Born an only child into the familiar traditional lower-middle class nuclear family, Barbara Kruger began life as a typical American citizen, daughter to her parents, an oil technician for Shell Oil and a legal secretary. An insider on the advertising scene, she worked in a variety of industry roles including graphic design, picture editing, and as a columnist; however it was when she left her job as head designer at Madamoiselle, woman's magazine, and turned her hand to subversive and witty collage that she shot to fame.Pairing found photographs with recognisable slogans declared in white Futura or Helvetica font against red block backgrounds, Kruger has built up a style which not only appears incredibly brandable, but is also synonymous with her practice. So much so that it has even been parodied and appropriated by the industry it mocks. Typically using screen print and halftone, this continues Kruger's narrative of advertisement based art, however instead of attempting to push or sell a product, Barbara tries to promote ideas and mindfulness. It is her attitudes sympathetic to the lives of working class people and struggles that make her work so relateable. One particular quote which stuck out to me was how she attributed her fascination with architecture back to the days when her parents would look at countless photos of "family homes [they] could never afford." Regularly using a combination of personal and outsider pronouns (i, we, us, you - they, them) she produces a narrative of opposing consumer vs. capital, this directly contrasting with the aims of advertisers.
The frank, literal language she uses to deliver her conceptual messages is another reason people are so drawn to her works, in a contemporary art world where much of the appreciation comes through lengthy deciphering, an artwork which literally spells out the nature of it's argument is refreshing to many.
The themes raised in her work critique ideas I have been now reading about in preparation for my essay, such as "When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook" (left) which draws parallels with a quote from Mark Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism';
"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts."
Although I liked her work, in terms of public response I couldn't help but think back to quotes I had read on 'interpassivity' in 'Capitalist Realism', particularly in today's world where so much of her iconography and style has been adopted by the very culture it attempts to critique, and when her works now sell in upwards of $10million a piece.
"A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief."
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