A Woman of Arts & Letters

Barbara Kruger is the absolute artist of the age of mechanical reproduction in its late-capitalist phase: Her product is the barbed image, designed to exist in unlimited numbers on the vernacular surfaces of inexpensive everyday objects, like mouse pads and T-shirts, tote bags and coffee mugs, wristwatches and umbrellas, as well as posters, postcards, book jackets, magazine covers and matchbooks. They are as much or even more at home in the museum gift shop as in the galleries upstairs, and since the objects there are purchased and carted away, they enter the stream of life and carry her messages into precincts far from the centers of high culture. Beyond that, she has evolved a format as instantaneously recognized as the great logos of commercial art, so that Andy Warhol, were he still around, could add Krugers to his repertoire of images everyone in the culture immediately identifies. Asked to complete "I shop, therefore..." for thousands of dollars on the way to becoming a game-show millionaire, it would be the rare contestant who would not sing out "...I am," based on one of Kruger's more familiar epigrams. I can think of no other artist, not even Warhol, who has had a comparable reception.

I need hardly tell my readers that the archetypal Kruger is a variation of the same formal means--usually a photograph in black and white, banal and anonymous, overlaid by a small number of red banners bearing white lettering, always in the same type font (Futura Bold Italic). The blazoned message carries the piece's barb, and it evokes an unmistakable voice. The voice is that of a moral critic, icy, smart, sarcastic, somewhat contemptuous, telling us in effect not to be jerks. "Don't be a jerk" is, in fact, one of her best-known messages, but it in some way accompanies all her messages, in the way "I think," according to Kant, accompanies all our thoughts. There are works by famous artists that belong to common consciousness in this way--the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper, for example, or perhaps Gold Marilyn Monroe. But every Kruger is familiar through the way Krugers are put together, even if one has never seen that particular Kruger before. She found the format early, and has never seen reason to modify it. It is clear that whatever her larger purpose, the Kruger format serves it perfectly.

Consider the cover image on the catalogue that accompanies Kruger's retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (until October 22). The message, distributed across three red banners printed one above the other, is: Thinking/of/You. The black-and-white image on which the message is superposed is of two hands. An open safety pin is held between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, its point pressed into the tip of the other hand's middle finger. It has not penetrated the skin but is about to. What exactly is the relationship between the picture and the image? That I--who am thinking of You--am a thorn in the flesh, so to speak. "Thinking of you" is what we might write on a postcard, or perhaps on a florist's card, attached to a gift of roses. It implies an intimacy, even an I/You relationship. You are on my mind, somehow, and I want you to know that you are. But ask how you would interpret a card with just this image of pin and fingers, with "Thinking of You" inscribed underneath or on the other side. You would not say "How nice!" It may not be threatening in the way a dagger would be, but neither is it a caress. The effect is to put the recipient on edge. Text and image together give a pretty fair picture of the relationship between "I" and "You" if I am Barbara Kruger and You are anyone within range of her voice. It is the relationship of I getting under Your skin.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.