Increasingly, Kruger dispenses with images entirely, allowing the context itself to work its magic, as she did with “Untitled (Greedy Schmuck),” a black panel with the titular words printed in large white letters, which confronted visitors to the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in 2012. She’s currently designing face coverings for a number of arts nonprofits, and her journalistic social critique has found its way into newspaper op-ed pages as recently as last April (“ A Corpse Is Not a Customer,” read a recent piece for The New York Times). Resolutely anti-hierarchical, the artist’s provocations have appeared on coffee mugs and city buses they’ve covered the walls of a Lower East Side skate park and the exterior of a department store in Frankfurt, thus ensuring that even people who might never have entered a museum or gallery would have access to them: medium, message, place. You tended to contemplate these things after the fact more than you really beheld them in the moment: Kruger’s work is nearly always direct in address and billboard-speed in receptivity. The text, superimposed across the appropriated black-and-white pictures in her now-iconic white sans serif font (usually Futura Bold Oblique) in a red box, seemed to externalize things we’d long internalized, things like misogyny, consumerism and our relationship with authority and desire: Imagine Don Draper’s grasp of American psychopathology delivered with the pithy asperity of Emily Dickinson.Ī second collage by Roberts, also made for T and titled “A Consequence of History.” In an interview, Roberts described Kruger as “a champion of women’s rights and women’s bodies and taking control of your life,” and she wanted to take that idea and apply it to a Black child “trying to find his own voice and to not see that as a threat.” © Deborah Roberts, courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (There’s a T-shirt for that, too: It reads “Barbara Kruger was right,” and was issued in 2018 in limited edition by the comedian Hasan Minhaj to mock the streetwear company Supreme, which pilfered its branding from Kruger.) In the 1980s, Kruger became famous for juxtaposing aphoristic declarations with found imagery culled from magazines and textbooks: In her 1981 “ Untitled (Your Comfort Is My Silence),” an anonymous man in a fedora raises a finger to his lips in warning her 1986 “ Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero)” features a Norman Rockwell-esque illustration of a young girl cooing over a little boy’s bicep. THE T LIST: A weekly roundup of what the editors of T Magazine are noticing and coveting right now. “ It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it,” it read. Many of us in New York had the MetroCards she designed in 2017, printed with questions that stung a little every time we used it, crossing into Manhattan on the Q train: “Who is healed? Who is housed? Who is silent? Who speaks?” Perhaps you even attended a Rage Against the Machine concert with Kruger’s stage backdrop - it was the 1996 “Evil Empire” tour - or owned one of her T-shirts, like my friend Ben, who, in high school, had the one with a vintage image depicting a housewifely figure holding a magnifying glass, her eye comically enlarged behind the lens. Maybe, decades later, you cut one of her op-ed illustrations from the newspaper - “ You Want It You Buy It You Forget It” - which spoke to your dawning suspicion that you had become just another cog in the capitalist machine. Originally a signifier of cool, its message reverberated for years. “ You are not yourself,” it read, accompanying an image of a woman’s fragmented reflection, the mirror shattered by a bullet or fist. Maybe it was a postcard from a museum gift shop in your dorm room in the late 1980s, pinned to the wall above your stack of cassettes. PERHAPS WE’VE ALL had it, the Barbara Kruger moment. In an interview, Roberts said that in Kruger’s art, “There’s no room to not understand what she’s talking about.” © Deborah Roberts, courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London They also both attended Syracuse University, at different times. Both artists use found imagery in their work - though Roberts generally does not combine her images with text, as she does here in tribute to Kruger’s style. “A Consequence of History,” a 2020 collage-and-text work by Deborah Roberts made exclusively for T and inspired by the art of Barbara Kruger.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |