Thanks Lou for posting this review.
Kruger epitomizes for me the narcissistic sloganeering and chablis
apocalypticism that ate art/politics in the eighties. I especially liked
two comments in the review: "She doesn't like to be for things.
Instead, she identifies herself with a stance: critical, suspicious,
oppositional." and "Kruger makes the classic rhetorical mistake of
focusing so completely on what she means to say that she overlooks how she
says it. She's oblivious to the way her carefully reasoned critical
positionality actually comes off."
I don't think it's fair to blame Kruger for the edgy, cynical turn in
brand promotion. Actually, I think it was because her work was so
static and susceptible to re-appropriation that she was made into an art
world celebrity. Books on post-modern art/politics in the eighties just
had to include a reproduction of some utterly boring Kruger image.
In formal respects, my own image making trades on some of the same
trite elements as Kruger's -- the re-use of old magazine images, the
intrusion of swathes of large format text, the allusions to
constructivism and dadaist montage. The principal difference (I would
argue) is that my works are trivial but useful instruments in a
committed research project, whereas Kruger's are monumental,
cynically artless "works of art".
I also don't think it would be possible to overstate the importance of
Walter Benjamin's arguments about art and politics to the cynical,
edgy lifestyle commercialism. And I want to be clear that I don't mean
simply its importance as critique. I don't know if Kruger herself says
anything about Benjamin and his analysis of "post-auratic" art. But
W.B. essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" served as virtually the Communist Manifesto of the 1980s
post-modernist art scene. I have a couple of problems with that. One is
that the "reception" (ironic self reference) of Benjamin's theories about
the reception of art was extremely superficial -- reduced to sloganeering,
much of it based on hearsay. The other problem is that the Benjamin essay
that got monumentalized was both extremely suggestive and disasterously
unresolved, which is why it lent itself so readily to sloganeering.
It's almost as if Walter Benjamin holds up the fun-house mirror, by
means of which late capitalist consumerism presents its image as something
cool, radical and self-referential. I would suggest that the antidote for
this ironic instrumentation of Benjamin may be more Benjamin. I would
caution that what I am proposing is dangerous and could easily lead right
back into the narcissistic, sloganeering trap that Kruger epitomises and
Bennetton replicates.
Temps Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
