Kruger, Barbara

Barbara Kruger (1945–) is an American conceptual artist, a curator, a writer, a film critic, an editor, and a political agitator. She is also a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The startling nature of Kruger's signature work is its simplicity: Her large-scale back-and-white photographs are overlaid with red rectangular slashes embedded with short, aggressive phrases in a futura bold font. Kruger's art can be found in museums and on the sides of buses, billboards, T-shirts, book covers, shopping bags, and political posters. Her highly recognizable work addresses social power struggles, feminism, gender-based consumption, individual autonomy, and desire within a consumer culture and a system dependent on stereotypes.

Born in 1945, in Newark, New Jersey, to a lower-middle-class family, Kruger attended Syracuse University until her father died, when she dropped out of college to return home. Kruger then went to Parsons School for Design, where she worked with and was inspired by Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel. Arbus's work, which explored the grotesque underbelly of suburban life, was an early influence on Kruger, as was Arbus's position as a female role model to Kruger. Israel encouraged Kruger to create a portfolio before she left Parsons, and it was he who helped her get a position with magazine publisher Condé Nast. Whether her inability to finish either degree was a sign of restless and impatient intellect or a lack of commitment, her achievements in the magazine world are undeniable. By the age of 22, Kruger was Mademoiselle magazine's chief designer. Working in the magazine industry taught Kruger to have a sharp eye for images; she was trained to scan and select pictures, gauge their rhetorical potential, and then crop and edit them to focus their impact. Kruger learned about the manipulative and seductive possibilities images had on viewers and applied these lessons to her own work. In 1976, after designing a few book covers and becoming involved with New York City's performance art and narrative scene, Kruger left the east coast for California and began to teach at the University of California, Berkeley.

An installation by Barbara Kruger displayed at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Australia. Kruger's work has appeared in films, videos, on outdoor media like billboards and posters, and on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France.

(Wikimedia)

While in California, Kruger was drawn to semiotics, the “science of signs,” and European cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes. In 1978, she published a book called Picture/Readings. The book placed images alongside texts to play contrapuntally with the meanings of each. Text, she believed, could make audible the elements of the images that remained unseen and unheard in the photograph. Kruger was fascinated by the ways in which social relations are experienced in the everyday world and began to explore the global etiquette of power—a concept she derived from French philosopher Michel Foucault. The source of social and cultural power, she understood, is anonymous and cannot be centralized. Power exists less as a singular body than as a network of relations working to unify social apparatuses and institutions; for Kruger, power is inscribed through the stereotype, the pose.

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