Reinventing the Art World: Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman

 The modern art world is crowded with male artists, predominantly white hetero-normative male artists, leaving little room for women. By deconstructing the art world’s power structure, feminist artists are reinventing the way the public views gender and how women are represented in the art world. Cindy Sherman and Barabara Kruger are two powerful contemporary American feminist artists who confronted and subverted traditional notions of representation, gender, and power within the art world. Sherman and Kruger analyze and deconstruct modern art theory and practices while creating powerful visual narratives by exploring new media art forms such as photography, film, and installation work. Both artists, growing up in a media, advertising, and consumerism landscape, confront and explore through appropriating images for their art show how these affect socially constructed ideas on identity and gender (Gaylord, 2016). Both are associated with the Pictures Generation, a group of Conceptual artists concerned with the critical analysis and dissemination of mass-media culture

 

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. When she was a child, she moved to Long Island, New York, with her family to be closer to her father's work. Later, she attended SUNY Buffalo and received her BFA in photography in 1976. It was also during this time that she was introduced to conceptual art, which she found both liberating and inspiring” (Minichiello, 2023). She moved to New York City and began her most famous art series called the “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1988). These 70 film stills were based on old Hollywood b films where it showed Sherman in a variety of roles in different situations, often based on female stereotypes. The photographs were taken from the perspective of a lustful gaze in uncomfortable situations to create conversations on female representation, feminism, and postmodernism (Gaylord, 2016). She often used theatrical elements in her photography to amplify her visual narrative. Transforming herself using makeup and prosthetics, which were often disheveled, peeling shows “the artificiality of these fabrications, a metaphor for the artificiality of all identity construction” (Gaylord, 2016).

                      How mass media representations shape us | Cindy Sherman (2021) MoMA

 

Barbara Kruger, a New Jersey native, was born in 1945 in Newark. She was born to a working-class Jewish family, and her family often experienced discrimination for their belief. She attended Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, in 1964. She entered the Parsons School of Design in New York City in 1966. There, she gained art connections and was introduced to Richard Avedon and other photographers. Kruger was hired by Condé Nast Publications as a second designer for Mademoiselle magazine and promoted to chief designer in 1967. She worked at Mademoiselle for four years, then left to pursue work as a freelance picture editor and graphic designer at Aperture, House and Garden, and other magazines (Myers, 2022). She began focusing on creating artwork in 1969, combining traditional female art forms and contemporary but would be unsatisfied and would eventually take a hiatus from creating work and focus on academia and writing. In the late 70s, Kruger would cycle back to art and begin developing” her trademark style of black-and-white photographs of cultural images from mainstream sources that were juxtaposed unexpectedly with familiar phrases or slogans typeset in the Futura Bold Italic font against a red background” (Myers, 2022). Kruger went beyond the museum and gallery setting to use large-scale public areas as you would use for advertising. Her work was displayed on billboards, subway posters, bus placards, and display windows.  Also, using new media such as film would allow for a multisensory tool for exploring social, economic, political, and cultural issues. Kruger's commercial art and advertising background gives her fundamental insight into images' circulation and cultural impact(Hernandez,2022). Reappropriating tools designed for consumer consumption allows for a wider range of accessibility to her art. She integrates it into everyday social life, therefore confronting the contemporary art world structure.

                                Barbara Kruger – Consumerism, Power and the Everyday (2017) Tate

 

References

Gaylord, K. (2016, January 1). Cindy Sherman. MoMA. Retrieved April 13, 2024, from https://www.moma.org/artists/5392

 

Hernadez, M. L. (2022, January 1). Barbara Krueger. MoMA. Retrieved April 13, 2024,

from https://www.moma.org/artists/3266

 

Minichiello, M. (2023). Cindy Sherman. Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia.

 

[MoMA]. (2021, January 1). How mass media representations shape us | Cindy Sherman | UNIQLO ARTSPEAKS [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=239_BLVToB8

 

Myers, A. (2022). Barbara Kruger. Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia.

 

[Tate]. (2017, January 1). Barbara Kruger – Consumerism, Power and the Everyday [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVxtKcDOHYc