Her pen was poised when her eye spied the April issue of Artforum. There, in the review section (page 69, to be exact), critic Donald Kuspit denounces Barbara Kruger’s “manipulations of the self-evident” which (sadly) fail to “provide information . . . not available elsewhere.” A comment that is, itself, “entertaining” in that it seems to confirm the artist’s work on what Roland Barthes called the “implicit proverbs” stating “the law of society,” which are less reflections of universal opinion than of a particular vision of the world. That the vision is male, exacting powerful repressions through its representations, resounds in the critic response. Caveat Kuspit . . .
Kruger’s recent exhibition extends and amplifies her use of the techniques of graphic tradition to articulate a specific feminist stance. All elements within these large black-and-white works are strategically conceived. This includes the planar, posterlike look, with its careful cropping and manipulation of scale; the images chosen from fashion and other media sources; the weighting of image to superposed texts; and the red frames, designed as ingratiating devices or lures. Nothing in these works, then, is “ornamental,” though they do end up, in many cases, looking pretty nice (something that supports Kruger’s comment on the slick naturalizing of ideology that underlies the dissemination of representations). Rather, Kruger pursues an unsettling strategy of disjunction. For if word and image are deployed in cinema, advertising, and the different languages of dominant discourse according to a relation of reciprocal redundancy—repeating and reinforcing meanings—Kruger aims to separate them, alienating image from text, so as to erode their ideological force. Interruptive ends thus inform this artist’s use of language: her strategies are directed at those precise points within dominant culture at which sexual positions become so solidified through repetition as to acquire the illusion of the evident.
Kruger’s subject, in these and other works, is the production of sexuality under patriarchy—the projection of norms of femininity that objectify woman, assigning her a “proper place” within the cycle of consumption. Instead of conflating imagery into the range of multiplicity, Kruger collapses it into one stereotypical vision: that of woman as object of looking, as pose, as submissive victim, reduced to silence rather than the “activity” of speech (the order is both logocentric and phallic). It is women who “construct the chorus of missing persons,” denied access to language and subjectivity, just as it is woman who is the “pose” categorically shaped for the male gaze (I quote from the overlying texts). And it is man who is always figured in action (“You make history when you do business”); it is he who stands while she sits, resting, or lies supine. And this supine position is the one that is ideologized as “natural” for woman, as her biological destiny rather than as a cultural formation (the subject, on another level, of “We won’t play nature to your culture,” in which an erotic image of idealized femininity reclines on the ground, two leaves substituting for eyes). The effect of these works is both to highlight these naturalized, inherently oppressive representations and to interrupt them, breaking the sway of the image, and pointing toward alternative subject positions for the female gender.
One of Kruger’s central accomplishments, indeed, lies in her address to this question of subject positions, an activity indicating her debt to psychoanalysis and to theory basing the construction of ideology in language. This is manifest in her pronominal manipulations, which place the viewer according to sexual perspectives, and in her focus on specularity, or those regimes of looking that, inscribed during infancy, repeat themselves throughout culture. This is an art, in other words, that argues for recognition of the role played in signification by sexual difference—and by those relations of power that, in their construction of identity, negate representation’s neutrality.
I admit to being a fan, just as I acknowledge specific reservations. Big, for example, is not always better in Kruger’s work, which is often more cogent in a small or book-sized format. Several of these massive images strain the boundaries of effect, while others approach the formulaic. However, the work places itself among today’s most important political art by attempting to seize the issue of oppression at its roots, at the level of the construction of subjectivity. It directs daggers against those attitudes that can appear as “truths” only if you believe in the propriety of the position.
—Kate Linker
