Episode 64: Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)” (1989)

The last time I took a flight, I found myself mindlessly staring at the screen on the seat back in front of me.  The commercials rolled past, as they do now, including one for a ClearBlue Easy pregnancy test.  It’s one I’ve used myself in the past, more times, I will say, than number of children I have.  And watching this commercial, soundless, I saw a beautiful woman in her well-appointed bedroom get her results and collapse joyously onto the bed, a face full of the purest sunshine.  But we never see the results.  And I had to raise my plastic cup of ginger ale to this brilliant marketing campaign. No matter what that pregnancy test said, she could be relieved and joyful.  And no matter who is watching, we can project ourselves onto her.  We’ve been there.  We can relate to that feeling.  And what does that say about the public conversation around the impossibly personal topic of pregnancy?  The bottomless depths of joy, or panic, or grief, and above all, the unknown.  Our futures.  Our bodies.  Our selves.  It’s not something that can fit on a picket sign.

Let’s just get something out of the way: this is not an episode about abortion.  Even the artwork we’re looking at in this episode isn’t really about abortion.  And it’s not about my politics, my values, my business.  It’s about conflict.  It’s about tension.  It’s about a stark divide, a positive and negative exposure of woman’s face, her exquisite lipstick and perfect eyebrow mirrored like a poster from a horror film, half angel, half demon, split down the middle and held together with red Band-Aids of text that reference a body we don’t even see.  And yes, this photographic silkscreen was created for a specific moment, the first time Roe vs. Wade, the constitutional amendment that allowed for the federal legalization of abortions, was under significant attack in 1989.  That is unambiguous, recent history.  But the image – the tension, the conflict, both external to this woman, and perhaps internal within her, too – is timeless.  It’s an image that manages to tell a million stories in one story.  It speaks with the succinct visual impact of a picket sign, but it’s not a picket sign.  It’s not prescriptive.  It’s rare to have art that can speak to its moment, and also every moment, and feel just as prescient, just as potent, each time.  And that’s what this is what this episode is about.

Of course, for something to be timeless, it has to feel like it’s always addressing you, right now, which for Barbara Kruger, is kind of her thing.  Her signature large-scale black-and-white images are overlaid with red text bars of pithy little phrases that smack you with Futura Bold or Helvetica Extra Bold, always using personal pronouns “I” and “you” that pins us to our spot, implicating us directly.  After all, why should Uncle Sam get all the army recruits when he points the finger straight at you, that is, me.  It’s, again, a brilliant marketing strategy to break the fourth wall like that, this active, who, me?  that forces you to engage.  Think about it: your body is a battleground.  Wait, mine?  My body?  I mean, is anyone else’s too?  What is the battle over?  Is this an accusation?  A threat?  “Direct address has motored my work from the very beginning,” Kruger said. “I like it because it cuts through the grease.” 

And yet, there is a very real difference between the directness of a Kruger statement and, say, the directness of a picket sign, or even Uncle Sam.  You know what Uncle Sam wants you to do when he’s pointing that finger at you.  You know what an activist is saying when she holds up a sign that says My Body, My Choice.  There’s a clear ideological message being conveyed.  But Kruger feels direct and indirect.  Her phrases read like they’re dripping with irony, but they’re actually pretty openly earnest.  She makes statements of fact – your body is a battleground – that we then use to, in her words, interrogate ourselves, question “the systems that contain us.”  Of course, these systems and statements are directly bound up with her politics: the role of the patriarchal male gaze in art history in “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face” from 1981, or the role of capitalist consumerism in “I Shop Therefore I Am” from 1987, or both in “You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece” from 1982, and so on, from feminism, to gender, to celebrity.  And it’s a knife’s edge that she’s walking on, managing to deliver statements that both sear and probe, yet don’t overtly judge.  Judgement coming from art, and any authority, alienates.  But broad statements of fact merely describe.  They leave the judgement to you.  So in other words, this art isn’t a picket sign so much as a mirror.

And not just a mirror held up to the individual, but to society as a whole.  Because her text is also agitprop, authoritative, sensationalist.  She’s critiquing politics and propaganda, the mainstream media and tabloid journalism, “in their native tongue,” as critics have described.  A headline can throw a punch, but she’s ready to punch right back. “I think I developed language skills to deal with threat,” she said.  “It’s the girl thing to do – you know, instead of pulling out a gun.”

Of course, she’s not the first artist we’ve looked at to integrate text and imagery, or to pull metaphorical guns in a political firefight.  Different though their aims were, it wouldn’t be wholly inappropriate to summon Roy Lichtenstein from episode 27, who was also uncannily good at finding meaning in generality, at pulling out the exact frame of a comic strip that tells any story the viewer wants to project.  But let’s go back even further, all the way to episode 3, the first time we ever dug into political art by way of John Heartfield, the Weimar political master of photomontage.  Between 1930 and 1938, Heartfield created more than 240 photomontages, which were published in the popular illustrated magazine AIZ, and which mostly criticized Nazism, fascism, and even took on Hitler directly through satire and subversion.  And it’s incredibly powerful satire, the kind that gets you in your soul, equal parts witty and deeply disturbing – and earned Heartfield the number five spot on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted list.  His infamous “Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle (Hurray, the butter is finished!)” is a prime example of his gift: a photomontage that depicts a family sitting around a dinner table, in a dining room with wallpaper emblazoned with swastikas and a framed photo of Hitler.  It would be a perfectly homey nationalist scene, except they’re all eating a bicycle, while the baby gnaws on an axe and the dog licks an oversized nut and bolt.  The title directly addresses both the food shortages the German population was experiencing under the first few years of Nazi rule, and a quote from a speech by Hermann Goring, who claimed that “iron ore has made the Reich strong while butter has made them fat.”

Now, to be clear, Kruger doesn’t claim Heartfield as inspiration, and has gotten a little spicy towards all the art historians, myself now included, who jump to compare them.  But…come on.  Take, for example, the hand that reaches towards you in Heartfield’s famous Communist poster “The Hand has Five Fingers,” which feels as though it could have been a direct inspiration for Kruger’s subversive, Des Cartian “I Shop Therefore I Am,” which is overlaid over the same reaching hand.  In fact, the intentional shallowness of Kruger’s statement almost feels like it needs Heartfield for its punch to fully land.  But no, Kruger says, no direct influence.  When it comes to the overlay of text and images, she credits her style to her training as a graphic designer, rather than seeing herself as part of this long trajectory of political art.  But I honestly feel like this sells her a bit short; there doesn’t have to be a direct link to appreciate the kind of detached directness that Heartfield and Kruger share: the creation of space for you between the artwork and the world; you know what side the artist is on, sure, but you also need to do a little work – to understand the references, to decide which side you’re on instead of just being told what to think.  In other words, and in the words of cultural critics from Heartfield’s generation, it’s activism that is meant to wake you up, to engage, not demand that you blindly follow, having been bludgeoned comatose by someone else’s ideology.

But let’s talk more about Kruger’s evolution and influences, according to her.  She was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945, and grew up during the golden age of advertising.  She studied art and design, first at the University of Syracuse and then at the Parsons School of Design, under Diane Arbus.  Then she went to work as a page designer at Condé Nast, constructing layouts for spreads in Mademoiselle and House & Garden, and seeing firsthand the incredible power of image, photography, text, and their many permutations that both inspire and manufacture desire in its consumers. 

And like with almost every photographer we’ve looked at in the past, from Henryk Ross in the Lodz Ghetto to Ansel Adams standing on his car to Hiroshi Sugimoto in the back of his theaters, Barbara Kruger realized that, more than anything, photography is a manipulation.  This was a founding principle of what became known as the Pictures Generation, a group of artists – which included Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, and others – who, in the mid-1970s, found themselves awash in images from the day they were born: media, film, television, and ads, and who therefore decided to weather this roiling sea with both cool detachment and a desire to expose this medium that purported to tell the objective truth.  On the contrary, Laurie Simmons said, “I was excited by the idea that a photograph could lie.”  Simmons, who is now perhaps better known as Lena Dunham’s mom, was a core member of this crew – in her words, less a photographer than an artist who used photography.  Her piece, “Woman/Kitchen/Sitting on Sink” from 1976, is a prime example of the power of intentional artifice, both in its technique and its subject matter.  It’s a photograph of a doll playfully and unsettlingly arranged in a dollhouse scene; in her retelling, Simmons was a young art school graduate looking for freelance commercial photography work, and in order to get a job working for a toy company catalogue, she began photographing dollhouse furniture.  The job never panned out, but she was smitten with its artistic possibilities.  And here, we see a classic 1950s housewife sitting on a sink, engaged in the performance of her domestic duties, but the authenticity of the scene can’t help be questioned given how artificial it all is.  It is a doll, after all.  It’s beautiful and perfect in the way anything poured into a mold can be.  This isn’t even a kitchen, it’s a playset.  It’s pure simulation.  The stereotype of elegant 1950s femininity, like the character of June Cleaver, is both venerated and subverted. And its artificiality highlights how damaging this kind of fiction could be to women conscripted into making it real.  As Simmons wrote, “I was simply trying to recreate a feeling, a mood, a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal at the same time.”

This sense of photographic fiction is also seen in the work of Cindy Sherman.  Sherman, a fellow member of the loosely gathered Pictures Generation, and good friend of Simmons, is known almost exclusively for roleplaying in her art.  She is almost always her own subject, but, like with Carrie Mae Weems in episode 50, the images are never self-portraits.  Instead, she creates personas; she dresses up in various costumes, wigs, prosthetics, and disappears into these transformations so seamlessly you’d be forgiven for not really being able to recall what Cindy Sherman actually looks like.  Take, for example, her series of “Untitled Film Stills” from 1977-80.  The naïve waif stares apprehensively, yet defiantly into middle distance, surrounded by skyscrapers.  You know exactly who she is, the bus from nowhere she just got off of, the love story that will follow, the kiss at the top of the Empire State Building that will take us into the credits.  But there is no movie.  Her character exists as though on a trading card, with all the narrative implied but unrealized.  And again, it calls to mind the isolated comic book frames of Lichtenstein, the idea that a pop culture frame in isolation, if properly chosen, can be representative of everything that comes before and after that frame, and that we as the audience can actually fill all of that in on our own.  And it begs the question, particularly with Sherman’s characters, about how we’re going to do that.  What narrative journeys have her women been on?  Where are they going?  And how have we been shaped by larger societal forces to consider ourselves empowered with the ability to tell her story?  Like with Simmons’ dolls, there’s a remarkable amount of truth about ourselves that can be gleaned from this intentional fiction, that is reflected back to us.

This is just a taste of the work that was being created the 1970s and 80s, and the tension it both spoke to and exploited, when Barbara Kruger created this image of a woman’s face divided down the middle for the Women’s March on Washington in 1989.  It was distributed originally as a flyer with a clear activist message, pushing back against the antiabortion legislation being bandied about by the Supreme Court.  And it’s interesting to take the flyer, which has all the logistical and ideological information about the march all overlaid on this divided face - not to mention a very clear statement of Kruger’s politics - and compare it to the image that we’ve been looking at this whole time, which doesn’t really have any of that information.  It just says, your body is a battleground.  A lot of people go into a conversation about Kruger, and this image, knowing what it’s referencing – namely, the abortion debate.  But imagine if you didn’t.  What if it was just about the image itself, this face, half beautiful, half grotesque, and this direct statement of fact.  Your body is a battleground.  It could be about abortion, or childbirth, or infertility, or misogyny, or diet culture, or cancer.  All beautiful and lethal at the same time.  A million stories in one story.

Barbara Kruger is 78 now, still creating work that, in her words, “conjoins the seduction of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.”  She lives in LA, and her more recent work has that unmistakable tinge of pop culture, of the advertising she bit her teeth on, of surface.  But acknowledging the surface is how to get to the depth, to her trademark satire that gets to your soul, always speaking to something larger.  For example, her 2010 cover of W magazine, featuring a nude Kim Kardashian covered only by the red stripes of text that read “It’s all about me; I mean you; I mean me” might just be one of the most brilliant and succinct descriptions of Kardashianism, and the rich soil from which it grew, ever committed to glossy paper.  And, ironically, Kruger’s style has even reached a whole new generation of consumers by way of the logo for the streetwear brand Supreme, whose designer admitted to blatantly cribbing her work, and whom Kruger never really pushed back against until she was dragged into a lawsuit between Supreme and another retailer.  It’s like she seemed fine taking a breather, letting the politics of her message speak to another era.

And then 2022 happened. 

Roe was challenged again, this time by a majority conservative court, and was, as we all know, overturned.  And Kruger sprang back into action.  “Your Body is a Battleground” was repurposed, featured on the cover of New York Magazine in May, before the official ruling in June but after the leaked opinion, when the writing was on the wall.  The text from the original image was replaced with the far more context-specific, but no less ambiguous “who becomes a ‘murderer’ in Post-Roe America?” with the word murderer very intentionally in quotes.  And it’s clear here that age, and success, has not dimmed Kruger’s brilliance.  In fact, it’s sharpened it.  Because no one would ever question New York Magazine’s allegiance here, or the politics of its staffers, or of Kruger, and yet, it’s a perfectly phrased, even charitable question.  It’s aimed at everyone engaged in the conflict and yet no one side in particular: a direct interrogation of those who believe abortion is murder, and that banning it is murder, and, in this debate, how compassion has many meanings but is never free of consequences.  And we know it’s a great question, and a meaningful contribution to productive political art, because it’s a terrible picket sign.  Imagine putting this on a picket sign.  Imagine chanting it.  It’s not a shot fired.  It’s simply a question that cuts through the grease, that mirrors back our own beliefs, that demands we do a little work.  And it’s a question that wakes us up – all of us – to the complexities, and the unavoidable tensions, both external and internal, of caring so deeply about our bodies, our selves, our children, our unknown futures, that we’re willing to do very public battle over an impossibly personal issue.  It wakes us up to our opponents, so often our fellow women, and to how deeply they share the depth of our conviction.  And maybe it helps us meet in the middle of this divided line, somewhere around the brow line, and astounded at how deeply we all relate to that conviction, that feeling.  And just maybe, even, to each other.