ARTIST REVIEW PART 1: BARBARA KRUGER

She writes words on walls. We read them. That's it. This has been Barbara Kruger's iconic way of working for more than 40 years, and it has brought her international fame. Her art is terse, assertive, argumentative, pithy and always directed straight at your face. They have the status of overheard speech, of shouts from the crowd or disembodied rhetoric, of urgings, rebukes, demands and counter-demands, and they work against each other all the time. At best they may inspire thought, analysis, and debate; at their worst they are hectoring banalities on the lowest level of phatic speech.

Kruger keeps her finger tightly pressed to the pulse of popular culture. I look at Barbara Kruger’s art as “extract expressionism.” She takes images from the mass media and pastes words over them, big, bold extracts of text—aphorisms, questions, slogans. Short machine-gun bursts of words that when isolated, and framed by Kruger’s gaze, linger in your mind, forcing you to think twice, thrice about clichés and catchphrases, introducing ironies into cultural idioms and the conventional wisdom they embed in our brains.

Even with all of this, Kruger fails to impress or connect with me. She prints words that are shouted out by the media and protesters all over the world, every single day. Kruger’s only weapon is the fact that she puts it all in a very sarcastic and showy manner that makes people feel not only uncomfortable but also bad about themselves. Her work screams the fact that Kruger is and has always been desperate in a very childlike manner for attention. It makes me feel sad for her in a way because I think that Barbara Kruger cannot see the world as a livelier place where not everyone thinks or conducts themselves like that. To be honest, Kruger’s work depresses me to the core. They make me feel like there isn’t anything to be happy about in the world. They make me constantly scrutinize myself, looking for defects in me that might accuse me, in some way, of being the kind of person that Kruger criticizes or shames in her work.

Speaking as a person who had been depressed for the longest time, it is now that that I truly feel happy in my own skin, in the environment and the world that I live in. I have started seeing the world in a new light, one that makes me happy and content in a lot of ways. On the other hand, seeing Kruger’s work brings back the memories of the rough time of my life and I feel that she doesn’t really see or understand the world that she lives in and the people that she lives with. At the end there is very little to be happy about in Kruger’s work.