The work of Barbara Kruger is more poignant than ever

Jennifer Piejko

Your body is a battleground

The woman I’m facing reveals much more than she may intend to: Tight-lipped, her steady gaze looks directly ahead. Her polished styling and neutral expression still disclose that she is ready for battle. She’s also printed on a large square of silk and, by now, has multiplied enough times, both online and in fabric, to create her own artillery of replicas. <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6907/Barbara-Kruger" target="_blank">Barbara Kruger</a>’s Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) (1989) was made in what we might refer to today as her brand: Like so many of her works, it was made economically in every sense, beginning with the found vintage photographic image of a symmetrical, commercially appealing face that serves as its focal point. The model’s refined, elegant 1950s-era sophistication and vacant yet focused gaze radiate both elegance and anonymity; giving her any unique identifiers would narrow down who she might be, when the point is she could be many women, perhaps even the viewer. Kruger uses her inconspicuousness to make her relatable in the work; the ‘Your’ in Your Body is directed at anyone who can see themselves within it. Like many of her other works, the artist combined this with a short, blunt statement in bold sans-serif Futura font, then tuned the entire thing in a palette of black, white, gray, and red layered color blocks. The resulting picture then goes on silk-screen, paper, walls, billboards, or school buses, provoking passersby with her proclamations and rhetorical questions.

Perverting the visual language, virality, instructiveness, and delivery channels of traditional advertising, she’s made a practice of using the castoffs of marketing – magazine advertisement pages, newspaper clippings, and paint – and toeing the line of copyright infringement to create conceptually incisive, provocative, viral art, a style which has amusingly become recognizable for the marketing campaigns that her artwork directly influences. Her education and early career helped to hone her methods as a visual artist as well: After attending Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design, she spent the 1960s working in the graphic design department at Condé Nast, where she became chief designer at Mademoiselle, a magazine geared toward young women.

The rest of the work’s title reads as simultaneous diagnosis and warning – your body is a political, social, and cultural public battleground, one to not only determine, but defend. The artist initially proposed Your Body as a flier graphic for Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) to use during the Women’s March on Washington on April 9, 1989, a protest held to call attention to women’s rights and gender equality in the US, whose conditions remain under constant legal threat. The crowd of 300,000 – which included Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Marlo Thomas – carried wire hangers and posters reading ‘Keep your laws off my body’ as they marched past George H.W. Bush’s White House. They came in advance of a wave of lawsuits ushered in by the conservative party in power that threatened the federal right to abortion care that Roe v. Wade granted in 1973. One case in particular, the Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing on Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), a Missouri case which threatened public funds and facilities for performing abortions, played a role in determining the timing of the demonstration. Kruger took her face – not her own, but the one she sourced, monochromatized and reprinted in perpetuity – and plastered the streets of New York as an extension of the protesters in Washington that day.

Roe v. Wade had been on precarious edge since its verdict was announced. Norma McCorvey, better known as Jane Roe, the plaintiff whose body was the literal battleground in the case, was the inadvertent lightning rod on the issue of abortion, eventually splitting the American public, like the figure in the poster, right down the middle. While abortion access seemed more and more secure as the decades after Roe passed, the issue never truly felt settled in American society. Restrictions, often in ‘red’ areas of the map, would get protestors back into the streets, reaching another swell once Donald Trump took office. The 2017 Women’s March took place the day after his inauguration as a general action against many of the 45th president’s established anti-woman stances, both public and semiprivate. By the time that notes from the current Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion had leaked to the press several weeks before the official ruling was released June 24, 2022, organizers prepared for the now generations-old threat of revocation to finally emerge. Access to abortion would no longer be a federally protected right, and, in some states, was revoked immediately due to trigger laws established in anticipation of such a ruling. Kruger’s images became more pointed: A black-and-white graphic she made for The New York Times Opinion section read, ‘If the end of Roe has come as a shock to anyone, that means they haven’t been paying attention.’

Your Body is as sharply conflicted as its subject, and even more relevant today than the day it was made. When the Dobbs draft was revealed, Kruger released the work anew, this time for the cover of New Yorkmagazine. The only change was her text: It now read ‘Who Becomes a “Murderer” in Post- Roe America?’ Now that individual states were free to enforce their own rights, restrictions, and penalties by drawing their own lines through the biopolitics of abortion, the stakes had risen to a new high. A woman would be prosecuted as a killer for undergoing, or perhaps even pursuing, a standard abortion procedure. So might the doctor who permits it. Barbara Kruger saw this coming, and tried to warn us with another oracle of a work, this time in 1986: HOW COME ONLY THE UNBORN HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIFE? This article was originally commissioned for the Art Basel Miami Beach magazine 2022.Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Detailed installation view of&nbsp;Barbara Kruger,&nbsp;Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989/2019, David Zwirner, New York. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner. A dark filter was applied over the image for readability. 2. Installation view of&nbsp;Barbara Kruger,&nbsp;Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987/2019, David Zwirner, New York. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.&nbsp;

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