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Lot Essay
“I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become” (B. Kruger quoted in Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z, New York, 2001, p. 184).
Barbara Kruger’s Face It is a prime example of the bold, graphic aesthetic and witty humor that reign supreme within the artist’s career. Kruger’s style continues to be as relevant today as it was when she embarked in her practice in the early 1980s. In Face It four elements hang next to each other, the title phrase “Face It!” emblazoned across the top and bottom of each element. Behind the large bars of texts rests a delicate hand that holds on to a piece of fabric, seemingly the interior of a jacket. On the jacket’s tag, where one would normally expect instructions for garment care, Kruger has instead inserted the words “this luxurious garment won’t make you rich or beautiful.” Through this subversive comment, Kruger challenges our consumer culture and the way in which society has come to build an identity around commodities.
These types of commentaries presented in this commercial style act as a beacon of Kruger’s work, a kind of calling card for her creations, in many ways born out of her eleven years working for Condé Nast. One of the pioneering postmodernist artists, alongside the likes of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, Kruger began to create work that responded to a newly disillusioned America, and to uproot the cultural legacy left in the wake of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. With a vast array of unchallenged masses of media and marketing images, as well as a rapidly expanding consumer class, Kruger and her fellow artists hoped to deconstruct these seductive images, questioning both their role in the construction of identity and their claims to originality and authenticity. Kruger approaches this task through an appropriation of advertising images, primarily from the 1940s and 1950s, a time when clichés permeated the media landscape. These familiar images are then layered with text that subverts the viewer’s comfort by calling attention to the images’ inner workings, as constructed to instill desire. Through this text, Kruger challenges the dominant code and encourages her viewers to do the same.
Face It evokes this challenge through its repetition, which recalls the oversaturation of images that proliferates through our society to the point that they become almost unnoticeable, but subconsciously consumed. The changes in colors alludes to the subtleties of marketing tactics, while the stark statement “Face It!” acts as a wakeup call, a call to awareness. The red-framed finish, a staple in Kruger’s work, further suggests notions of the media through an allusion to the jokey definition of a newspaper: black and white and red all over. Face It further summons ideas related to propaganda and the artificial nature of the reality that mass media takes for granted.
The success of Kruger’s output, and in particular Face It, can in part be credited to her works’ ability to feel at once universal and still intensely personal. Its dark joke unfolds slowly, peeling away to reveal the multiple layers of meaning that one small statement can hold.
Barbara Kruger’s Face It is a prime example of the bold, graphic aesthetic and witty humor that reign supreme within the artist’s career. Kruger’s style continues to be as relevant today as it was when she embarked in her practice in the early 1980s. In Face It four elements hang next to each other, the title phrase “Face It!” emblazoned across the top and bottom of each element. Behind the large bars of texts rests a delicate hand that holds on to a piece of fabric, seemingly the interior of a jacket. On the jacket’s tag, where one would normally expect instructions for garment care, Kruger has instead inserted the words “this luxurious garment won’t make you rich or beautiful.” Through this subversive comment, Kruger challenges our consumer culture and the way in which society has come to build an identity around commodities.
These types of commentaries presented in this commercial style act as a beacon of Kruger’s work, a kind of calling card for her creations, in many ways born out of her eleven years working for Condé Nast. One of the pioneering postmodernist artists, alongside the likes of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, Kruger began to create work that responded to a newly disillusioned America, and to uproot the cultural legacy left in the wake of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. With a vast array of unchallenged masses of media and marketing images, as well as a rapidly expanding consumer class, Kruger and her fellow artists hoped to deconstruct these seductive images, questioning both their role in the construction of identity and their claims to originality and authenticity. Kruger approaches this task through an appropriation of advertising images, primarily from the 1940s and 1950s, a time when clichés permeated the media landscape. These familiar images are then layered with text that subverts the viewer’s comfort by calling attention to the images’ inner workings, as constructed to instill desire. Through this text, Kruger challenges the dominant code and encourages her viewers to do the same.
Face It evokes this challenge through its repetition, which recalls the oversaturation of images that proliferates through our society to the point that they become almost unnoticeable, but subconsciously consumed. The changes in colors alludes to the subtleties of marketing tactics, while the stark statement “Face It!” acts as a wakeup call, a call to awareness. The red-framed finish, a staple in Kruger’s work, further suggests notions of the media through an allusion to the jokey definition of a newspaper: black and white and red all over. Face It further summons ideas related to propaganda and the artificial nature of the reality that mass media takes for granted.
The success of Kruger’s output, and in particular Face It, can in part be credited to her works’ ability to feel at once universal and still intensely personal. Its dark joke unfolds slowly, peeling away to reveal the multiple layers of meaning that one small statement can hold.