Tramway Presents Barbara Kruger - Twelve

Friday, 12 August 2005 19:42

GLASGOW.-Tramway presents Barbara Kruger - Twelve. Twelve is an installation by one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists, Barbara Kruger. Twelve is a large scale video installation of twelve short scenes, written by Kruger, performed by actors and projected on opposite sides of the space to each other. Nine of the 12 scenes occur at the same time in a mealtime setting. Text scrolling along the bottom of each scene suggests the thoughts or words of the people involved. Each scene lasts between 6 seconds and 12 minutes and portrays discussions between groups, friends or families, which evolve into arguments. The viewer stands in the centre of the installation going on around them, thrust into the middle of discussions which become increasingly hostile, feeling unease at witnessing something private yet public, real yet unreal, violent orally/ aurally but not physically. Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and now lives in New York and Los Angeles. After attending The School of Visual Arts at Syracuse University, she went on to study Art and Design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York. Barbara Kruger’s iconic red and black text and image works, where fragments of images are overlaid with short phrases or captions, owe much to her early career in graphic design and art direction at Conde Nast Publications. Since then, Kruger has sustained a career which spans over thirty years. Her work is included in all major collections of contemporary art throughout the world, but is just as likely to be placed in non- art environments – billboards, public parks, train stations, or match boxes. Barbara Kruger uses popular culture as both a subject and a tool in her work. Images taken from sources such as fashion magazines are juxtaposed with provocative text to criticise the very structures and values these magazines propagate. Her work poses questions, scenarios, and ideas on a range of subjects - economics, consumerism, gender politics, race, personal rights, autonomy – but all can be reduced to a simple exploration of how people function and co- exist within a hierarchical society.

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