BARABARA KRUGER PLENTY TO OPEN AT GUILD HALL SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATION, VIDEO INSTALLASTION AND SHOW OF WORKS
On August 14 from 2-4pm, BARBARA KRUGER PLENTY exhibition opens at Guild Hall and will be on view through October 11. There is a special preview on Friday, August 13 at 6:00pm which is part of Guild Hall’s Summer Gala that celebrates this exhibition. In keeping with Guild Hall’s mission of exhibiting artists of the region, the entire museum has been turned over to Barbara Kruger.
“Barbara Kruger is one of the most important artists of this century. Her work is exciting and challenging. I have wanted to work with her since I first became Curator of Guild Hall in 1990 and am delighted that the opportunity finally arrived for our schedules to coincide and work together on this amazing exhibition,” said Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Museum Director and Chief Curator.
For the exhibition Barbara Kruger will create a site specific installation in the Moran Gallery and a video installation in the Woodhouse Gallery, while a selection of photographs and prints by East End Collectors will be exhibited in the Spiga Gallery. This is the first site specific installation and video installation for Kruger in the Hamptons, a place where she has summered for the last 21 years.
The show’s brochure states:
Barbara Kruger is an artist whose work for the past 40 years has defied categorization. Is she an installation artist, feminist artist, appropriation artist or conceptual artist? Is she a video artist, photographer, sculptor? The correct answer is all of the above. But we shouldn’t stop there, we should also add curator, teacher, writer, philosopher and social commentator, because Kruger’s work uses images, text and video to decode the social, psychological and political messages that the media uses to bombard us on a daily basis. Her art raises issues of power, politics, sexuality and representation and brings them to the foreground, challenging the viewer to engage and think.1
Barbara Kruger’s work has pushed the lines of High and Low Art until the boundary is blurred and the discussion is nil. Yet the core of her work is about the “discussion” that the work elicits from the viewer. She wants to engage the viewer on their level and make them think. Be it at a bus shelter or in a museum/gallery setting, she is constantly reaching out in whatever format works and uses both public and private venues to do that. Her works range from the monumental to pocketsize, from wrapping the outside of a museum to a matchbox. Her magazine covers, reviews and commentaries for newspapers are perhaps most broadly accessible and therefore reach the most diverse audience worldwide. Whether you are entering a museum gallery, staring at a billboard or watching a bus pass, you are being addressed directly by Kruger’s text. The text often uses declarative pronouns and statements. The text and image play off one another. What is more intriguing? The text, or the image, or is it the combination of the two? 2
In early work from the late 60s, Kruger used her own photographs that she overlaid with text. By the late 70s, she stopped taking photographs and began to appropriate images from commercial printed sources. By the mid 80s much of the work consisted of black and white photographs with overlaid captions set in white Futura Bold Italic lettering on red banner strips. In each of these works the statement was often as bold as the image it was placed over, making a strong political or social comment. The design premise for all these works was in a similar vein and thus made Kruger’s work immediately recognizable, creating a “branded” signature. 3 Kruger added color overlays and images to her works in the early part of 2000. In the installation work Kruger allows the viewer to become an integral part of the work as they walk through it, over it, around it, or underneath it. In these venues she becomes the architect of the environment, creating a space that affects the viewer from the outside in. The installation can engulf, encircle and invite you in or keep you at a distance, not wanting to enter any further. When Kruger works on a site specific installation she takes into account not only the actual space that the installation is conceived for and inhabits, but also the greater community that it will be addressing. For the Guild Hall Museum site specific installation Plenty, 2010, Kruger’s focus is on the rampant consumerism that exists in society today. MONEY MAKES MONEY AND A RICH MAN’S JOKES ARE ALWAYS FUNNY is displayed in 10 feet high Helvetica lettering that encircles the gallery walls. Across the ceiling the text YOU WANT IT YOU NEED IT YOU BUY IT YOU FORGET reinforces the consumer sentiments, and tucked slightly out of view are OWN IT and FLAUNT IT. Two smiley faces appear over the doorway and flank the historic panel, which pays homage Thomas Moran, the first artist in East Hampton to have home and studio. In Plenty, the viewer brings something of themselves, their point of view, their perspective, their socio-economic background and their cultural blueprint to the work so each experiences it in a different way. This work is devoid of images and focuses on text alone. Therefore the viewer must use his/her own point of reference to engage in the piece, since we don’t have visual imagery to ground us.
Over the past two decades, Kruger has also created videos to expand her visual presentations. Kruger’s videos are an extension of the single image and text. They have evolved into the next level and have been put in motion- should we dare say perpetual motion- since most are on a loop. You enter into the darkness and are immediately engaged in a dialogue with what is projected in front of you. Are you part of it or are you an observer? Can you relate to the banality of the moment or the universal ideas that are being questioned? In these environments, you take on the discourse/dialogue of living our daily life, getting from point A to point B. What is the point of that? Is there any? Or is it just what we do - the motions we go through in our daily life. Do we ever stop to think about that? Is that, in fact, the point? In the Plenty video installation, which was made in 2008, and the Plenty site specific installation both touch upon a familiar Kruger theme: consumerism in our present day society. In the video Kruger’s images appear one per second as if they are part of infomercials for watches, sneakers and jewelry on late night TV. They are punctuated with the short messages such as PLENTY SHOULD BE ENOUGH, YOU ARE A VERY IMPORTANT PERSON, HANG UP AND DRIVE, AND PLEASE STOP TEXTING. This work was first shown on a video billboard on top of LACMA West (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and on two video billboards at the Key Club on the Sunset Strip. Plenty was part of the Women in the City project organized by West of Rome. When the video was projected in this commercial format they may not have been immediately recognized as art. Putting the video into the museum setting creates another not-so-hidden layer to the message. Who are the people who come to museums, who are the collectors, artists, or patrons? What has been, is, and what does the future hold about the relationship of our consumer driven society and the contemporary art world? Many layers of meaning and insider jokes are all in play in this one piece.
Barbara Kruger’s work continues to evolve and new subjects further the discourse/dialogue of everyday life events and issues that she brings forth in her powerful, thought -provoking works of art.
Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey. She lives in Los Angeles, New York and East Hampton. She studied at Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts and the Parsons School of Design in New York. After leaving school, she worked for Conde Nast Publications. She has taught at the California Institute of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley.Kruger is currently a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 2005 she was the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 51st Venice Biennale. In 1983-84 she received a National Endowment for the Art Grant and in 19976-77 a Creative Artists Service Program Grant. Kruger’s has had numerous one person exhibitions and her work is in the collections of major museums in the United States and internationally.
Guild Hall Museum Hours and Admission
BARBARA KRUGER
August 14 – October 11
All Galleries
Gala preview August 13, 6 – 7 pm
Reception August 14, 2 – 4 pm
Plenty, 2010 Acrylic ink on adhesive vinyl, Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York (site specific installation)
Video Installation: Plenty, 2008, 3 minutes, 15 seconds.
Works on loan from private collections.
Current and Upcoming Exhibitions at Guild Hall:
Barbara Kruger: Exhibition (Guild Hall Museum) Aug 14 - Oct 11, 2010
Elizabeth Sloan Tyler: 2008 Winner Members Show Part I (Woodhouse) Oct 23 – Nov 28 2010
Ellen Frank: Cities of Peace (Moran and Spiga Galleries) Oct 23 - Jan 16, 2011
Carolyn Conrad, 2008 Winner Members Show Part II (Woodhouse) Dec 4- Jan 16, 2011
Guild Hall Museum
158 Main Street
East Hampton New York 11937
631.324.0806 or GuildHall.org
Through Labor Day: Mon, Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sat 11-5pm & Sun noon-5pm
After Labor Day: Fri & Saturday 11am-5pm & Sun noon-5pm
$7 suggested admission with GH members free
About Guild Hall
Founded more than 75 years ago, Guild Hall is the year-round visual and performing arts center wholly dedicated to serving the residents, members, families, and artists of the East End and offering them, as well as visitors and tourists, enriching experiences by presenting relevant and meaningful programs and events, working in collaboration with artists, and providing a meeting place for the community. For more information and to become a member, visit www.GuildHall.org.
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