Barbara Kruger’s image and text work is renowned for its rhetorical power and visual urgency. In the 1960s and 1970s, Kruger worked as a graphic designer and picture editor for magazines including Mademoiselle, Vogue, House & Garden, and Aperture. There she developed the graphic sensibility she would later instrumentalise in her art, employing cropped, largescale black-and-white photographs overlaid with pithy aphorisms typeset in Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed and set against red or black bars – a now-iconic design schema. Kruger started to investigate media’s execution of words and images to construct desire and identity from a feminist perspective in the late 1970s. Over the decades these methodologies have expanded to include the up-scaling and spatialising of her visual practice through both still and moving images. Located at the very end of the Corderie building, Kruger’s new installation for The Milk of Dreams, including a three-channel video component, is mapped to fit the site’s spatial parameters. Kruger’s imploring phrases of command (“PLEASE CARE,” “PLEASE MOURN”) implicate the viewer in a direct confrontation with the work, using the ironically disembodied mode of address that is characteristic of her practice to call attention to our own bodies’ viscera and excreta.
Madeline Weisburg
