Barbara Kruger: Annotating the Annotator
During the fall break, I took a short trip to Chicago with my friends. Immediately following my arrival (after trying my first bite of the city’s famed deep-dish pizza), we made our way from River North towards the Art Institute of Chicago. Before we even arrived at Grant Park, we saw streetlight banners and billboards promoting Barbara Kruger’s anti-retrospective retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago on every major road.
Kruger’s declarative and poignant statements were pasted on buildings all over downtown Chicago, including the facades of old industrial warehouses in the West Loop areas like pictured below. Again, the irony of their overtly promotional functions were not lost upon me. Her urgent words became forms of subliminal messaging framing the architecture of Chicago.
Admittedly, I was not familiar with Kruger’s work before this visit. Upon entering the Art Institute, her bold statements written in sans serif fonts and bright color blocks (mostly red and white) conjured up the fonts of streetwear brand Supreme as my most immediate aesthetic association. I soon realized the irony of the situation. Supreme appropriated Kruger’s signature Futura Bold Oblique font in italics and has since sued other clothing brands for “copying” its brand aesthetics. In turn, Kruger has parodied her appropriator in ambitious live performance exhibitions which comment on contemporary consumer behaviors. This example is only one of many multi-layered works in Kruger’s career. Kruger critiques culture and the self while self-consciously modeling all the complicated ways in which we construct our identities through images, materials, and their spectatorship.
Below are two annotations I made of pieces which attracted me in Kruger’s “anti-retrospective” retrospective. The curators insist upon this description as one does not and should not cement Kruger’s works to historical stasis by way of traditional exhibitionism. Many publications have commented on Kruger’s self-reflexive artworks. The lines of spectatorship and associations seem to infinitely rebound within a single frame and across gallery halls. As I pondered more deeply about the relation inter- and intratextual relationships among her works, I discovered a dually playful and solemn approach with which Kruger treats her ideas. Her large words and images overwhelmed the columns and walls of the Art Institute. At times, I felt like I was flooding in her barrage of imperative statements. Visceral and confrontational.
Art Forum, Summer 2016, Vol. 54, №10
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face), 1981
Annotating this piece was a generative experience similar to but slightly different from the formal analyses I’ve conducted for art history courses. I was able to draw upon the multi-disciplinary knowledge I gained from my academic coursework along with my own practices of media consumption.
