90
TAKING' PICTURES
PHOTO-TEXTS BY BARBARA KRUGER
Barbara Kruger is an American artist working in
New York. Her work, reproduced for the first
time in this country, operates in a manner
reminiscent of billboards and advertisements.
Text is combined with image to produce a
declarative 'message'. The montage of cropped
quotations from (usually) examples of now
outmoded styles of art photography with short
assaultive phrases constructs parodic advertise-
ments exposing aspects of ideology. Though
instantaneous in their impact, these messages are
problematized through the indeterminacy of the
personal pronouns and the ambiguity of the
address. Below, a statement from Barbara
Kruger about this work:
There can be said to exist today a kind of
oppositional situation in the arts (principally on a •
theoretical level only, as the marketplace tends to
customize all breeds of activity); the laboratorial or,
studio versus certain productive or more clearly,
reproductive procedures. As parody frees ceremony
from ritual, so its 'making alike' allows for a
disengaged (or supposedly) distanced reading.
This strategy is employed by a number of artists
working today. Their production, contextualized
within the art subculture, frequently consists of an
appropriation or 'taking' of a picture, the value of
which might already be safely esconced within the
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proven marketability of media imagery. Using, and
or informed by fashion and journalistic
photography, advertising, film, television, and even
other artworks (photos, painting and scupture),
their quotations suggest a consideration of a work's
'original' use and exchange values, thus straining
the appearance of naturalism. Their alterations
might consist of cropping, reposing, captioning, and
redoing, and proceed to question ideas of
competence, originality, authoship and property.
On a parodic level, this work can pose a
deviation from the repetition of stereotype,
contradicting the surety of our initial readings.
However, the implicit critique within the work
might easily be subsumed by the power granted its
'original' thus serving to further elevate cliche. This
might prove interesting in the use of repetition as a
deconstructive device, but this elevation of cliche
might merely shift the ornamental to the religious.
And as an adoration the work can read as either
another buzz in the image repetoire of popular
culture or as simply a kitschy divinity. However,
the negativity of this work, located in its humour,
can merely serve to congratulate its viewers on their
contemptuotis acuity. Perhaps the problem is one of
implicitness, that what is needed is, again, an
alternation, not only called 'from primary to
secondary', but front implicit to explicit, from
inference to declaration.
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91

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