Known for iconic text works proclaiming “I shop therefore I am” and “Your body is a battlefield” – the latter given new life last spring as an incendiary cover for New York Magazine – the artist always remains humble. “I believe that no work of art is as brilliant, amazing, awesome and important, or as failed, ridiculous, horrible and small as it is written,” he tells the Guardian. “All exaggerated claims, judgments, anointings, and condemnations are as incidental as the works to which they refer.” Kruger, who first gained widespread recognition for her 1989 Women’s March on Washington banners for legal abortion, has been a tireless advocate for reproductive freedoms for more than four decades. Her work is known for challenging society’s views on beauty, identity, social constructs, and how we perceive our power (or lack thereof) within social structures. With the Supreme Court’s recent move to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade decision, which disabled the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, Kruger’s art has never been more relevant. Even if that recognition can be bittersweet. The first thing heard upon entering the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, New York is the metallic click of a typewriter. The sound, part of an immersive installation and larger self-titled performance by Kruger, is eerie and pierces the stillness that usually envelops the austere white space. Yet the art on display is as urgent as the cacophony erupting within its massive walls. On view through August 12, the exhibition is a homecoming for the East Coast-born, Los Angeles-based trailblazer, whose bright, anti-capitalist text-based collages and multimedia works have helped define activist aesthetics in America for nearly half a century. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Cast of characters), 2016/2020. Photo: Courtesy of the artist The most extensive presentation of an individual in Zwirner’s history, the exhibition boasts regular and new works and coincides with Kruger’s large-scale site-specific installation – Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I mean me. I Mean You – showing at the Marron Family Atrium of Moma in New York, from July 16. This month also concludes Lacma’s tribute to Kruger and a genesis showing at Sprüth Magers of her early “paste-up” rebel collages. “My work is rarely about incidents or events, but tries to create a commentary on the ways in which our cultures construct and contain us,” she says, responding to the topicality of the screenings. “I’ve always said I try to do work on how we are to each other. I see this as a work in progress.” Kruger, who began her career in the 1960s Condé Nast design department, learned early on the power of words and images and the immediacy of a visual elevator pitch as an image-based call to action. In the decades since, her pieces have taken on a life of their own, making cameos in movies and “inspiring” the sleek boxy, black, white and red Supreme logo, sparking a legendary Hypebeast trademark war, with Kruger famously denouncing copycats of her as “a ridiculous group of completely flawless jokers”. For her exhibition at Zwirner, the classics have been reimagined with a digital facelift using video and audio, LED display care and smart edits. For example, in Pledge, Will, Vow (1988/2020) – also included in the 59th Venice Biennale – passages of the Pledge of Allegiance are typed to powerful effect and reshaped on screen, evoking the sense that our current history is edited, rewritten and sometimes even completely discarded by an unknown hand. “The works at Zwirner are mainly moving image installations that have been created and recreated over the last three years,” explains Kruger. “All these responded to the particular architecture and the built environment that contained them,” she continues, noting her engagement with the challenges of her spatial planning work. Despite the difficulty of creating these facilities, which Kruger still curates by hand, she feels a tremendous privilege. “I feel lucky to have these amazing opportunities to create projects in these spaces. I never take it for granted, as what is seen and what becomes salient is often so cruelly arbitrary,” he says, noting the strengthening of some artists over others, the result of “historical conditions, the brutality of social relations, the limitations of categories” as and the fickle vagaries of the often hydraulic art market. “I am so grateful for the current visibility of my work and welcome it as I approach my centenary.” Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner. Photo: Kerry McFate/David Zwirner For her latest work, Kruger, who once wrapped Kim Kardashian’s naked body in her trademark Futura typeface on the cover of W magazine, talks about how celebrity, technology and social media shape attention and consumerism. our standards. “My image/text works try to show and tell stories of bodies and minds. How they might portray themselves and how they imagine themselves,” he says. “In this age of massive voyeuristic and narcissistic conflicts and heightened attention, I feel very bound by the self-presentation and directness that social media offers. How delighted, desired, adored and shamed by these images are millions of us.’ At the same time, on the streets, her works gave her a new dramatic presence, with replica Krugers appearing on signs and billboards at abortion rights protests across the country. It would be easy for a less modest artist to feel the need to claim ownership. “As someone who never thought anyone would know my name or my work, it’s amazing and satisfying and haunting, and it could only happen at a time when the virality of images is so accelerated,” she says of her proliferation. her job. “And, fearfully, when the viral form of pestilence, war, and grievance is so punishingly prevalent.” Ultimately, Krueger’s art excels when it allows the viewer to change their perspective, often on what is overlooked or misrepresented. “My work has consistently focused on the vulnerability of bodies. About how power flows through cultures. About how the choreographies of hierarchies and capital determine who lives and who dies, who is kissed and who is slapped, who is praised and who is punished,” he explains. Installation view, Barbara Kruger, David Zwirner. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/David Zwirner As for how the artist feels about Roe’s recent decision, she has some choice words for those just tuning in. “The repeal of Roe should not come as a surprise,” he warned. “Anyone who’s shocked by what’s happening hasn’t been paying attention,” he says, pointing to the U.S.’s checkered history of suppressing minority rights while promoting white supremacy. “Any surprise at the current state of affairs is the result of a failure of imagination. Not understanding the power and punishment of what has happened and worse, what is to come.” She believes this failure of imagination has contributed to what has become, in her words, an “increasingly volatile period of reckoning and revenge”. Instead of shame, he hopes to build community. “More than ever, it’s vital that we simultaneously engage the controversies around race, gender, and class,” she says. “To not compartmentalize, silo, and prioritize these issues, but to see the interconnectedness of the forces that determine what it’s like to live another day. To hurt or to heal, to nourish or to destroy.”
