Issue Icons
Barbara Kruger
By Anne KeehnPhoto By Barbara Kruger
Language has long been the weapon of choice for feminists. Elizabeth Cady Stanton kicked off the first feminist revolution in 1848 with her “Declaration of Sentiments” at Seneca Falls. The women’s liberation movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s was sparked by Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Discrediting gender-biased words like “starlet,” “usherette,” and “Miss” were social advances on par with equal wages and daycare. In the ‘90s, there was a small movement among neo-feminists to reclaim the word “bitch.”
Barbara Kruger is an artist. She is not a writer, theorist, or academic. She attended Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design, but graduated from neither. In Kruger’s case, this may be a sign of a restless and impatient intellect rather than a lack of commitment. But, with a background in magazine design and poetry, she has a smart, bullshit-free way with words.
Diane Arbus, famed photographer of the suburban grotesque, was Kruger’s teacher at Parsons in the 1960s. In a 1997 interview in Art in America, Kruger recounted how Arbus once told her, “You know, you should write, because you talk like Dorothy Parker.” As if to prove Arbus’s point, Kruger added a Parkeresque quip: “I developed language skills to deal with threat. It’s the girl thing to do – you know, instead of pulling a gun.”
The deceptively simple format of Kruger’s signature work—blackand- white photographic images slashed with Futura Bold phrases on rectangles of red—belies her nuanced message of social power struggles, feminism, and consumerism.
In 1966, when she was about 21, Kruger got a job at Condé Nast, where she was employed for the next 12 years. She worked in the art department at Mademoiselle, and became head designer at Home and Garden. In this commercial capacity, Kruger honed the art of creating bold, attention-grabbing imagery.
In the early ‘70s, Kruger attended a Patti Smith poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church in New York and became fascinated by the power of words. Over the next few years, she dedicated much of her free time to writing and reciting her own poetry.
Poetry can be the literary version of a magazine ad: maximum subtext and meaning condensed into the shortest amount of prose, a skill that Kruger has perfected in her art. She claims to have a short attention span – not necessarily a bad thing. To distill a complex message in sparse, simple terms is no easy task. Kruger speaks in an incidentally intelligent drawl, at once inviting and challenging. A conversation with her will keep you on your toes. When SWINDLE approached her to be included in the Icons Issue, she was blunt. In the first ten seconds of the interview, she rattled off the following:
“When you call your magazine SWINDLE, it makes it sound so subversive. But from what I can see, Shep [Fairey] is all about playing by the rules and obeying all the copyright laws.”
Followed by: “I’m not an icon. What is an icon? I’m just a regular person. People don’t really care about artists anyway. You walk up to anybody on the street and ask them to name an artist, and they probably won’t even know what to say. Maybe they’ll say ‘Andy Warhol,’ because they think he was kind of perverse and queer.”
Kruger is brutally astute and realistic. But she speaks with humor, and this is what makes her words palatable, even inviting.
When used cleverly, comedy can be that spoonful of sugar—or dash of salt—that makes the medicine go down. When Kruger constructs one of her signature collages that reads “Your gaze hits the side of my face” over a printout of a porcelain statue’s profiled face, it is disarmingly incongruous enough to spark a gut reaction. A more didactic image would be off-putting. But her images meet us only halfway: the conclusions we draw from them are ours alone. “I’m interested in doubt,” she says. “Something that is feared in American society today.”
Kruger is a pioneer of guerilla art. In a precursor to subversive advertisements, her iconic images were put on shopping bags and t-shirts, and she plastered her work on billboards and bus shelters. “Pictures and words have the power to tell us who we are and aren’t, and I try to engage that power,” she says. “I try to make work about how we are to one another.”
Like the satire of Matt Groening’s The Simpsons or Mike Judge’s King of the Hill (two cartoons that she is a fan of), Kruger’s art doesn’t preach to the high-falutin’ choir. It speaks to popular culture in its own language, subverting the mass media by fighting back with the same weapons.