Compare and Contrast 2 Famous Artists After 1980

Art After 1980

What is art? That question has been dissected and examined from every perspective for millennia. When the concept of modern art is brought up, the immediate impression is a large canvas with solid-colored geometrical shapes that is supposed to have some deeper meaning about humanity. This perspective is obviously very limited. Those who have understanding of the reality of modern and contemporary art know that this is far from the truth. The contemporary art movement allows for the acceptance of all forms of art, from sculpture, to paintings, to digital art, to photography, and anything else that can be imagined. The contemporary artist works from the perspective of this cultural moment and in so doing leaves a permanent impression of that perspective. Two such artists are Paul McCarthy and Barbara Kruger. Thought both working from the current moment, the two artists have very different perspectives and the messages they wish to inform through their art have to be constructed in extremely opposing ways.

Paul McCarthy was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, Utah. It seems incongruous that a city known for wide-spread Mormonism would produce an artist like McCarthy who specializes in taking seemingly innocent aspects of life and making them distasteful. The thesis of McCarthy's early performance art, he stated, was to continue with perverse acts until the audience could not stand it any longer. The result of these works, is the disgust not only at what it is McCarthy is doing but at the consumer culture which has become so harshly jaded that only such atrocities can shock them out of their normal mental space. It is because of the highly controversial nature of his work that McCarthy has been heavily marginalized and unrecognized in the media, except when one of his inflatable sculptures broke loose and broke a window in a children's home. His mentioning in the trade papers is almost always associated with an act of perversion or a misinterpretation. According to Carol Kino in The New York Times, "The lack of recognition also has to do with how much of his work has sex, scatology and abjection writ large -- sort of a slapstick take on the Viennese Actionists -- and with how hard a lot of it is to watch. He is often dismissed as either a troublemaking bad boy or a troubled individual" (1). While neither of these things is necessarily true or untrue, the message of the work is what must be considered, not the man.

Some of McCarthy's more controversial works have been done in the medium of giant inflatable statues. One, a red inflatable Santa Claus with a purported pink Christmas tree has been titled "Santa with a Butt Plug." (See figure 1). Even the most innocent children's images, that of Santa Claus, can be reconstructed to have sexual connotations given the right context. To those who wish to see the aforementioned plug as a tree can certainly still witness that, but the modern era adds a second connotation to everything whether or not it was originally intended, which is the point of the piece. The Santa Claus sculpture was designed for the city center of Rotterdam but was never placed there. The Rotterdam Municipal Council "deemed it unsuitable for installation in the public space" (Santa 1).

Perhaps even more controversial was McCarthy's inflatable statue entitled "Complex Shit" which was a series of brown inflatable pieces of feces installed in a field in Bern, Switzerland. (See Figure 2). Looking at the piece, one cannot help but feel nauseous. Commentators on the piece have made such pithy remarks as "There's another shitty piece of art." This is the point of the piece, that contemporary art is considered pompous and wasteful to the majority of the population. Consequently, any piece, no matter how brilliant will be derided. So, to combat the allusion to fecal matter, McCarthy takes a jab at the art world before his detractors have the chance to do so.

Barbara Kruger is also a controversial figure in contemporary art, but not for the same reasons as McCarthy. Although the two were both born in the same year, their perspectives on life, and the subsequent perspectives of art are completely different. Whereas McCarthy focuses his attention on the perversion of the world underlying the clean veneer of mythology, Kruger is far more concerned with the iconography of popular culture and the detrimental effect it has on humanity. The thesis of Kruger's work is that the modern era is so consumed with popular culture, that we have relinquished and claim to real culture. In her book Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances, Kruger said, "To those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off by the relentless seductions of remote control. We are demi-living proof that the video camera has replaced the mirror as the reflection of choice" (5). For Kruger, there is no delineation between high and low culture, good or evil, or any other dichotomy society tries to enforce on the general population.

Barbara Kruger's favored technique is to take classic photos from advertisement and lay them over with text to illustrate their innate hypocrisy. Many of her works are untitled because she wants each person to read their own message into the piece without the influence of a title. For example, in Figure 3, there is a picture of a face with smoke coming out, an obvious image from an old cigarette commercial. The face seems at peace and rested. Yet the words atop the picture in white lettering on a red field read "Who is bought and sold?" As a nation of consumers, we buy materials that we desire without consideration of the repercussions for that purchase. In the modern moment, we understand the health risk of smoking cigarettes and yet people still do it by the thousands. This piece illustrates the perspective that in purchasing the cigarettes, the person is in fact allowing the cigarette companies to purchase them, body and soul.

Another important theme in Kruger's work is the systematic gendering of the population through popular culture. In Figure 4, there is an adorable little boy trying to flex his muscles to impress a similarly adorable little girl. She is suitably impressed as she pokes his bicep and he makes a grimace indicating his strength and masculinity. Across this image are the words, in the same white lettering against red, "We don't need another hero." The picture seems to come from a 1950s advertisement, a time where the position of the little girl was to be in awe of the strong little boy, to grow up and eventually marry him and bear other adorable children who would carry on the stereotype of their gender. Kruger's art is feminist in nature and her attempts are to show the fallacy of gender stereotypes, especially as they are applied to the modern sensibility of woman and womanhood. The modern little girl does not need to look in awe at the little boy's muscles and, if she does, then she is trapped in an archaic gender role and has not been taught about what she is capable of .