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Lot Essay
This work has been requested for inclusion in The Deconstructed Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, January-April 2012.
"I have a question for you: what is a public sphere that is an uncommercial public sphere?" Barbara Kruger, 1991
Barbara Kruger's Untitled (When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook), one of the most explosive and defining provocations in the artist's oeuvre, riffs on a line from a play by the Nazi-era sympathizer Hans Johst, "Whenever I hear the word 'Culture,' I reach for my revolver," an oft-intoned phrase of Nazi ideologists during the period. Disturbing for its association with Hitler's Germany, it underscores the seriousness of Kruger's project. An incendiary juxtaposition of text and image, Kruger's strategy since the 1970s is to stun by confounding, to thwart through aggression. Her strategy is one of displacement: interventions by wit and stealth.
Howdy Doody leers from the frame, an icon of 1940s and 1950s children's television, a quintessentially American puppet--male, spotted with 48 freckles (representing the forty-eight states up to 1959 when Alaska was recognized), dressed in cowboy garb (emblematic of the American West), whose name incorporates the American greeting, "Howdy do!" and who starred on NBC television from 1947 through 1960. A vehicle for the advertisement of consumer products--Colgate toothpaste, Halo shampoo and, "3 Musketeers" candy bars, among them--Kruger sets up the puppet as a symbol of exploitation, a visual sign that substitutes for the commodity itself, a product of a debased culture. Overlaid with text printed in Futura Bold font, Kruger's work is a construct only of apparent content, apparent because, in contrast to the expected exhortation to consume, Kruger has tweaked the wording into a counter-message of satire and reprisal. Kruger here creates a disjunction between image and message, between the subject--Howdy Doody--and the object of its visual field--the goal to which the rhetoric of desire is directed--a prompt to "take out my checkbook." A postmodernist of astounding visual resources, Kruger frames the dynamic of commodity culture as a relay of significations, in line with the critique of society put forward by the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard who proclaims that signs and commodities they advertize are interchangeable: "the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as a sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities" (J. Baudrillard, "Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign," SubStance, Vol. 5, No. 15, "Socio-Criticism (1976)," p. 114).
Profoundly aware of the operations of consumer culture, Kruger's oeuvre disposes such codes of commutability in the reduced palettes and garish images through which commodities often circulate. Born in the final year of the Second World War, Kruger was thrust into the highly charged intersection of commerce and high culture of the post-war years. After a year at the Parsons School of Design in 1965 where she worked with Diane Arbus, Kruger was hired by Conde Nast Publications and Mademoiselle magazine, after which she moved into areas of graphic design and picture editing for publications such as House and Garden and Aperture. From 1977, Kruger's worked with her own architectural photographs, publishing an artist's book, Picture/Readings, 1979, the year she began to incorporate sourced images in her work. Kruger's strategy of appropriating images from popular culture resulted in collages with texts, which quickly took on a tone of agitprop. Addressing issues of language and sign, she has been grouped with such feminist postmodern artists Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman.
Kruger's belief that she "lives and speaks through a body which is constructed by moments which are formed by the velocity of power and money" (B. Kruger, op. cit., 435) is translated into the garish vividness of the Howdy Doody-puppet's open mouth, poised to cannibalize the very text "culture," the rows of white teeth in inverted counterpoise to the raised eyebrows and wide-eyed vacuous stare--a visual image that uses irony and sarcasm to subvert the control asserted by advertisements in their ubiquitous and seductive representations of desire. Untitled (When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook) stands as an extraordinary compendium of the issues with which Kruger has dealt throughout her career. Taking responsibility "for the meaning which we create" in our society is a political act with which Kruger engages the ads, slogans, and other media meant to undermine the authority of commodity culture. Kruger's work is edgy; it stimulates and unnerves the viewer, nowhere more pointedly than in the present work, which contaminates the familiar and implicates the viewer in ways both profoundly empowering and deeply disturbing, creating a visual frisson that is as compelling as it is provoking.
"I have a question for you: what is a public sphere that is an uncommercial public sphere?" Barbara Kruger, 1991
Barbara Kruger's Untitled (When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook), one of the most explosive and defining provocations in the artist's oeuvre, riffs on a line from a play by the Nazi-era sympathizer Hans Johst, "Whenever I hear the word 'Culture,' I reach for my revolver," an oft-intoned phrase of Nazi ideologists during the period. Disturbing for its association with Hitler's Germany, it underscores the seriousness of Kruger's project. An incendiary juxtaposition of text and image, Kruger's strategy since the 1970s is to stun by confounding, to thwart through aggression. Her strategy is one of displacement: interventions by wit and stealth.
Howdy Doody leers from the frame, an icon of 1940s and 1950s children's television, a quintessentially American puppet--male, spotted with 48 freckles (representing the forty-eight states up to 1959 when Alaska was recognized), dressed in cowboy garb (emblematic of the American West), whose name incorporates the American greeting, "Howdy do!" and who starred on NBC television from 1947 through 1960. A vehicle for the advertisement of consumer products--Colgate toothpaste, Halo shampoo and, "3 Musketeers" candy bars, among them--Kruger sets up the puppet as a symbol of exploitation, a visual sign that substitutes for the commodity itself, a product of a debased culture. Overlaid with text printed in Futura Bold font, Kruger's work is a construct only of apparent content, apparent because, in contrast to the expected exhortation to consume, Kruger has tweaked the wording into a counter-message of satire and reprisal. Kruger here creates a disjunction between image and message, between the subject--Howdy Doody--and the object of its visual field--the goal to which the rhetoric of desire is directed--a prompt to "take out my checkbook." A postmodernist of astounding visual resources, Kruger frames the dynamic of commodity culture as a relay of significations, in line with the critique of society put forward by the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard who proclaims that signs and commodities they advertize are interchangeable: "the stage where the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as a sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities" (J. Baudrillard, "Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign," SubStance, Vol. 5, No. 15, "Socio-Criticism (1976)," p. 114).
Profoundly aware of the operations of consumer culture, Kruger's oeuvre disposes such codes of commutability in the reduced palettes and garish images through which commodities often circulate. Born in the final year of the Second World War, Kruger was thrust into the highly charged intersection of commerce and high culture of the post-war years. After a year at the Parsons School of Design in 1965 where she worked with Diane Arbus, Kruger was hired by Conde Nast Publications and Mademoiselle magazine, after which she moved into areas of graphic design and picture editing for publications such as House and Garden and Aperture. From 1977, Kruger's worked with her own architectural photographs, publishing an artist's book, Picture/Readings, 1979, the year she began to incorporate sourced images in her work. Kruger's strategy of appropriating images from popular culture resulted in collages with texts, which quickly took on a tone of agitprop. Addressing issues of language and sign, she has been grouped with such feminist postmodern artists Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman.
Kruger's belief that she "lives and speaks through a body which is constructed by moments which are formed by the velocity of power and money" (B. Kruger, op. cit., 435) is translated into the garish vividness of the Howdy Doody-puppet's open mouth, poised to cannibalize the very text "culture," the rows of white teeth in inverted counterpoise to the raised eyebrows and wide-eyed vacuous stare--a visual image that uses irony and sarcasm to subvert the control asserted by advertisements in their ubiquitous and seductive representations of desire. Untitled (When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook) stands as an extraordinary compendium of the issues with which Kruger has dealt throughout her career. Taking responsibility "for the meaning which we create" in our society is a political act with which Kruger engages the ads, slogans, and other media meant to undermine the authority of commodity culture. Kruger's work is edgy; it stimulates and unnerves the viewer, nowhere more pointedly than in the present work, which contaminates the familiar and implicates the viewer in ways both profoundly empowering and deeply disturbing, creating a visual frisson that is as compelling as it is provoking.