visual representation to address issues of gender and identity in her pieces, Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987) and Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1981). Kruger’s art is categorized as conceptual by her contemporaries because she rhetorically and ingeniously juxtaposes her language atop found images in order to portray a new idea or concept. Art scholar, Margot Lovejoy, explains how the photocopy machine offered new possibilities to artists, which dramatically impacted art production, and uses Kruger as an example of how artists can play with representation through this new artistic tool.1 Kruger’s two art pieces from the 1980s began as photographs; “her strategy is to reproduce found images from published sources and to add texts to them.”2 Kruger uses copies of mid-19th-century images in order to deconstruct modernist notions of representation; this act of deconstruction is highly postmodern. Rather than simply regurgitating exact replicas of the images, Kruger represents them within a radically different conceptual context and format. Renowned art scholar, Anna Goldstein, discusses Kruger’s initial experimentation with text and images—“picture practice”— and her shift to the “now characteristic black-and white photographs re-photographed from existing sources . composed together with phrases typeset in Futura Bold italic and presented in red lacquered wood frames.”3 She repeats the red color from her frames into her actual 1 Margot Lovejoy, “The Copier: Authorship and Originality,” in Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms Inc. Research Press, 1989), 110. 2 Lovejoy, “The Copier: Authorship and Originality,” 111. 3 Anna Goldstein, “Bring in the World,” in Barbara Kruger (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 31. 1 artwork as bold contrast against the black, white, and grey colors of the photographs. In Kruger’s piece, Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987), she uses red text to jump out at the audience, inviting them to look at the words on top of the image and to figure out what she is trying to say. Kruger’s contrasting color scheme draws attention to her audacious phrases, full of double-entendres and comic undertones. Her loud artwork fits into her medium of choice: advertisements. The artist strives for “visibility and recognizability” in her artwork “that could be applied to a variety of media and sites, particularly in the public realm, including billboards, posters, bus cards, media shelters merchandise, and architectural projects.”4 Alternately, she incorporates her artwork into useable, marketable items such as t-shits and grocery bags. Using advertising as a medium for art situates Kruger’s appropriation techniques on an entirely new level; she extends beyond the representation of found images into a representation of social “art.” Advertisements, as social art, are appropriated by Kruger to sell a message—a concept—rather than a commodity. In a discussion with Carol Squiers, Kruger stated: These were objects. I wasn’t going to stick them on the walls with pushpins. I wanted them to enter the marketplace 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. That’s what the frames were about: how to commodify them. It was the most effective packaging device. Signed, sealed, and delivered.5 Kruger’s statement outlines her artistic intention, her goal. A commodity-like composition and form allows her to comment on the consumer culture of the 1980s. Her artwork both embodies and articulates her subjects in question. Understanding the historical context of Kruger’s two art pieces allows for a better understanding of what she meant to express concerning consumerism and gender identity politics. America in the 1980s existed under President, Ronald Reagan, whose conservative politics pushed for a more unbridled economy. Raegan promoted consumption and big business; the wealthy spent money to show that they had money. The younger generations were free to play, buy, and revel in their youth. The term “yuppie” (a stereotypical American, college- educated, financially successful, baby-boomer with expensive taste) perfectly encapsulated the 1980s American youth. MTV’s popularity was at its peak, exposing the already unsupervised young people to the “gods” of their society—entertainment celebrities. In an interview with Lynne Tillman, Kruger noted that, “it’s both frightening and compelling how, in this celebrity- crazed time, human beings, bodies, become “figures.” And how the iconography of fame and public personal is played out in the spectacles and secrets of everyday life.”6 American consumers were not just consuming physical commodities, as seen in her piece, Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987), they were consuming each other, as seen in Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1981). 4 Ibid. 5 Carol Squiers, "Diversionary (Syn)tactics: Barbara Kruger Has Her Way With Words.”ARTnews 86, no. 2 (1987): 84. 6 Lynne Tillman, “Interview with Barbara Kruger,” in Barbara Kruger ed. Anna Goldstein (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 196. 2 Preemptively, French theorist, Jean Bauldrillard, captured the consumerist behaviors of Western society in his book, Simulacra and Simulation.7 His descriptions of the hypermarket and hypercommodity verify the “social code,”8 meaning people living a postmodern lifestyle have reconstructed and represented a new, collective form of authenticity within their culture. Interestingly, Kruger and Bauldrillard both seek to undermine—to deconstruct—modernity within society. Bauldrillard theorizes a new system. Kruger creates art. A parallel concept the theorist and the artist undertake is the notion of the “nucleus.”9 Although Kruger openly admits her decision to not “illustrate” theory, including Baudrillard or any other scholar, her artwork manages to reflect theoretical notions that are widely discussed.10 In Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987), Kruger implies that postmodern consumers live, or rather exist, to buy commodities. These commodities come from the hypermarket: a theoretical, yet physical, location where the essences of human existence now reside. Postmodern Americans live to consume. Kruger verifies our need to “shop” with this art piece; she appropriately grabs our attention through the advertisement-like composition, creating a sense of existential unity through clever humor. In a sense, this humor “ruins” the seriousness of our existence by giving us her reconstructed “commodities” (“Signed, sealed, and delivered”) and challenging us to see our ridiculous, superficial, materialistic condition. In the spirit of socially constructed notions, Kruger’s Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1981) can be analyzed for its gender and identity politics implications and feminist rhetorical practices within the context of Kruger’s time period and her generation’s expectations. According to Linker, during Kruger’s generation, “gender was not regarded as an innate or ‘essential’ condition, but rather as a construction produced through representation;”11 this situation leaves women’s identities in the hands of the postmodern culture. Representations of woman are constructed by the media, the hypermarket, the celebrity “figures,” and most commonly, masculine figures of authority. Because the traits and expectations of these figures are apt to change, women’s representations will eventually change as well—leaving women to submit to the whims of society. Kruger appropriates a classical image of Grecian beauty, in her 1981 art piece, with the words, “Your gaze hits the side of my face.” The possibility of physical, mental, and/or emotional abuse comes to mind as it is unclear if the subject’s face has
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