Week 6 last blog for semester 2-Barbara Kruger

Week 6 last blog for semester 2-Barbara Kruger

Kruger’s earliest artworks date to 1969. Large woven wall hangings of yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons, they exemplify the feminist recuperation of craft during this period. Despite her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Fischbach Gallery, both in New York, the following two years, she was dissatisfied with her output and its detachment from her growing social and political concerns.

During the early 1980s Barbara Kruger perfected a signature agitprop style, using cropped, large-scale, black-and-white photographic images juxtaposed with raucous, pithy, and often ironic aphorisms, printed in Futura Bold typeface against black, white, or deep red text bars. The inclusion of personal pronouns in works like Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981) and Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987) implicates viewers by confounding any clear notion of who is speaking.

In these installation works Barbara Kruger transferred words and images directly to the surfaces of the gallery. Each installation featured a text written on the floor in white type on a red ground. With a directness that is characteristic of Kruger's work, the text addresses the viewer's sense of certainty with the world. In Kruger's installations the floor now has a voice, the walls can hear you, and the architecture is manipulating the way you speak.

Kruger uses The colour red to create a strong impact, she also uses word's like 'YOU' and 'US' so that the reader is included in the works and knows who is speaking.

Kruger is a well-known graphic designer from the 1980s whose work primarily focused on social activism. Kruger had a distinct style, juxtaposing found photographs with strong declarative slogans – composing a language of art and protest. Her most well known piece, Your Body is a Battleground, epitomizes her style. The poster consist of a black and white photograph of a woman’s face, split down the middle, with one half of the photograph’s color inverted.

Placed across her face in white Futura bold italic and a red text box reads ‘Your body is a battleground.’ Most of Kruger’s work explored the dynamics of gender and social power in American society. The piece is reminiscent of Peter Gee’s poster Dr. Martin Luther King from 1968. The central axis of the poster uses a positive and negative dichotomy, which was inspiration for Kruger’s poster. Her posters along with Gee’s and other postmodernist designers of the 1980s employed bold statements that attacked the viewer.