Borders Visible and Invisible Presentation of 3 Artworks

Borders: Visible and Invisible-Presentation of 3 Artworks

Borders of gender: Artwork that questions the way women are represented

Depicting the female form has been central to the development of Western art, yet women have often been denied the means to create art themselves. Within the works of postmodern feminist artists like Barbara Kruger, the assumptions of what constitutes 'great art' and appropriate ways of representing women are questioned. Kruger takes existing photographs and images of popular culture and reconstitutes them into collages. Kruger, much like male artists before her like Manet and Andy Warhol, reconfigures conventional ways of depicting the female body to cross the borderlines of what is considered art, appropriate sexuality, and appropriate ways of representing women.

This is seen in one of Kruger's most famous works entitled Your Body Is a Battleground. The work gets its title from the literal words that are cut out and transposed upon the black -- and white photographed face of a woman. The woman's face is split into two. Half of the woman is a photographic negative; half looks like a traditional, black-and-white 'glamour' shot from a 30s movie. The woman has been reduced to a photographic image; Kruger suggests to the viewer that this manufactured image must be contested. The fact that women have been rendered into objects of art throughout history makes the female body a symbolic battleground, not merely a literal form.

On the most superficial level, Kruger's image is feminist and challenges the borders of conventional representation because it speaks out against the objectification of women. It uses conventional photographic art, which has traditionally glamorized the female frame, as a way of speaking back. However, its meaning is ambiguous. Is the 'you' of the statement the viewer of the objectified woman, or the woman in the picture herself? What of the male gazer who looks upon the woman? The word 'you' seems to feminize the male observer of the picture, suggesting that he too is drawn into the representational war of the 'battleground' of the woman's body. Even the borders of subject/object and male/female are challenged by the construction of the piece.

This work of Kruger is characteristic of her unique 'look' as an artist. "Barbara Kruger's graphic work usually consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases usually make a bold statement and commonly use pronouns such as you, I, your, we and they" ("Barbara Kruger," Art History Archive, 2012). Kruger's "black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing" as a way of talking 'back' to them and asserting the power of female artists to redefine the female body ("Barbara Kruger," Art History Archive, 2012). The woman of Your Body is a Battleground is beautiful and arresting, even while the use of such an image is specifically designed to satirize and challenge the conventions of women's magazines.

However, the type of objectification of women Kruger is responding to in her work is not solely confined to contemporary popular media representation. Even supposedly transgressive works of art have objectified the female body, as can be seen in the Impressionist Manet's 1863 Luncheon on the Grass. This painting, one of the first Impressionist works, caused public scandal because of its depiction of naked women matter-of-factly eating and bathing with a group of clothed males outdoors. In contrast to late Impressionists, such as Monet, Manet used a more realistic style. The sharply-defined bodies of female nudes and clothed males are in stark contrast to the hazier depiction of water and grass.

Like Kruger, Manet enjoyed taking aspects of existing art -- in Manet's case, high art -- and making new meaning from them. The female nude has historically been a typical subject of art and used to 'represent' sexuality but the realistic (as opposed to classical) setting and its cheeky provocation caused many art critics of the day to see Manet's work as obscene (Luncheon on the Grass, Web Museum, Paris, 2012). Nudity is treated in an irreverent fashion in the context of high art. Instead of depicting a classical Venus nude, the nakedness of his female picnickers are taken for granted, challenging the viewer's sense of what is 'normal,' 'appropriate,' or 'modest.' For a woman to be naked is as normal as having lunch for Manet. The viewer's relationship with the work is less intimate, unlike Kruger's use of the word 'you, but does suggest the experience of being a voyeur, as if the viewer is watching a very private moment of several couples -- crossing the borders between public and private space

Andy Warhol, much like Barbara Kruger also used the female image to satirize commercialism in his depictions of Marilyn. Like his famous soup cans, Warhol used a repeated image of the famous movie star Marilyn Monroe to highlight the ubiquity and meaninglessness of the symbol of the actress within the culture -- there is no 'real' Marilyn anymore, because her image has been endlessly manufactured, like an image of Campbell's soup. Marilyn is painted in garish colors, as if the representation of her is just as 'made up' as the actress herself.