Arty Farty Friday ~ Sun Aquarian Barbara Kruger

Below is a re-airing of a 2011 post...just because. Before starting the re-run, though, I looked around to discover whether Ms Kruger has had anything to say about the current election season. I found this, by Bob Duggan, relating to the 2012 election season at Big Think: How Barbara Kruger Asks the Questions This Election Must Answer. The exhibit is still on view, I understand. I haven't yet found anything specifically related to 2016 though. I like this one of Ms Kruger's for our current situation:

Barbara Kruger (Sun Aquarian) is an artist whose work, once identified, is immediately recognisable from then on. She incorporates text and old photographs from magazines, or her own photographs, to present provocative messages. These concern consumer culture, stereotyping, feminism, politics etc. In recent years she has moved into video art and installation art.



One of Ms Kruger's best known slogans “I shop therefore I am” mocks consumerism.



She also uses her artwork as a platform to make known her political and social views on some controversial issues such as abortion i.e. “Pro-life for the unborn…Pro-death for the born.”


In an interview with Barbara Kruger conducted by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve in the November 1997 issue of Art in America, titled “The Art of Public Address,” Ms Kruger explained:

The brevity of the text is about cutting through the grease. I just want to address people in a very forthright manner. It is why I always use pronouns, because they cut through in the same way. Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in. I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty. I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.

Barbara Kruger was born into a working class background in Newark, New Jersey on 26 January 1945. After graduating from Syracuse University, she enrolled in Parsons School of Design in 1965. Shortly after, she was given a job at Mademoiselle.

From an interview at Dazed Digital

I felt like a Martian at Syracuse University. Most of the people there were very wealthy and had a lot of facial surgery. After the first year at college I saw little reason to stay. And my father had died, so I wanted to be closer to my mom in New Jersey.

I transferred to Parsons School of Design and studied with Diane Arbus. She was the first female role model I had that didn’t wash the kitchen floor six times a day.
I left school at 19. I didn’t have the money to continue. Initially, I got a job as a telephone operator. Then I was hired at Condé Nast as an assistant designer at Mademoiselle Magazine.

In the beginning, it was thrilling to work for magazines because it was all new, and I thought I wanted to be Art Director of the World! But I soon realised that I just didn’t have it in me to be a designer. Designers have to construct millions of different images of perfection to suit their clients. The have extraordinarily broad skill sets. I admire that tremendously, but I could never do that.

I didn’t have a pot to piss in so I started to take all these teaching jobs. Without a degree you couldn’t get a real job, so I just got visiting jobs. I first went to CalArts in 79 and I think at that point I realised I liked LA. I’ve been in Los Angeles for almost 22 years now.

(12 noon chart - time of birth not known.)


No wonder I've been cheering on every example of her slogans I've uploaded for display here! Ms Kruger's natal Sun is in the same degree of Aquarius as my own, and she, too, has Mercury in Capricorn. Socially aware, interested in communicating in a straightforward, no nonsense fashion! There the similarities end though.

Without a time of birth I cannot ascertain rising sign or exact Moon position, but whatever her time of birth Moon would be somewhere in the sign it rules - and possibly the most "female" of all the signs - Cancer, which I think clearly links to her connection with feminism.

There's a lovely Grand Trine in Air in her chart. Uranus in Gemini and Neptune in Libra link to each other in harmonious trine, and both link to her Aquarius Sun, and underline her Aquarian traits of slight eccentricity (Uranus ruler of Aquarius), and creativity (Neptune).























Many more examples can be seen at Google Image.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

Look, we're all saddled with things that make us better or worse. This world is a crazy place, and I've chosen to make my work about that insanity. (Barbara Kruger)