Looking to the Left: Politics in the Art of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, by Jenni Drozdek

In the exhibition catalogue Art and Ideology, feminist art critic Lucy Lippard claimed that all art is ideological and that artists “who remain stubbornly uninformed about the social and emotional effects of their images and their connections to other images outside the art context are more easily manipulated by the prevailing systems of distribution, interpretation, and marketing.”[2]  If Lippard’s statement is correct, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer are exempt from her categorization, given that throughout their careers both artists have manipulated Lippard’s aforementioned systems to spread their messages within the public arena.  While Kruger surveys advertising systems and (re)presents images in order to expose and question power structures, Holzer utilizes an anonymous voice to send messages of authority to the public.  Although they use different media and methods of dissemination, a leftist agenda pervades these artists’ messages.

From: Kritikos: an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image