Barbara Kruger Museum of Modern
Art, Heide,
|
Barbara Kruger, detail, 1996 |
Barbara Kruger Museum of Modern
Art, Heide,
|
Barbara Kruger, detail, 1996 |
| Barbara Kruger's exhibition tempts the visitor with sounds that spread beyond the gallery walls, creating an anticipation of the visual drama inside the gallery. This is an unusual prequel for an exhibition of Kruger's work. The powerful visual presence of her silent billboards and posters in public spaces is usually her mode of dissolutely pervading our conscious and subconscious fears. | |
Barbara Kruger, |
Expectation often outweighs experience but in the turmoil created by Kruger's exhibition, the experience is everything. Within the three rooms that make up the exhibition the viewer is exposed to the force, aggression, and spectacle of the mass media that permeates contemporary culture. Complimenting the noise of the crowd, Kruger has displayed a black and white panorama in the first room. Suspending the euphoria of the masses are large, square 'billboards' presenting photographs 'cut out' from mainstream media and tattooed with her usual slogans. |
| The power of the mass media strives to strengthen images that will obsess and stimulate their target audience. The epitome of this power is encapsulated in a photograph of the authoritarian saviour with his questioning, concerned look designed to appeal to the crowd. Kruger's interpretation: "Hate like us". | |
Barbara Kruger |
Over the photograph of a woman in a surgical mask is a slogan indicative of Kruger’s concern with male power and the gaze : "Your craving for yourself in others". "Your campaign for a world without women - Fear like us". There’s a woman in one of the photographs who hangs her head in shame at the sight of her appearance - so disparate with a world which desires beauty and confidence. Through these images, Kruger “attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome the female spectator into the audience of men” and her work is still concerned with subverting representation and difference although that difference is not restricted to gender. |
| Kruger incorporates references to religion: "My God is better than your God"; class: "Look at me. Look at me and know you'll never be me"; and phobias: "Don't look at me. Don’t laugh at me"; into fuller transcripts projected onto the four walls and floor of the second room of the exhibition. This continues in the third room where young men and women mouth aggressive statements like television soap opera characters. "I have to tell you why I'm upset?" shouts one man while another, attempting to control himself, says through gritted teeth: "Don’t make me angry!". | |
Barbara Kruger, |
Since the early seventies
Kruger has been using her slogans to question the social
and political forces within society. Slogans of a similar
style were placed around Melbourne by an art student
prior to the Kruger exhibition. Subversive and
questioning, the slogans were quickly removed by the
Victorian Government with the excuse that they were not
‘art’. In this context, Kruger might agree that
it is unfortunate for her work to resonate as strongly
today as it did two decades ago. Julie Cotter |
