Before Photoshop - Barbara Kruger

In the old days before digital photography and Photoshop were able to transform everybody and anything in something else (i.e. -Shepard Fairey's "Obey" or "Hope" posters,") art directors would have legions of staffers doing nothing but things called paste-ups: actual physically manipulated cut and pasted images they would then photograph until they got it right.

Barbara Kruger has been in our faces for years, and her graphic imagery has become a default for the commercial advertising industry (she was once a Mademoiselle magazine art director). Her exhibition of "smalls" done the old-fashioned way: forty four images, all but two black and white, none larger than 11 X 14, framed simply in black at the Skarstedt Gallery has been called Pre-digital only because they feared nobody would know what a paste up even was anymore.

Much of Barbara Kruger's graphic work consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases included in her work are usually declarative, and make common use of such pronouns as "you", "I", "we", and "they". The juxtaposition of Kruger's imagery with text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in the work. The text in her work of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "you invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t." Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, her work is consistently about the kindnesses and brutalities of social life: about how we are to one another.

She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.


-S