“I really view art in a much more expansive sense: an aerosol of commentary, an enormous visual, filmic, sonic, and textual creation of what it means to be alive at a specific time. An ability to visualize, textualize, and musicalize the experience of the world.”
A t remarkable scale, Barbara Kruger’s Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry from 2014 is an arresting banner of brazen rhetoric which mystifies in its vagueness and voyeuristic connotations. Veiling short, presumptuous statements in Kruger’s trademark Futura Bold Oblique typeset under a gradation of grayscale hues, the present work startlingly transfixes the gaze and the mind while evoking a sense of bodily transience. Kruger was a pivotal member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists influenced by Conceptual and Pop Art who utilized appropriation and collage techniques to reveal the constructed nature of images, producing work that often resembled advertising. Containing text simultaneously spotlit and fading within the background, Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry incites questions regarding the human condition and our response to the ever-changing media landscape. Recently the subject of a major traveling exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kruger’s Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry critically examines the viewer’s agency and sense of self with a pointed phrase necessitating idiosyncrasy.
The artist’s late digital prints, of which Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry is a superlative example, reflect Kruger’s interest in the mechanisms of consumer culture and constant shifts in public misinformation. It is within this context that she questions self-actualization and bodily understanding in a society which seeks to capitalize off of every aspect of living. Thus, Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry prompts an inquisitive reflection and a curious voyeurism; “Barbara Kruger forces us to ask, “What constitutes the construction of the self now?” (Zoé Whitley, “Enough About You. Let’s Talk About Me: Barbara Kruger on Contemporary Cultures of Voyeurism, Stereotype, and Narcissim,” in Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, BARBARA KRUGER: THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU., April 2021 - January 2023, p. 85). At once omitting image to concentrate solely on text, Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry engages in direct address to expose and undermine the power dynamics of identity, desire, and consumerism.
“I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction."
Kruger’s use of the Futura Bold Oblique typeface recalls her early career as a graphic designer for the Condé Nast magazine Mademoiselle in the late 1960s, after having studied for a year under Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel at the Parson’s School of Design. Kruger would remain a part of the commercial editorial world into the mid-1970s, during which time she would develop a keen understanding of the effect of manipulating text and images and their “codes of seduction” as the artist would later say, referring to their powerful ability to engage and provoke desired responses in viewers. In 1973, Kruger burst onto the art scene with her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. Her work was soon subject to a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York in 1980, elevating her status as one of the foremost artists of the Pictures Generation, and setting the stage for the remarkable critical and commercial success that followed.
With rich, black and white tonal variations framed by a signature red border, Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry’s ambiguous phrasing considers consumer behavior and the ways in which information instantaneously flows through media. Indeed, the present work is a skillful addition to Kruger’s longstanding dedication to interrogate the systems which form and define our identities. “Kruger’s chosen medium, then, addresses the systems of prejudging form and content. Between Barbara Kruger’s sharp demarcations of black, white, and red, she expands the frame for the existence of liminal spaces between self-doubt and self-belief, superiority and oppression, fiction and reality” (Ibid., p. 87) A penultimate representation of her decades-long practice, Hard Body, Long Story, I'm Sorry boldly confronts the relationship between individual identities and structures of mass media, exposing the inescapable conditions and voyeuristic tendencies of media consumption involved in contemporary culture.
