Social Practice and the Creative Enviroment: Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger

'' Art as Social Practice " advocates a practice that is "invested in questions challenging the surety of knowledge, to displace the flow a bit or redirect it".

(Barbara Kruger)

Barbara Kruger- Eye

Much of 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", "your", "I", "we", and "they". The juxtaposition of imagery and text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in Kruger's work. The text in her works 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." Much of her work questions feminism, classicism, consumerism and individual desire. the black and white images she creates are in fact culled from the mainstream media magazines from which these ideologies derieve from.

Barbara Kruger- Untitled( your body is a battle ground) 1989

Barbara Kruger- Untitled Questions 1991

I became interested in this artist when some friends decided to respond to her work, they were interested in her use of text and public responses. They looked in different texts and they felt that they most revelant text would be WHY ARE YOU ANGRY? As they felt that this word summed up peoples emotions of that time. (They did not conduct a survey!) They constructed the piece and installed it in various locations around Limerick City. People responded to the piece in a positive manner or depend on how you take it. I think it is interesting how the work changes context depending on site and situation.