Ruining Representation: Barbara Kruger's Text-and-Image Montage
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Kruger's text-and-image montage is a postmodern critique of stereotypes, embedded in representations of women in particular. The rupture between her own texts and borrowed photographic images generates the tension between those contradictory elements, thereby compelling the viewer to decode socially imposed stereotypes. To reach out a larger audience, Kruger also appropriates the strategy of spectacle, which effectively penetrates the collective psyche of the public. Yet the encounter with the apparently familiar images along with short texts would be greeted with frustration due to the unexpected tension between the text and the image. The inversion aims to compel the viewer to refuse the socially imposed stereotypes of women and ultimately to disclose the formation of the stereotyped representations, which have sustained the patriarchal hierarchy of capitalist society. With her systematic critique of the hidden power relations that constitute representations, Kruger endeavors to dismantle the socio-political system of representation. Kruger's text-and-image montage points to the public site of double erasure of women, whose misrepresentation has been circulated in mass media. The female viewer is also deprived of subjectivity in consuming her own misrepresentation. By displacing stereotypes, Kruger intends to make the viewer to think about the way in which to represent him-or herself. Kruger's subversive intention aims to give a place back to the viewer, whose difference in gender has been assimilated in constructing a homogeneous Other. By looking into the work of Barbara Kruger, female activist artist, this paper does not intend to replace a hero with a heroine in art history. It is more interested in the song rather than the singer. Kruger's deconstructive and subversive text-and-image montages seek an optimistic future. Kruger endeavors to disclose the social system that has been in shadow under the History. She wants to displace the singular and univocal history into “a chorus of stories, a crowd of reckoning.” Her notion of the new history is “not only about the pain of the past, or the struggles of the present, but implicitly and explicitly proposes inclusive definitions for democratic futures”(Kruger, 1993: 15).
Abstract
Kruger's text-and-image montage is a postmodern critique of stereotypes, embedded in representations of women in particular. The rupture between her own texts and borrowed photographic images generates the tension between those contradictory elements, thereby compelling the viewer to decode socially imposed stereotypes. To reach out a larger audience, Kruger also appropriates the strategy of spectacle, which effectively penetrates the collective psyche of the public. Yet the encounter with the apparently familiar images along with short texts would be greeted with frustration due to the unexpected tension between the text and the image. The inversion aims to compel the viewer to refuse the socially imposed stereotypes of women and ultimately to disclose the formation of the stereotyped representations, which have sustained the patriarchal hierarchy of capitalist society. With her systematic critique of the hidden power relations that constitute representations, Kruger endeavors to dismantle the socio-political system of representation. Kruger's text-and-image montage points to the public site of double erasure of women, whose misrepresentation has been circulated in mass media. The female viewer is also deprived of subjectivity in consuming her own misrepresentation. By displacing stereotypes, Kruger intends to make the viewer to think about the way in which to represent him-or herself. Kruger's subversive intention aims to give a place back to the viewer, whose difference in gender has been assimilated in constructing a homogeneous Other. By looking into the work of Barbara Kruger, female activist artist, this paper does not intend to replace a hero with a heroine in art history. It is more interested in the song rather than the singer. Kruger's deconstructive and subversive text-and-image montages seek an optimistic future. Kruger endeavors to disclose the social system that has been in shadow under the History. She wants to displace the singular and univocal history into “a chorus of stories, a crowd of reckoning.” Her notion of the new history is “not only about the pain of the past, or the struggles of the present, but implicitly and explicitly proposes inclusive definitions for democratic futures”(Kruger, 1993: 15).
참고문헌 (16)
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