Your body is a battleground: How the art of Barbara Kruger became a feminist rallying cry

It’s likely you’re familiar with Barbara Kruger’s art even if you’ve never set foot in one of her exhibitions. Maybe you’ve stumbled upon it in a newspaper or come face to face with it on a billboard, bus or building. Her best-known work embeds monochrome photographs in coloured boxes, emblazoned with slogans in a swishy font. The palette is restricted: black, white and red. The phrases pithy and terse: “We don’t need another hero”; “You are not yourself”; “I shop therefore I am.” It’s brash, it’s brilliant. It’s art designed to spur us into action.

And until 17 March it will be on show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You, which debuted in Chicago and has had stints in Los Angeles and New York, is a career-spanning exhibition that brings together banners, installations, moving image works and soundscapes that deal in words and pictures. It’s Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London in more than 20 years, and a homecoming of sorts – in 1994 she wrapped a room at Serpentine South as part of Wall to Wall, a show of wall drawings by international artists curated by the gallerist Maureen Paley. It’s also the first of a trio of exhibitions at the gallery devoted to contemporary female American artists including Judy Chicago and Lauren Halsey.

“There’s something incredibly real and powerful about Barbara, the way she has the confidence – confidence in herself, but also in her viewers – to approach big, complicated themes with such openness,” Bettina Korek, CEO of the Serpentine, tells me. Themes to do with class inequalities, capitalism, gender, beauty and vanity, power and how it plays out in our bodies. While her work is punchy and direct, it’s in no way prescriptive, instead leaving it up to us to interpret it as we will. “It isn’t about making judgements,” continues Korek. “It’s about asking questions.”

Kruger’s career began in graphic design. After studying at Parsons School of Design in New York (the great Diane Arbus was one of her teachers), she took a job at Condé Nast in 1966, first in the design department at Mademoiselle, the magazine immortalised by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. During the following decade she produced work for book covers and other magazines – learning how to grab people’s attention. “Barbara has talked a lot about how she has incorporated formal strategies of advertising into her art practice,” says Korek, “and in the age of social media, personal branding, and frayed attention spans, the world has now caught up with her.”

It’s Kruger’s bold visual language that makes her art suited to activism. In the 1980s, her billboards addressing women’s reproductive rights captured the public’s attention. Originally created as a poster for a pro-choice rally in Washington DC in 1989, Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) – reconfigured into a digital piece for the Serpentine show – depicts a woman staring out at the viewer, lips pursed, brows arched, eyes unwavering. Her steadfast expression is emphasised by the overall symmetry of the image, which in turn is highlighted by the sharp line – a front line – bisecting her face. To the left, the glossy photograph exists in its original state; to the right is its negative, the model’s lipsticked mouth and scraped-back hair a ghostly white. The halved face evokes the stark divide in reactions to the new string of anti-abortion laws sweeping the country at the time.

That poster soon became a symbol used in demonstrations for women’s rights around the world. And yet, Kruger never says she makes political art; nor does she claim to make art that’s feminist. I ask Korek what she makes of that, and she tells me Kruger is weary of categorisation. “Feminists are just one of her audiences, and feminist politics only a single facet of her work’s content,” she says. “The work stands on its own, and markers like ‘feminist’ or ‘political’ are more limiting than they are expansive in this case, because the work is always about so many things all at once.”

Kruger is both a defining voice of her era and a part of a larger conversation that – like her art – crosses borders and generations. It recalls photomontage, the technique of cutting and pasting together images from mass media that the German artist Hannah Höch developed in 1917 together with her lover and fellow Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, and which was used to protest against contemporary cultural politics. The colours hark back to those of Russian Constructivism, as seen in El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919), an agitational lithograph in black, white and bloody, revolutionary red.

Coming up in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kruger resisted the pull of painting – which was making a comeback after conceptual art – and instead incorporated photography into her practice, quoting and critiquing imagery from contemporary mass media. She was in the same crowd as Cindy Sherman, who in her witty photographic portraits also draws attention to the deceptive nature of appearance. Kruger exhibited alongside fellow artist and friend Jenny Holzer, whose propaganda-like texts take a similar anti-capitalist approach. Together with the feminist artist collective the Guerrilla Girls, she took to the streets with her art. She’s inspired legions of young artists, among those she’s taught at UCLA over the decades.

In many ways, Kruger has come full circle. As Korek points out, she began borrowing tropes and logics from the media world, and now the worlds of design and advertising are borrowing from her signature style. The first room of the show at the Serpentine is filled with pastiches of her work lifted from social media. “We’re living in a time where mass engagement means engagement with individuals, but distributed massively,” Korek tells me. “Similarly, Barbara’s ideas are universally relevant, but they also provoke deeply personal, individualised reactions.”

Korek was in her early twenties when she first met Kruger, working together with the curator Emi Fontana on Women in the City, a group show of public artworks installed across Los Angeles. Later she collaborated with Kruger on public art projects produced by her organisation ForYourArt – for example, wrapping buses with her work in partnership with the Los Angeles Fund for Public Education – and more recently on the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles in 2020. “I can truthfully say that knowing Barbara has changed how I see the world,” she says.

The artist’s work reverberates in unexpected ways. In the wake of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, a new generation is finding affinity with her creations. Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) was doing the rounds online when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Of course, the sustained relevance of her art is somewhat regrettable. The artist has said so herself: “It would be great if my works became archaic, if the issues that they try to present, the commentary that I’m trying to suggest was no longer pertinent. Unfortunately, that is not the case at this point.”

Now approaching 80, Kruger continues to bring together gallery-goers and protesters, to unify audiences across the ages. As long as injustice and inequality remain, she’ll be here, rallying us, asking questions.

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You is at the Serpentine until 17 March