Art As Brand. - Review - book review

Afterimage, Sept, 2000 by Weena Perry

Barbara Kruger

Whitney Museum of American Art

New York, New York

Organized by The Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

July 13-October 22, 2000

Barbara Kruger

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999

268 pp./$40.00 (hb)

During the 1980s, the postmodern penchant for recycling the imagery and objects of mass media and popular culture reached epic proportions and unleashed 'a juggernaut of debate among critically inclined members of the art world and academia. Were appropriation, quotation and pastiche simply the latest in stylistic gimmicks or were they viable tools for cultural criticism? Did this new work disturb or merely reinforce the complacency endemic in late-capitalist culture? While visual art lumped under the rubric of "postmodernism" typically accessed a shared matrix of cultural tropes and formal devices, it often differed radically in intent from work to work. Detractors and supporters alike recognized the ambiguous nature of much postmodern art and attempted to define the various kinds of postmodernism in circulation, whether critical, reactionary or stylistic.

At the time, Barbara Kruger seemed to unambiguously epitomize an oppositional or politicized postmodernism. By appropriating advertising's overlay of text on image, Kruger disrupted the "rhetoric of the image" (to use Roland Barthes's phrase) of the photographs she lifted from preexisting sources such as fashion magazines and medical manuals. Consistently using Futura Bold Italic font with a red, black and white color scheme, Kruger produced works with strong graphic appeal whose aphoristic phrasing guaranteed their accessibility to a diverse audience.

Unlike many artists and cultural theorists who paid lip service to confusing "fine" and "applied" categories of art, Kruger not only embraced the look of commercial graphic design, but also aggressively pursued venues for her work outside of the traditional gallery-museum system. Beginning in the early 1980s, a torrent of billboards, public announcements, posters, magazine layouts and op-ed pieces deluged passersby, riders of public transportation, and magazine readers across the United States and Europe. In startling contrast to the commercial advertising to which they bore resemblance, Kruger's captioned images demanded that we rethink our xenophobic, sexist and racist proclivities. Rather than sell products, Kruger's designs sold ideological critique. On occasion, the artist's insistent but generalized cultural commentary gave way to more substantial political action. The billboards and posters for the March on Washington in support of legal abortion in 1989 and the Women's Work Project on Domestic Violen ce in 1992 remain two of Kruger's most compelling projects, having collapsed the distinction between public service and public art. Kruger's ubiquitous "Your body is a battleground" design acquired a heightened urgency when considered in light of the backlash against women's reproductive freedom then sweeping the nation. The primary slogan used for the Boston and Miami domestic violence project, "Don't die for love," concisely summarized the possible fatal consequences of remaining in an abusive relationship.

In her attempts to reach as many people as possible, Kruger eventually followed this strategy through to its logical conclusion--logical, that is, for someone who had worked in commercial graphic design, as Kruger did from 1967 through 1976. T-shirts, shopping bags, matchbooks, baseball caps, magnets and coffee mugs soon joined her repertoire of photographic-based imagery. Soho galleries, public transit, magazine covers and people's bodies provided a formidable array of locales for her work. In short, Kruger not only succeeded in blurring the boundaries between high art and mass media: she also went further than any previous artist, including Andy Warhol, in the merchandising and "branding" of her art production. As with the Doritos or Tide logos whose familiarity signal to shoppers from shelves bursting with similar products, Kruger's signature font likewise achieved product recognition and brand ubiquity.

This "brand" quality of Kruger's collected works proves to be its primary weakness in the context of a museum retrospective. Occupying eight galleries at the Whitney, the first three devoted to installations, "Barbara Kruger," organized by Museum of Contemporary Art curator Ann Goldstein, presents two decades of Kruger's photographs, photographic silkscreens on vinyl, video, audio, posters, engraved metal plates and merchandise. Only a fraction of the 60 works on display represent pre-trade-mark Kruger: otherwise, room after room assails museum-goers with a cacophony of red, black and white images and text that--despite their much-touted graphic punch--dissolve into a mind-numbing homogeneity. Given the artist's decades-long concern with probing the vicissitudes of violence, one could argue that the differentness-yet-sameness of Kruger's medium and message is precisely the point. Unfortunately, any critical acumen that individual works may offer is severely compromised by both their juxtaposition with one an other and their occupation of institutional rather than public space. The slogans staring down at viewers from the walls and up from the floors have more in common with bumper-sticker politics than cogent cultural critique. The simplicity and brutal directness of the Kruger statement--designed to be processed without a lot of cogitation--works best when encountered in the frenetic environment of the city street or while flipping through the pages of a magazine rather than in the contemplative atmosphere of the museum. Laudable as it is to question hierarchies between high art and mass production and the separation between art and daily life, all contexts and venues are not equal--something any corporate marketing director could tell you.