an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, February 2006, ISSN 1552-5112
Looking to the
Left: Politics in the Art of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer
Artists alone can’t
change the world. Neither can anyone
else, alone. But we can choose to
be part of the world that is changing.
There is no reason why visual art should not be able to reflect the
social concerns of our day as naturally as novels, plays, and music. . . [T]he
more sophisticated artists become, the more they are able to make art that
works on several levels. They can make specific artworks for specific audiences
and situations, or they can try to have their cake and eat it too, with one
work affecting art audiences one way and general audiences another. . . Art that is not confined to a single
context under the control of market and ruling-class taste is much harder to
neutralize. And it is often quite
effective when seen within the very citadels of power it criticizes.
- Lucy Lippard [1]
Looking to
the Left: Politics in the Art of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer
In the
exhibition catalogue Art and Ideology,
feminist art critic Lucy Lippard claimed that all art is ideological and that
artists “who remain stubbornly uninformed about the social and emotional
effects of their images and their connections to other images outside the art
context are more easily manipulated by the prevailing systems of distribution,
interpretation, and marketing.”[2] If Lippard’s statement is correct, Barbara
Kruger and Jenny Holzer are exempt from her categorization, given that
throughout their careers both artists have manipulated Lippard’s aforementioned
systems to spread their messages within the public arena. While Kruger surveys advertising systems and
(re)presents images in order to expose and question power structures, Holzer
utilizes an anonymous voice to send messages of authority to the public. Although they use different media and methods
of dissemination, a leftist agenda pervades these artists’ messages.
Such messages came into fruition due
to multiple sources, both cultural and political. The Vietnam War, living and working in a
decade of a right-wing White House (the 80’s), and the watered-down liberal
politics of the
Barbara Kruger’s leftist slant in
political thinking was obvious before she started producing the famous
collage-like works for which she is so well-known. While working as chief designer for Mademoiselle
magazine, she was also freelancing in designing book covers for several
publications. The books she chose to
take on as projects say much about her political slant. Between 1968 and 1972, her book jackets
included titles like The Anarchist Prince, The Illusion: An Essay on
Politics; Theatre and the Novel; Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth
-Century
Many of Kruger’s works deal with
feminist issues: the way that women are depicted in media and art, women’s
traditional roles, and women as objects of the gaze. The feminist movement was an outgrowth from
the New Left of the 1960’s, and therefore, at the least, her feminism may
qualify her as a partial leftist. Kruger
is adamantly pro-choice as well, something that is reflected in her works and
in posters she produces for pro-choice organizations. However, being pro-choice and a feminist do
not necessarily a leftist make. Thus, in
addition to her feminist works, her other overtly political works must be
considered as well.
In April 1989, a pro-choice march
was held in 
the poster
advertising the event (fig. 1):
fig.1
Barbara
Kruger
Untitled
(Your Body is a Battleground), 1989
The
message on the poster is loud, bold and clear: “Your body is a
battleground.” The image of the woman
and the text superimposed upon it summarized what protesters felt about the
issue: “Where is the boundary between inside and outside, private and public,
and who will control it?”[4] Her message also implicated the conservative
agenda in power at this time. The bottom
portion of the poster discusses the Supreme Court case launched by the Bush
Administration that sought to overthrow the Roe v. Wade verdict, and thus
answers the question, “Your body is a battleground for whom?” The poster makes the
answer pretty clear: woman’s body is the battleground for a right-wing
administration opposed to giving women the right to choose. A woman’s body is no longer her own, not if
conservatives have anything to say about it.
In 1990, using the same slogan, Kruger designed a billboard that was
placed directly next to another from a pro-life organization (fig. 2):
fig.2
Barbara Kruger
Your Body is a Battleground, billboard project for
The
contrast is striking. A woman’s
screaming face appears, an eight week old fetus’s life placed before hers. In 1992, Kruger pressed the issue of woman
vs. fetus again in a poster that asked “How Come Only the Unborn Have the Right
to Life?” (fig. 3):
fig.3
Barbara
Kruger
How Come Only the
Unborn Have the Right to Life?, 1992, design for The Village Voice
These
designs were more than the works of an artist.
They were the works of an activist, who was adamant about her beliefs in
a woman’s rights.
In these works, power (and who
wields this power) is a primary concern.
According to Kate Linker, “To Kruger, power is not localized in specific
institutions but is dispersed through a multiplicity of sites, operating in the
range of discursive procedures that govern sexuality, morality, the family,
education, and so on. . . power cannot be centralized. . .[it is] anonymous.”[5] Although the power that Kruger challenges and
confronts may be invisible, there is no denying that some of it can be
pinpointed. The “Your body is a
battleground” poster (fig. 1) is a perfect example: she is clearly implicating
the Bush administration, and moreover, the conservative and right-wing
agenda. Another example is her poster
design for “The Decade Show: Frameworks of identity in the 1980’s” in 1990,
which served the function of “agitprop” according to one author.[6] The text, once again, points the finger at
the right-wing in its statement that “[t]he Decade Show starring Reagan/Bush
presents 10 years of almost NO MONEY for Health Care, Housing, Education, the
Environment and almost ALL MONEY for Weapons, Covert Operations, Corporate Tax
Breaks and Savings and Loan Bail Outs” (fig. 4):
fig. 4
Barbara Kruger
poster design for “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the
1980’s,”
Power is
certainly localized in this work.[7]
Kruger’s
works also focus on issues that are less centered on feminism, but direct their
attention to global or national politics.
In her work Your Manias Become Science (fig. 5), a mushroom cloud
fills the 
picture
space with its lethal smoke:
fig. 5
Barbara Kruger
Untitled (Your Manias Become
Science), 1981
The left-wing
was quite vocal about its call for nuclear disarmament during the Cold War,
when this work was produced. Kruger’s
work echoes this leftist call. Equating
the science of bombs (and of murder) with the manias of a government that
distrusted Communism to the extent that all necessary precautions were made
(including producing bombs that could decimate a population), she angrily
confronts the leaders whose military and strategic decisions are akin to a
paranoid schizophrenic’s thinking.
In 1984, Kruger began to produce
works that dealt with money and buying.
In these works she deals critically with the market, and with
consumption and commodification, taking an analytical look at capitalism and
the greed that it invites.[8] Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am), Untitled (When I Hear the Word
Culture I Take Out My Checkbook) and Untitled
(Buy Me, I’ll Change Your Life)
all explore the power that commodity fetishism has over the consumer.
Kruger’s look at money and how it is
spent is also the focus of a 1989 billboard design for Art Against Aids (fig.
6) where her anger is clearly defined: “Fund Health Care Not Warfare”, it
demands:
fig. 6
Barbara Kruger
billboard project for Art Against AIDS,
Her
derision against a nation that has turned health care into a capitalistic
enterprise, while the military receives funding from the government, speaks
loudly in both the text and the image, in which a helpless arm is clutched by
others’ hands, holding it back from receiving what it is reaching for (health
care/money to pay for it).
Kruger’s use of magazine and book
illustrations from a bygone era is purposeful.[9] According to Stephen Heller, the artist
“exemplifies the continuum of activist designers who, since the nineteenth
century, have used the tools of mass communications to subvert the myths
perpetuated by the powerful.”[10] Lucy Lippard points out the responsibility
feminist artists have in creating “a new image vocabulary that conforms to our
interests” since images have been so active in exploiting women.[11] Kruger
does exactly this. She takes images and
uses them against themselves by employing texts.[12] And she does this not only to send out a
feminist message, but to send out leftist messages as well. An image of a mushroom cloud becomes not just
a symbol of destruction and power, but of a mania. Though her work has “the
look and feel of slick ads,” states Walter Kalaidjian, their politics “cut across the grain of
consumerist ideology. Indeed, her images
frequently allude to the general violence, oppression, and humiliation entailed
in the cultural logic of unequal exchange fostered under advanced capitalism.”
[13]
Like Barbara Kruger’s, Jenny
Holzer’s works often appear outside of the art world and mimic the commercial world
(by appearing on billboards, t-shirts, buttons, posters, and electronic
signs). However, unlike Kruger, Holzer’s
messages are often in conflict with one another. This is especially obvious in her Truisms,
of which there are hundreds, in which short aphorisms often contradict one
another - some appearing leftist, some rightist, and some completely
neutral. However, one begins to see her
leftist stance when exploring how and where her work is disseminated and compares
this with what the artist has to say about her work. Of her politics, Holzer has stated, “When I
was younger, I wanted to go fight with Che in the jungle, but now I’m just a
standard leftie-liberal.” [14] Her insertion of the word “leftie” is an
important one, since she considers herself more than just the standard liberal,
a word that no longer means what it used to in an era when liberals are
adopting more and more conservative tactics to avoid being labeled the dreaded
“leftist” term. [15]
Like Kruger, Holzer uses language to
communicate her thoughts. However,
whereas Kruger merges text and image, Holzer usually relies upon text
alone. Although she attempted painting
while in school and at the beginning of her career, [16] Holzer
soon found that she was much more fascinated with communication through
language, which could convey a message that painting could not. She did not think she could make effective
narrative paintings and wanted a way to express her views.[17] Her desire to communicate first found
fruition in her Truisms of 1977-79 in which her principal medium is
language.[18]
As mentioned, these truisms often
had contradictory messages.[19] However,
even in this large list of Truisms, the leftist maxims outweigh the
right-wing ones. [20] And although the majority of Truisms
are neutral or apolitical in tone, there are nineteen that reflect a leftist
politics and only ten that reflect rightist politics, or almost twice as many
leftist. And although the majority of Truisms are neutral or apolitical
in tone, there are nineteen that reflect a leftist politics and only ten that
reflect rightist politics, or almost twice as many leftist. Although maxims
like “Abuse of power comes as no surprise”, “An elite is inevitable”, “Deviants
are sacrificed to increase group solidarity”, “Money creates taste”, “Politics
is used for personal gain”, and “Decency is a relative thing” could be
associated with the Left as well as the radical Right, they are better suited
as leftist truisms. These truisms seem
to condemn rather than simply to confirm - they are accusatory rather than
simply true. In these cases, we must
consider the real leftist leanings of the artist and the implications those
leanings have when using such an accusatory tone. These truisms reflect where the Right has
gotten us, but they are not spoken by a rightist voice, and it is hard to
divorce Holzer’s politics from them.
Holzer also uses truisms that state emphatically
leftist agendas: “Any surplus is immoral”, “Class structure is as artificial as
plastic”, “Everyone’s work is equally important” (this one is even communist),
“Inheritance must be abolished”, “It’s not good to operate on credit” (critical
of capitalism), “People who don’t work with their hands are parasites”, “Raise
boys and girls the same way”, “Redistributing wealth is imperative”, “Remember
you always have freedom of choice” (always a touchy subject where abortion is
concerned), “Using force to stop force is absurd”, “Grass roots agitation is
the only hope”, and “Private property
created crime.”
In contrast, the right-wing truisms, most of
them fascist, possess a tone that is much more malicious than her leftist
statements: “Absolute submission can be a form of freedom”, “Freedom is a
luxury not a necessity”, “Killing is unavoidable but nothing to be proud of”, “Most
people are not fit to rule themselves”, “Occasionally principles are more
valuable than people”, “Separatism is the way to a new beginning”, “Sex
differences are here to stay”, “The idea of revolution is an adolescent
fantasy”, “Trading a life for a life is fair enough”, and “Violence is
permissible even desirable occasionally.”
This must be more than coincidence, as they reflect the tyrannical
positions the Left often associates with the Right.
Although readers may find additional
statements that fit into the rightist/leftist categories, or they may delete
some of the ones listed above, there is no doubt that Holzer’s list is
comprised of more leftist truisms than rightist. [21] When questioned about a political slant in
her Truisms, Holzer denied a more leftist slant. She claimed, “I think they are a
representative sampling of opinion. I
didn’t want to make a didactic or dogmatic piece. . . I wanted to highlight
those thoughts and topics that polarize people, but not choose sides. I was trying to present a fairly accurate
survey and not have it break down into left, right, center, or religious versus
anarchist, or what have you.” [22] Yet if we
go through her list carefully, we find that she does take sides with the Left
more often, whatever her intentions may have been. Hal Foster notes that the reader of the Truisms
seems to be “in the midst of open ideological warfare,” [23] and it
appears that the Left has won.
However, it is not only Holzer’s
list of Truisms that reflects a more leftist agenda. Individual truisms have often been
reproduced on t-shirts, posters, hats, billboards, stickers, etc. One of the most often reproduced is “Abuse of
power comes as no surprise.” In a popularly
reproduced image of Lady Pink, a graffiti artist with whom Holzer had
collaborated on other projects,[24] the artist wears a shirt bearing the truism
(fig. 7):
fig.7
from Jenny
Holzer’s Truisms, 1977-79
T-shirt
worn by Lady Pink, NY, 1983
The
message is accusatory and implicating - but whose power is she talking
about? The Truisms were started
only three years after
In fact, the truisms that have
elicited controversy have also been leftist.
In 1982, Holzer’s Truisms were exhibited at the Marine Midland
Bank in
In her more recent texts for Lustmord
(fig. 8), Holzer focused on violence against women:[28]
fig. 8
Jenny Holzer
excerpts from Lustmord, 1993-4, ink on (women’s) skin
Prompted
by the events in
observer. Her language is violent and graphic so the
experience is adequately conveyed.
According to Diane Waldman, “Chillingly, the series underscores the way
the world often sits by, watching, while women fall prey to abuse and death.”
[29] The reader is not aware from whose position
Holzer speaks in Lustmord since “she speaks simultaneously from all
three positions - and from none of them.” [30] Holzer’s reasoning for her use of
“reprehensible statements” by her invisible characters is the hope that “readers
will, in reaction, land in the right place.” [31] This desire of hers can easily be
transferred to interpreting her Truisms as well. And what is the “right place” to land in a
series of contradictory statements? For
a leftist artist, “right” must mean Left.
Holzer’s leftist agenda has also
come into play in a leaflet produced by the artist that had a response slip
attached stating “Jesus Will Come to
What is important to note is that
Holzer’s works are not meant to be confined to the galleries and museums alone;
Holzer clearly intended to get her message out on the streets using a populist
dissemination tactic. When the Truisms
were first completed, they were plastered around the city of
fig. 9
Jenny Holzer
from Truisms (1977-79), Spectacolor sign project, “Message to the
Public”,
Of her use
of a public medium Holzer has stated, “I hope that my content is worth placing
in public, that it might even counteract some of the worst messages to which
we’re subjected.” [34] And since
radical thinking makes people either scared or is ignored altogether, her
message becomes more effective and more likely to be taken seriously “if the
message seems to come from on high.”
This strategy is effective for her since sign technologies have become
“mediums of authority.” [35] Her
messages are also anonymous - her name is not linked to them, and they simply
give the impression of common maxims thus lending them an authoritative voice.[36]
What Kruger and Holzer have in
common is a heavy reliance on language to get their respective messages
across. In fact, their use of text is
crucial, because without it, their works would cease to function politically. The use of language is then an effective
medium to use because it is understandable and to the point. It is directed as much to the general public
as to an art audience. Along with their
use of text, Kruger and Holzer also manipulate advertising and commercial
media, a tactic that makes their work quite powerful. As far back as1936, Meyer Schapiro pointed
out that people get pleasure from commercial and filmic imagery “with a
directness and wholeheartedness that can hardly be called forth by the artistic
painting and sculpture of our time.” [37] Thus, using what he called “infantile public
art” actually serves to make the message more powerful because people are more
attracted to those images. This has
certainly proven true for Kruger and Holzer, whose images appear on everything
from t-shirt to mugs.
Yet, both
artists question and confront power structures, an important aspect of their
work that recalls a 1981 lecture where Lucy Lippard told her audience: “You’ve
probably heard the old purist saw ‘Wanna send a message? Call
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, February 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes