Roni Horn (born September 25, 1955) is an American visual artist and writer. Horn has been intimately involved with the singular geography, geology, climate and culture of Iceland.
Tag: Western design
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Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist. Most of her work consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as “you”, “your”, “I”, “we”, and “they”, addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Kruger currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
Most important element is the political content, making it clear and bold, though often based on enigmatic images and contradiction.
She works visually with text usually short quotes in bold typeface eg futura, and uses black, white and ‘lipstick’ red, sometimes other bold colours or limited palettes. Sometimes in caps, sometimes lower case and often reversing front and background colours.
Appropriation eg images from 1950s used in 1980s. Silkscreen.
Short introductory overview. Image and Text
Much of Kruger’s work pairs found photographs with pithy and assertive text that challenges the viewer.
Kruger has said that
“I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t.”
A larger category that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. In describing her use of appropriation, Kruger states:
Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.[16]
Her method includes developing her ideas on a computer, later transferring the results (often billboard-sized) into images. Examples of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground,” appearing in her trademark white letters against a red background. Much of her text calls attention to ideas such as feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, frequently appropriating images from mainstream magazines and using her bold phrases to frame them in a new context.
Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989
Belief+Doubt (2012) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Kruger discusses how she constructs her work – deciding which elements of the image interests her most, then placing text accordingly. Barbara Kruger discusses her life and work and how it has evolved from magazine cut and paste to large public murals. The questions are the important thing. Enjoys putting questins on a buge mural space. Kruger discusses a collaborative project. It is the questions that are important in having a critical view of the world. Whose values, whose hopes and whose fears? Her poster for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington in support of legal abortion included a woman’s face bisected into positive and negative photographic reproductions, accompanied by the text “Your body is a battleground.” A year later, Kruger used this slogan in a billboard commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts. Twelve hours later, a group opposed to abortion responded to Kruger’s work by replacing the adjacent billboard with an image depicting an eight-week-old fetus.
Kruger’s early monochrome pre-digital works, known as ‘paste ups’, reveal the influence of the artist’s experience as a magazine editorial designer during her early career. These small scale works, the largest of which is 11 x 13 inches (28 x 33 cm), are composed of altered found images, and texts either culled from the media or invented by the artist. A negative of each work was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial ‘paste ups’. Between 1978 and 1979, she completed “Picture/Readings,” simple photographs of modest houses alternating with panels of words. From 1992 on, Kruger designed several magazine covers, such as Ms., Esquire, Newsweek, and The New Republic. Her signature font style of Futura Bold type is likely inspired from the “Big Idea” or “Creative Revolution” advertising style of the 1960s that she was exposed to during her experience at Mademoiselle.
In 1990, Kruger scandalized the Japanese American community of Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, with her proposal to paint the Pledge of Allegiance, bordered by provocative questions, on the side of a warehouse in the heart of the historic downtown neighborhood. Kruger had been commissioned by MOCA to paint a mural for “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation,” a 1989 exhibition that also included works by Barbara Bloom, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince. But before the mural went up, Kruger herself and curator Ann Goldstein presented it at various community meetings over the time period of 18 months. Only after protests did the artist offer to eliminate the pledge from her mural proposal, while still retaining a series of questions painted in the colours and format of the American flag: “Who is bought and sold? Who is beyond the law? Who is free to choose? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?”. A full year after the exhibition closed, Kruger’s reconfigured mural finally went up for a two-year run.
In 1994, Kruger’s L’empathie peut changer le monde (Empathy can change the world) was installed on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France. One year later, with architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson and landscape architect Nicholas Quennell, she designed the 200-foot-long (60 m) sculptural letters Picture This for a stage and outdoor amphitheater at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Between 1998 and 2008, she created permanent installations for the Fisher College of Business, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Price Center at the University of California, San Diego. For a site-specific piece that she produced at the Parrish Art Museum in 1998, Kruger placed across the upper range of the museum’s Romanesque facade stark red letters that read, “You belong here”; below, on columns separating three arched entry portals, stacked letters spelled “Money” and “Taste.” As part of the Venice Biennale in 2005, Kruger installed a digitally printed vinyl mural across the entire facade of the Italian pavilion, thereby dividing it into three parts—green at the left, red at the right, white in between. In English and Italian, the words “money” and “power” climbed the portico’s columns; the left wall said, “Pretend things are going as planned,” while “God is on my side; he told me so” fills the right.[23] In 2012, her installation Belief+Doubt, which covers 6,700 square feet (620 m²) of surface area and was printed onto wallpaper-like sheets in the artist’s signature colors of red, black and white, was installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
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Ed Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV (/ruːˈʃeɪ/, roo-SHAY; born December 16, 1937) is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist’s books.
Ed Ruscha works in a very open-ended way exploiting tension between images and text that often seem rather arbitrary in their juxtaposition, making the viewer make their own connections and interpretations.
His approach is mainly aesthetic – interested in abstract potential of words against abstract design underlying his photographs and paintings. Some commentators on the You Tube videos below have seen this as rather vacuous. What concerns me is the way a focus on ‘cool’ leads to a sort of ‘apathy of the sublime’.
Rapid but pretty comprehensive visual overview of his work: photobooks, painting and text with comments by other artists. Ed Ruscha discusses his exhibition ‘Course of Empire’ at National gallery of large paintings of sections of buildings in LA at two points in time. The first 1990s in black and white and the second 2004 showing changes. References the paintings of rise and fall of civilisation by Thomas Cole on exhibition at National Gallery at the same time.
He discusses how coincidences happen in the making of a work. He does not think too much about meaning and has a compulsion to make things as an ‘involuntary reflex’ as he gets up in the morning. The words come from movies, things he hears on the radio, overheard conversations, things he reads. ‘Things just come out of the air’. Then viewers make up all sorts of meanings and connections.An extended interview where Ed Ruscha discusses how his work evolved from his early journey from Oklahoma (slow and simple) to LA (fast and furious). His first car journey he produced as the photobook 26 Gasolene Stations influenced by Robert Frank, Walker Evans and Jack Kerouac, His work on the Hollywood sign comes from the time in 1960s when he could see it from his window as a ‘weather report’ of smog levels. Not sure where ideas come from, but they do. They come. He has to preconceive ideas and puts recognisable things like words and things. Background in abstract painting, type setting and graphic design. His work is about the tension between images eg landscape, mountain tops and their symbolism ‘not making any noise’ and words that he can overlay in any size. He often uses stencils. Experiments with gunpowder. He discusses his photobooks of gasolene stations, parking lots and swimming pools. He describes them as not having any political point, aiming for a cool distance and ‘no style’. But of gasolene stations he also says ‘ what used to be Navaho land now belongs to the white man to put gasolene stations on.’ The work on parking lots and swimming pools seen from a helicopter also point to something (what? Waste? Wealth? Emptiness?) about life in LA. Discusses the ways he works across media, particularly etchings. -
Lawrence Weiner
Lawrence Charles Weiner (February 10, 1942 – December 2, 2021) was an American conceptual artist. He was one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s. His work often took the form of typographic texts, a form of word art.
http://www.artnet.com/artists/lawrence-weiner/
https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/lawrence-weiner
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Richard Littler
Littler has said “I was always scared as a kid, always frightened of what I was faced with. … You’d walk into WHSmith… and see horror books with people’s faces melting. Kids’ TV included things like Children of the Stones, a very odd series you just wouldn’t get today. I remember a public information film made by some train organisation in which a children’s sports day was held on train tracks and, one by one, they were killed. It was insane. … I’m just taking it to the next logical step.
Scarfolk is a fictional northern English town created by writer and designer Richard Littler, who is sometimes identified as the town mayor. First published as a blog of fake historical documents, parodying British public information posters of the 1970s, a collected book was published in 2014.
Scarfolk, which is forever locked in the 1970s, is a satire not only on that decade but also on contemporary events. It touches on themes of totalitarianism, suburban life, occultism and religion, school and childhood, as well as social attitudes such as racism and sexism.
Scarfolk was initially presented as a fake blog which purportedly releases artefacts from the town council’s archive. Artefacts include public information literature, out-of-print books, record and cassette sleeves, advertisements, television programme screenshots, household products, and audio and video, many of which suggest brands and imagery recognisable from the period. Additionally, artefacts are usually accompanied by short fictional vignettes which are also presented as factual and introduce residents of Scarfolk. The public information literature often ends with the strapline: “For more information please reread.”
The aesthetic is utilitarian, inspired by public sector materials in the United Kingdom such as Protect and Survive.
A television series co-written by Will Smith was described as “in the works” in 2018.
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James Victore
Victore’s position comes across loud and direct with his statement,
‘Graphic Design is a club with big f***king spikes in, and I want to wield it.’
His interest in social and political agendas follows the same direction as Garland’s in orientating his work for more ‘useful’ objectives.
In 2005 the director David Hillman Curtis started making a series of short films recording artists, designers, illustrators, and architects talking about their ideas and process. One of these films featured the poster designer James Victore. Hillman said: I chose to film James because of his posters. I didn’t know him or much about him at the time, but I had seen a few of his pieces and had fallen in love with them. I also liked that he was doing work that was politically subversive at a time – the height of the Bush Administration’s popularity – when it seemed as if a lot of creative people were too discouraged to do so. James was very outspoken during the interview, using foul language and cussing out politicians. I kept this stuff in the film and lost Adobe as a sponsor because of it.
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Tom Muller
Experimented with ripped pages, fluoro paper and deliberate print errors to create a raw and dissonant aesthetic for a special collected edition of spy comic zero.
Collage from Zero -
Irma Boom
Irma Boom (born 15 December 1960) is a Dutch graphic designer who specializes in bookmaking. Her innovative and experimental designs often blur the lines between art and literature, challenging the convention of traditional books in both physical design and printed content. Boom has been described as the “Queen of Books,” having created over 300 books and is well reputed for her artistic autonomy within her field. Boom’s work earned her numerous awards and accolades, highlighting her status as a visionary in the field.
website: Irma Boom Office https://irmaboom.nl
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Guerilla Girls (forthcoming)
Guerilla Girls, a feminist group fighting sexism in arts practice. Formed in New York in 1985, the group maintain their anonymity by wearing gorilla masks and using the names of dead female artists as pseudonyms, e.g. Frida Kahlo and Hannah HÖch.
They put pressure on organisations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by uncovering statistics that reveal the extent of patriarchy in the art world past and present. The original group disbanded in 2001 but several Guerrilla Girl spin-offs still exist.
Recent campaigns include ‘Unchain female directors’ targeted at the male-dominated world of the Hollywood film studio.
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