Kruger is frank about her refusal to participate in the romance of marginality. To demonstrate and to help impede the mechanism by which the stereotype achieves its result, she has deployed stock images that set in motion the processes of self-identification through which people interpolate themselves as constituents of the social order. Kruger has responded to the rapid success of her style by diversifying the forms of her practice.
This has done little to quiet her critics, yet one could argue—as I intend to in this essay—that her refusal to limit her work to any single venue, and her identity to a single vocation, has acted in concert with her formidable inventiveness and wit to preserve the radical potential of her art. On the occasion of a exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and Schirnkunsthalle, for example, she got permission to hang five huge images on a building facade above the town square, placing the spectator in the untenable position of having to look up to them.
Three of them showed differently cropped versions of a photograph in which a police officer thrusts forward a huge, leather-gloved hand, as if to stop traffic, or in any case to enforce the law. Even such deceptively simple pieces work to diversify the increasingly limited messages that business and government are willing to put out.
Typical of the ads she has designed for museum exhibitions, this one reserved the right to criticize what it promoted. Kruger tries to use humor to get beyond the rhetorical flatness of so much agitprop. Appropriation here has nothing to do with the reuse of photographs; it encompasses an entire advertising genre. Kruger has set up and photographed men of different ages, races, and classes in stereotypical situations. To those images she adds a text that imagines a world in which men as well as women can conceive and bear children.
What should I do? In works like these, Kruger has tried to foster a resistant public at the level of its receivership. There are risks, however, in attempting to intervene in urban space.
For such space is not merely physical: it is invested—in every sense of that term—with social relations. Kruger proposed a red-white-and-blue sign in which the words of the Pledge of Allegiance would be laid out like the stripes of the American flag, in white letters against a red field.
However, Kruger had neglected to consider the position of the wall, on Central at First Street. Forty years later, the thought of having to confront it daily in letters five feet tall revived painful associations. Kruger promptly withdrew the proposal. Her second version of the plan retained the earlier design but put the questions where the pledge had been and consigned the pledge to the margins.
Though impressed by her flexibility, the community rejected this proposal too. Accompanied by a perky score, a woman in Reeboks and a suit is walking to work. Abruptly, Rosie stops in her tracks. The TV camera cuts to something that has clearly caught her eye—the side of a building, 29 by feet, painted like an immense American flag. The camera slowly pans the wall from left to right, over the cars in the lot on First Street and Central.
A car drives up. But after four meetings during which Kruger described her proposal and listened to residents of Little Tokyo explaining the impact of her project on their lives, everyone had agreed that the questions alone would make a fine addition to the south wall of the Temporary Contemporary.
While the production of public works has helped Kruger to maintain the critical edge of her practice, it is important not to separate what she has created for outdoor sites or museums from what she does in the more manifestly private circumstances of the commercial art gallery. Until recently, Kruger used her commercial gallery shows for straightforward installations of discrete works of art that tried to consolidate a sense of feminist community.
But in and she created installations in Santa Monica and Chicago that used the architecture of the gallery to generate the same results. As she handled them, the spaces were transformed into theaters of condescension. All that seemed deaf hears you. All that seemed blind is following in your footsteps.
Of course, looking down on it was precisely the point—looking down and having it talk back to you at the same time. In Chicago, to heighten the restive effect, Kruger added a single large photowork on the wall opposite the entrance. To see it properly you had to move well into the room—otherwise two thin columns that stand in the gallery would obscure your view.
These framing columns accentuated the height of the image, which extended from floor to ceiling: the over-ten-foot-tall head of a young woman who peered at the spectator, holding a magnifying glass to her even more greatly enlarged right eye. The installation, which also marks the emergence of a powerful nation—the newly unified Germany—is among her most disturbing and challenging works to date. Posters will still be available at our physical locations and can be sent out by mail upon request.
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Kruger hit the ground running in the new millennium with a mid-career retrospective that ran from to and traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to the Whitney Museum in New York. You buy it. You forget it. The artist takes her monumental messages to multiple museum and gallery interiors in the s. She debuted the four-channel, minute video installation The Globe Shrinks at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in ; the immersive work ponders, in part, what kinds of meaning can be gleaned from everyday occurrences.
She continued making works in that vein throughout the course of the decade. A sprawling installation by Kruger went on view at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow in that included black-and-white and vibrant green components. A collaboration with Volcom for a New York biennial becomes one of her most well-known works. In , the artist collaborated with Volcom, a clothing brand that centers skate culture, for her contribution to the Perfoma 17 biennial in New York.
I make my work about this kind of sadly foolish farce.
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