Barbara

Kruger
Barbara Kruger’s personal information is hard to find. Though
her work is bold and straightforward, she has refused to be overly
expressive about herself as an artist. Her biographies are brief, but
her work is observed and talked about quite intricately.

Barbara Kruger was born

in Newark , New Jersey in
1945. After attending Syra-
cuse University, the School
of Visual Arts and studied art
and design with Diane Ar-
bus at the Parson’s School of
Design in New York. Work-
ing at Mademoiselle she was
quickly promoted to head de-
signer. Later she worked as a
graphic designer, art design-
er, art director, and picture
editor which is evident in the
work for which she is known
internationally renowned.
Each one of her work is blatantly a signature piece.
it has a impersonal lucidity. She talks a lot about the
“war at home”, and how in each of us there is.....

• between the good and the bad

• men and women
• black and white
• losers and winners
• creeps and assholes

All sociocultural dissonances that make the world

so tweaked. If we lived in a pleasantville where all
the houses were exactly the same with the same
wife who baked the perfect apple pie, we would
have problems. The issues that Barbara Kruger talks
about is what makes us go insane but keeps us sane
at the same time: I would like to call it the Sanity
Paradox.
During her time as well as ours a lot of artwork is
derived from art history or intellectual conundrums:
a riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by
a pun. But instead she is dealing with “life issues”
straightforward. She targets the ego and libido:
the psychic and emotional energy associated
with instinctual biological drives. sexual desires.
manifestation of sexual drives.
She is subtle and blunt. Blunt language with
subtle implications. She is the least metaphysical or
mystifying. An existentialist:

Existentialism is a philosophical movement that

views human existence as having a set of underly-
ing themes and characteristics, such as anxiety,
dread, freedom, awareness of death, and conscious-
ness of existing. Existentialism is also an outlook,
or a perspective, on life that pursues the question of
the meaning of life or the meaning of existence. It
is this question that is seen as being of paramount
importance, above both scientific and other philo-
sophical pursuits.
visually arresting, less distant from our regular menu
of pleasures and provocations.

Her work has the quality of “heres the issue and here
it looks like”
People start puzzling who “I” am and who “we” are
and who “you” are.
She works a lot with the media. She works with a lot of ico-
nography from the 40s and 50s. which is about the time tele-
vision started to get popular

1936: About 200 hundred television sets are in use

world-wide. The introduction of coaxial cable, which is a
pure copper or copper-coated wire surrounded by insula-
tion and an aluminum covering. These cables were and are
used to transmit television, telephone and data signals. The
1st “experimental” coaxial cable lines were laid by AT&T
between New York and Philadelphia in 1936. The first “regu-
lar” installation connected Minneapolis and Stevens Point,
WI in 1941. The original L1 coaxial-cable system could
carry 480 telephone conversations or one television program.
By the 1970’s, L5 systems could carry 132,000 calls or more
than 200 television programs.

1948: Cable television is introduced in Pennsylvania as

a means of bringing television to rural areas. A patent was
granted to Louis W. Parker for a low-cost television receiver.
One million homes in the United States have television sets.

1956: Robert Adler invents the first practical remote

control called the Zenith Space Commander, proceeded by
wired remotes and units that failed in sunlight.
commercial media is the vernacular of our time, it res-
onates for us into our actual lives
Barbara Kruger uses her artwork to promote causes
she believes in. She is amazing expressive and
moving. A lot of her artwork was displayed
throughout cities like advertisements. They were on
billboards, buses, bus stops etc. She had everyday
commuters instead of contemplating which sham-
poo to use whether or not abortion is a right or not.
That is something all artists hope to do. Embede a
thought for longer than a few seconds.

I really like Barbara Kruger and believe she is one

of a kind, it will be exciting to see how someone
similiar to her will react in our future.

Anna Cerniglia
book: Thinking of You