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 catalog that accompanies Kruger’s retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 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.
Thinking of You” is not an aphorism, but Kruger’s messages often have an aphoristic ring, in the sense that aphorisms should be pointed, like open safety pins, and designed to lodge in the memory, which is the reason for their being pointed. Memory is reinforced by means of associated winces. The earliest and most celebrated compilation of aphorisms is attributed to the father of medicine, Hippocrates, and they were designed to stick in physicians’ minds for bedside use. “Don’t be a jerk” is a very valuable teaching, given our all-too-human propensities, and though no one can spell out all the ways there are of being a jerk, it is not inappropriate to ask, at any given moment, if one is guilty of the offense. Kruger’s barbed messages differ in this respect from the “truisms” of Jenny Holzer, an artist with whom, since she too uses words in her art, it is natural to compare her. Truisms express something we already know. Truisms pass for wisdom. But aphorisms hurt. That is why Nietzsche’s work bristles with aphorisms, each tipped with a tiny touch of acid.
In most cases, the You is female. Kruger’s well-known poster for the 1989 march on Washington in support of abortion rights has “Your body/is a/battleground” pasted over a woman’s face split in two. There is an internal connection between female addressees and the fact that the messages are on things like coffee mugs and shopping bags. With this in mind, let’s look at “I shop therefore I am.” The photograph here is an open hand. The red banner has the shape and proportion of a credit card, slightly enlarged, on which the words are printed in the routine white letters. The “card” is so placed that the person whose hand it is seems to be displaying it. Of course, this is spatially impossible. The red banners and the photographic image always belong to different realms. The banners are on the surface, the object photographed is in pictorial space. The hand cannot, so to speak, be inside and outside the picture at once, as it would have to be to touch its own surface. There are always clever possibilities for artists to set up dissonances between surface and space in order to convey something about pictorial metaphysics, about the relationship between surface, which is real, and pictorial space, which is illusory. But Kruger is not that kind of artist. Whoever the I to whom “I shop therefore I am” refers, she is made to identify herself through proclamation with the activity of shopping. One says “she” because shopping in our society is fairly gender-specific: “Men hate to shop” could be one of Holzer’s truisms.
Everyone recognizes the allusion to Descartes’s celebrated “I think, therefore I am,” and it is worth dwelling on the difference. Descartes offers “I exist” as something that cannot be doubted. Even if I try to doubt it, doubt is a form of thought, and if I think, I exist. More important, since I cannot think of myself as not thinking (try!), thought is inseparable from my nature; it is what I am: sum res cogitans. There is a certain dignity in being an entity whose essence is thought, but something frivolous in being one whose essence is shopping. The latter can be seen as an identity that has been thrust upon women as part of the social construction of gender. Women have internalized a role, essential to the operations of society as a mechanism, of consumption. But if they have had implanted in their mind the somewhat embarrassing “I shop therefore I am,” they will at least be in a position to reflect upon whether this is an identity with which they are happy. They can ask whether in running up and down the aisles at Wal-Mart, flinging shoes, lingerie, parkas, cosmetics, potato chips into their carts, they are not, as it were, being jerks.
I have riffed my way into the discourse of late-capitalist critique, which was Kruger’s intellectual milieu in the eighties, when she saw the world from the perspectives of Theory—that amalgam of Frankfurt School politics, poststructuralist semiotics, and feminist deconstruction that defined the cultural outlook of her generation and that still frames most of the critical literature devoted to Kruger’s achievement. “I shop therefore I am” was meant to bring to consciousness what, when one thought it through, was not simply a fairly innocent distraction but a kind of willing collaboration in a social system. The shopper is an agent of her own oppression. The work is a piece of consciousness-raising. So how appropriate that Kruger’s “I shop therefore I am” should have found its subversive way onto shopping bags, as a constant reminder, the way Hippocrates’ aphorisms were meant to be. The inscription condemns the object it ornaments and, in its sly way, gets under the skin of she who carries it!
From this perspective it is obvious that “I shop therefore I am” is far more effective on a shopping bag than on archival paper, framed on the museum wall. There is, however, a certain paradox inherent to the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin, who originated the idea, drew a sharp distinction between works of art emitting auras of high spirituality and proletarian images doing honest work in the world. I have always thought Benjamin had in mind the great
montageur John Heartfield, whose biting montages waged guerrilla warfare against Nazism as covers on working-class magazines. They certainly would not have had the impact they had were they hung instead in aurified isolation in gallery spaces. Kruger is like a Heartfield who has read the famous essay in which the distinction is made, and a certain number of her images are by way of digs at the museum. She installed banners on the facade of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, for example. One, placed over the door, reads, “You belong here.” As you enter into “Your” space, you pass between two signs that read “Money” and “Taste.”
Now, money and taste are very nice things to possess. But somehow one feels unsettled being characterized this way—as unsettled, say, as one would be if all at once identified as a being that shops. The acquisition of taste takes time; the objects on which taste is honed and exercised cost substantial amounts of money. Is this what you should have been doing with your time and money? In the lower gallery of the Wexner Center on the campus of Ohio State University, there is a large, permanently installed Kruger that shows someone, mouth agape, holding his hands to his face, rather like The Scream of Edvard Munch, with the banner asking “Why are you here?” Situationally the question addresses the hapless individual who has entered the museum without especially thinking a reason was needed for being there. Since most who enter the Wexner Center are students, the work gives a little multiple-choice quiz: “To kill time? To get ‘cultured’? To widen your world? To think good thoughts? To improve your social life?” None of these seem quite proportionate to the exalted role—the “aura”—of the museumed objects. So the question really is, Why is the museum here? What’s it for?
Kruger did one of her meaner pieces in 1985. Superimposed upon an image of a ventriloquist’s dummy—reminiscent of the one in an early Hitchcock film—she has placed, on three banners, “When I hear the word/culture/I reach for my checkbook.” As with “I shop therefore I am,” this alludes to a well-known expression, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver,” often repeated by Goering and Goebbels. Kruger is attacking those whom she mocks with the inscriptions flanking the Parrish Museum portal, who write the checks to buy the works the museum houses. There is a tiny sentence in the lower right-hand corner: “We mouth your words.” The patron is an empty-headed dummy, serving as a medium for the artist as ventriloquist. On behalf of the benefactor we might protest: Where would the museum be without those checks? And the answer will come back: Who needs the museum?
This brings us to the paradox. Kruger’s work needs the museum gift shop in order to circulate through the population, getting under people’s skin. The Whitney gift shop, for example, has a whole display of Kruger tchotchkes. But the objects are there only because the images have been authenticated by having been accepted into the museum as works of art in the classical, aurified way. It is because she is first an artist that she is able to be a provocateuse. In fact, there is also a reverse effect: Because the work has become so familiar, one encounters it in the museum with the sense that one is seeing the original of what is so widely reproduced. With qualifications, it is like encountering the Mona Lisa, having seen it only on postcards. And the question then is, To what degree can one be an artist in the age of mechanical reproduction if one is not an artist in the way that mechanical reproduction was supposed to supersede?
Kruger in
any case became an artist in the former sense in part through having been inspired by Benjamin’s thought. She had initially been an exceedingly successful graphic designer with gifts so transparent that she became chief designer for
Mademoiselle at the age of twenty-two. She did not—she perhaps could not—see a way of translating graphic design into art in the early seventies, when she made the decision to become an artist. To follow the path of art in those years was to encounter a sequence of forks; taking a wrong turn would lead the pilgrim into the brambles of nonart: It was art or decoration, art or literature, art or illustration, art or design, art or craft, art or whatever. These false roads gave critics their vocabulary: Bad art was decorative, literary, designy, illustrational, craft. At the same time, especially for women guided by an evolving feminist consciousness, there was a certain uneasiness in following the rather well-marked path of painting, which was paradigmatically the path of art.
Painting had begun to be regarded with a certain suspiciousness, as somehow too “masculine” and hence too oppressive. The problem was then to find a way to make art that was not painting. Kruger’s first efforts, according to Kate Linker, who wrote a book about her, “reflect insecurity, unease, and (in her words) ‘alienation’ deriving from her background in another discipline.” She began to make what one might characterize as distinctively feminine works—large woven hangings, “whimsical patterns of brightly patterned cloth laced with metallic yarns and rows of sequins, ribbons, and feathers.” These would certainly have been seen as feminine: Men would hardly make use of ribbons! Toward the end of the decade, Kruger got caught up in Theory as a form of social critique, particularly a critique of signs and the ways signs define the forms of our lives and exert power through the way we represent ourselves. At some point in the early eighties, in what must have been a kind of revelation, Kruger saw a way of turning Theory into art, and graphic design into its vehicle. By 1981 she had found the format that has since become so much a part of contemporary culture. “But you know,” Hilton Kramer recently wrote, “designing magazines is not the same thing as creating a work of art, no matter what the message of the moment may be.” It is not the same thing, no. But that does not mean one cannot create works of art the way one designs magazines. That is a possibility that Postmodernism has made available to those able to use it. It is part of what we must now recognize as the Postmodernist revolution in art, that art can be made out of anything. There are no antecedent criteria for what a work of art must look like; artists can invent their own genres, and there are no prior constraints on what works of art are supposed to do. Her graphic skills gave Kruger the means to be an artist and address her sisters on the issues that defined their lives.
So Kruger has worked both sides of the street, sending her barbs out in numbers great enough to affect the common consciousness and at the same time to get these very images accepted, usually in large format, as works of art in the more traditional sense. Lately, it seems to me, she has, somewhat contrary to the course she has followed so effectively, begun to make work that does not so readily lend itself to the means of mechanical reproduction and maximum distribution. She has been making large and ambitious installations, such as we now experience at the Whitney. For my part, I do not find these works compelling, and I should explain why. Much as Descartes’s cogito works only with the first-person singular, the force of Kruger’s accusatory messages depends upon the second-person singular. In “You belong here” on the Parrish Museum facade, the viewer reads this as “I belong here.” In the Wexner Center installation, I am the one addressed with “Why are you here?” Both those works are site-specific: The “here” refers to the place where I find myself when I see them. This intimacy is absent from the installations at the Whitney. We do not feel ourselves addressed. So the work does not engage us. There are too many words, there is too much noise, the atmosphere is something like that of a somewhat static disco, and the messages are somehow too blunt. I prefer the work that insinuates its message as with the point of a pin, like an inoculation against jerkiness. It is an admirable thing to have used art to get us to shape up and do the right thing. I am uncertain the new work will have this salutary effect.
October 2, 2000