[Back in the late 80s, when I worked in Goldman-Sach's new corporate
headquarters, I always got a chuckle over how the powerful investment bank
had decided to festoon the walls with 'avant-garde' art. This was
especially glaring in the cafeteria, which served as a mini-gallery for
some "daring" neon signs created by Barbara Kruger, who has an exhibition
at the Whitney Museum in NYC right now. These signs had slogans like "You
think you can escape commodification --- You can't". Standing on line
behind some bond salesmen in $1200 suits, I couldn't imagine them being
disturbed by her archly ironic postmodernism. Now if Goldman-Sachs had
decided to put up some of Mike Alewitz's murals of striking workers, that
would have been a different story…]
Barbara Kruger, Ad Industry Heroine
By Judith Shulevitz
Barbara Kruger, whose work is currently being exhibited at New York's
Whitney Museum, comes as close as anybody can to being the official artist
of American consumerism. You know who I'm talking about, even if you don't
know her name. Kruger is the collagist who slaps sarcastic slogans boxed in
red on old black-and-white photographs. "I shop therefore I am"; "It's a
small world but not if you have to clean it"; "Your body is a
battleground"--you've read her aphorisms on shopping bags and coffee mugs
and bus stop shelters and magazine covers and the Op-Ed page of the New
York Times. Slightly more than a quarter-century after quitting her job as
the head designer of Mademoiselle to turn the techniques of mid- and
late-20th-century propaganda and advertising against themselves, Kruger has
come full circle. Hers is the voice that suffuses today's airwaves and
magazine pages and that contemporary marketers work hard to emulate. The
edgy, ironic, supposedly self-hating but really self-congratulatory
advertisement or commercial--we owe it largely to her.
Kruger wouldn't like the idea that she incarnates the spirit of our time,
the bourgeois bohemianism that David Brooks meanly calls "Boboism." She's
against the commercial exploitation of anything, her many market tie-ins
notwithstanding. If her work consciously advances a position, it's
feminism. But although she's a feminist, she's also a theorist trained not
to impose her values on other people. She doesn't like to be for things.
Instead, she identifies herself with a stance: critical, suspicious,
oppositional. Kruger has made a career out of denouncing oppressors, from
anti-abortion agitators to wife-beaters, homophobics, racists, and the
editors of glossy magazines. A typical Kruger piece is a long room swathed
from floor to ceiling in giant red and black type and 1950s-magazine-style
photographs. In one such installation, the wall text screams: "All violence
is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype." Underneath it is the
photograph of a screaming woman and the words, "hebe kike yid hymie spic
wop dago mex cunt gash snatch pussy spook sambo ..." and so on. In another
installation, the photographs are of preachers railing, a man and a woman
kissing through surgical masks, medical deformities, magnets picking up
nails. "Pray like us," says the text imposed on the magnets. In smaller
type: "Your tired rituals. Your power trips. Your pompous scoldings. Your
insane strictness." Out of the mouth of the preacher comes the phrase,
"Hate like us," and in a box that's perched on the tip of his nose: "Your
fear and loathing. Your mean spirit. Your constant contempt."
You might object that for an artist opposed to stereotyping she has few
qualms about doing it to people she doesn't like. She would reply that
that's the point. Unlike their stereotyping, hers is a necessary
counterassault against people who reduce other groups of people to
derogatory nouns. It's also commentary--education and critique by way of
appropriation and allusion (to Dada montage and Soviet constructivism,
mainly). In other words, speak unto others as they speak unto you. In an
interview with writer Lynne Tillman (the one good article in the show's
otherwise shockingly sycophantic catalogue), Kruger says: "Direct address
has motored my work from the beginning. I like it because it cuts through
the grease. ... It's everywhere and people are used to it."
You can imagine the appeal of Kruger's bluntness for the New York art world
in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan came to power and seemed to threaten
everything it held dear, and maybe even again in the early 1990s, with the
rise of hate radio. Contemporary art tends to be oblique. Political
messages are delivered in a language that their non-artist recipients can't
begin to decipher. Kruger's unsubtlety, her frank mimicry of mass media,
her unconcern about the distinctions between high and low art, must have
been quite satisfying in their heyday. But they were also self-defeating.
When you shout back at someone who's shouting at you, one shout cancels the
other out. Kruger clearly meant her shouting to deconstruct the very act of
shouting, her message to be an anti-message. But communication doesn't work
that way. 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.
What does it feel like to walk inside a Kruger installation? It feels
awful. There's no other way to put it. It's like being buttonholed by a
snob who has either never met or never made an effort to sympathize with
the Middle Americans she rails against. Wherever she may have actually
traveled, Kruger views the world the way someone would who has never
ventured out of the four-square-miles of Soho and Tribeca and the East
Village. Her slogans are sophomoric. Her sarcasm is cheap. Her politics are
provincial--dismissive and demonizing and suffused with know-it-all-itis.
While you're standing there, you don't care what larger pedagogical purpose
or deeper intellectual meaning her declarations are supposed to have. They
just seem like the windy pronunciamentos of an art-world bully.
It's this air of unearned smugness that makes Kruger's art such a tempting
target for commercial re-appropriation. Her knowing negativity is perfect
for creating the insiderishness, the us vs. them, that lifestyle marketing
thrives on. She asks you to question yourself, true, but before you really
do so she lets you congratulate yourself for being the sort of person who'd
do a thing like that. "Why are you here?" demands the wall copy at one
installation. "What do you want?" But she never follows that up with a
fresh political insight or anything else that would give the typical
art-gallery-goer reason to rethink his or her most cherished prejudices. As
in the most effective commercials, her message is one of comfort and
solidarity. Barbara Kruger fans are good because they see through those
other people who are bad. Maybe if she's lucky, they'll stop and pick up
some Kruger product at the museum store on their way out the door.
Louis Proyect
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