One contemporary artist whose works are very popular is mass media is Barbara Kruger. Barbara Kruger is a montage artist who re-makes signs. Unlike the lot of mundane signs we see every day, Kruger's allow us to discover the deception of signs, and makes us believe that we do not have a need to fulfil what the signs are telling us.
Barbara Kruger's works deals with mass media. Her work is humorous in a self-referential way that exposes how our mindset on reality has become a function of social constructs. The media, commoditized images, symbols and signs. She is aware that television, film, advertisements, newspapers, magazines and movies do not reflect real life, but produce images that are not real. Her strategy involves the use of parody. Kruger's works exposes the deception by re-constructing works in mass media through appropriation.
Firstly, the aesthetics and style of her work play with simulacra, as they are made to look like a sign or billboard advertisement. According to social theorist Jean Baudrillard, hyper reality is maintained when the society as a whole upholds the illusion. In fact, "society can only function if the subject believes that rationality holds sway...society needs to believe that the sovereign power of rationality holds sway." However, Baudrillard adds in his theory of the fourth order of simulation, that irony is one of the strategies of human resistance because it reveals basic incongruities. Kruger's use of irony can be seen in the juxtaposition of text and image. This juxtaposition is uncannily familiar, yet different at the same time. It reveals the irrationalities behind what was presumed as logical, and creates a rupture in the viewer's observation.
In works such as "You Are Not Yourself" and "Super Rich, Ultra Gorgeous, Extra Skinny, Forever Young", Kruger challenges the unrealistic social ideals we hold about beauty, self-identity and self-worth and expose them as mere simulacra. "You Are Not Yourself" highlights the gap between simulacrum and reality. Because it is impossible to be who you think you should be, you can never be yourself. The perfect version of an ideal self is sold to you by the media, which as the invisible power of crafting your desire and shaping the way you act. The hyperbolic language in "Super Rich, Ultra Gorgeous, Extra Skinny, Forever Young" takes to an extreme a common sales pitch, and making it appear ridiculous. The text is paired with a close up of a face that appears to be undergoing plastic surgery, yet is crowded over by undefined shapes that part it. The utopian tone of the text is hence undermined by strange, defamiliarising image.
In the work "Buy me, I'll Change Your Life", Kruger exemplifies the way society sells, not tangible products, but the constructed idea or vision of an idealized life that we are led to achieve. In another work "I Shop Therefore I Am," Kruger parodies the all too familiar signs that sell to us a simulacrum of self identity. In this work, Kruger also incorporates Foucault's ideas about power and knowledge. "For Foucault, the moment when you think that you have discovered the "truth" about yourself, is also a moment when power is exercised over you". Hence, the process of attempting to take oneself as subject, as an independent individual producing knowledge about oneself, only makes one an object of power-knowledge relations. The use of the pronoun "I" initially seems to be strong, especially when it is endowed with an action word "shop" and an affirmative "am". However, the disembodied, faceless hand and the strong red border enclosing it quickly undermine this illusion of freedom and subjectivity. Instead, the individual's identity becomes the helpless product made and sold by political and economic authorities and institutes.
In addition, Kruger appropriated a clichéd statement from classical philosophy and placed it in a new context, eliciting humor because it is ridiculous yet true for many consumers. Furthermore, her use of pronoun "I" allows the viewer to engage the work on their own terms, and to reflect on the truth of the statement about themselves. By generating different responses to her work, she allows power to flow and be in flux. In this way, her art counters the types of information disseminated to us by the media that imposes particular values and desires while making us believe in our own agency.
Foucault's view on how we know some things and not others can also be extrapolated to included gender discourse. Butler rejects the belief of "natural" sexual identity and emphasizes in her theory that gender itself is a cultural and historical construct. Gender binaries arise and are continually performed, its roles and expectations constantly enacted by the media in order to establish authority.
Kruger exemplifies this tension on the gendered body in her work "Your Body is a Battleground", a work that counters essentialist believes about sexuality by highlighting it as a site for a whole host of received meanings that render it unreliable to be considered as ground for cultural differences. According to Butler, "The body is not a 'being' but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated..."The image of a female face divided in two and each halves tonal opposites of the other suggests that the female identity is fractured and can be easily manipulated on the surface. It can also suggest that sexual identities are reversible. However, given the either/or quality of black and white, one wonders if perceptions of women remain trapped in inartistic understandings.
While feminist theories attempt to resist myths of femininity based on their biological make up, Kruger goes a step further to deconstruct also myths of masculinity based on physiology deemed to be superior. In her work "We Don't Need another Hero," Kruger breaks down the narratives of male dominance by a directly rejecting the regulatory fiction of the American hero, while ironically, at the same time appear to perpetuate it. The image that accompanies the text portrays a girl admiring a boy's biceps, and that seems to contradict the message posed by the text.
Through such lack of fixed position, Kruger exposes gender myths and expectations as a politically shaky construction. Hers is an example of contemporary art that plays about with mass media as a key fabricating mechanism through which social construction of identity, gender and reality takes place. This good humor arises from the spirit of critical suspicion, and makes use of irony and parody to disrupt the illusion of a constant reality. In a hyper realistic world of excessive and unquestioned consumption of products, information and fantasy, it becomes even more important for contemporary art to be alert towards the influence of mass media and remain open-ended in its response.
Barbara Kruger's works deals with mass media.
Kruger's works expose the deception by re-constructing works in mass media through appropriation.
Firstly , the aesthetics and style of her work play with simulacra, as they are made to look like a sign or billboard advertisement.
The perfect version of an ideal self is sold to you by the media, which has the invisible power of crafting your desire and shaping the way you act.
Foucault's view on how we know some things and not others can also be extrapolated to included gender discourse.
In her work "We Don't Need another Hero," Kruger breaks down the narratives of male dominance by a directly rejecting the regulatory fiction of the American hero, while ironically, at the same time appearing to perpetuate it.
Except for these few minor corrections, your essay is very well written! Good luck with school!
:)
