MODERN ARTOXFORD

BARBARA KRUGERPATRICIA L BOYD

This exhibition presents a selection of work by renowned American conceptual artist, designer and writer Barbara Kruger (b. Newark, New Jersey, 1945).

The vitality and range of Kruger’s unique oeuvre will be explored in this presentation which comprises a site-specific text installation, multi-channel video installation and a selection of collages.

Background to Barbara KrugerKnown for her dramatic juxtapositions of text and image, Kruger’s bold visual language originated in her background as a graphic designer in New York, where she worked for magazines like Mademoiselle in the late 1960s. This commercial training developed her fluency in arranging words and images to maximum effect. Later Kruger began combining original writing with her own photographs, eventually developing her signature style of bold lettering overlaid onto cropped or blown-up images (often depicting human faces and bodies), along with her distinctive black, red and white palette.

Ideas and ConceptsKruger’s work is primarily concerned with the workings of power in contemporary life. Through ironic appropriation of text and imagery, she deploys the visual strategies of mass media in order to subvert the often manipulative logic at work in the language of advertising, television, films and websites. Kruger’s use of both declarative statements and the imperative, what she terms ‘direct address’, is a consistent tactic throughout her work. This mode of address is used not only to grab the viewer’s attention but also to implicate us in the work’s content, forcing us to confront and question familiar orthodoxies.

The artist has described her interest in popular culture, citing influences such as film, websites, magazines and reality television as a useful measure of contemporary conceptions of value and materialism. Kruger selects specific images to explore the appeal of escapist stereotypes and the impact on the psyche that particular representations of the body and consumer goods can have.

Though informed by feminism and critical of capitalism, Kruger’s work in the main encourages a healthy distrust of institutions or entities which claim authority, particularly those which have a bearing on our own individual freedoms. For the artist, it is power, be that in personal situations and relationships, or on a macro-economic scale through governments and corporations, that is a major determinant in people’s lives.

Paste-upsThis is most evident in Kruger’s careful skewing of familiar idioms to generate aphorisms, which range from the metaphysical to more overtly political agitprop. Examples of this can be found in Kruger’s handmade paste-up works such as Untitled (Talk is cheap) (1985) and Untitled (You delight in the loss of others) (1982) which are on display in the Middle Gallery.

TwelveKruger’s art functions as a site of resistance, positing a new perspective and refuting normative narratives about how we should look, act or think. This is especially evident in Twelve (2004), a multi-channel video installation on view in the Piper Gallery. In this rare film work, twelve conversations - in the mode of the soap opera or chat show - play out across four screens. The protagonists’ unspoken thoughts appear in text at the bottom of the picture, echoing the information overload of 24-hour news channels. In this work Kruger plays with televisual conventions to destabilise meaning and challenge our expectations of cohesive narrative.

Untitled (Titled) 2014 - Upper GalleryKruger’s investigation of rhetoric is further intensified by the work’s impactful graphic style of which the artist says, “I attempt to investigate the complex inter-relationships between power and society, but as for the visual presentation itself, I try to avoid a high degree of difficulty. I would like for people to be drawn directly in the work.” This has been further developed in a brand new text work made specifically for Modern Art Oxford which covers the walls and floor of the Upper Gallery. This immersive environment demands that the viewer be activated and adopt multiple standpoints in order to apprehend the meaning of the words pasted across the walls. While previous installations have focused on specific issues, the installation at Modern Art Oxford presents a more philosophical enquiry in which each viewer cannot fail to be implicated.

This exhibition at Modern Art Oxford presents the inventiveness and diversity of Kruger’s formal strategies, as well as underlining the continued relevance of her political concerns in today’s society.

Kruger’s investigation of consumerism, power and desire echoes some of the ideas explored in Patricia L. Boyd’s exhibition in the Project Space. While Boyd’s sculpture employs a very different formal language, both artists challenge our understanding of value, materialism and the everyday enviroments in which we live and work.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring an introduction by Paul Hobson with texts by Ciara Moloney and Timothy Williamson.

BARBARA KRUGER28 June - 31 August

PATRICIA L BOYDMETRICSProject Space14 June – 3 August 2014

Patricia L Boyd (b. 1980, London) presents new work commissioned by Modern Art Oxford in her first solo exhibition at a UK public institution.

For Metrics, Boyd has produced a series of sculptures that are clad with a 6mm layer of timber lifted from the floor of her studio in Soho in central London, a prime location for many creative businesses. The forms of the sculptures are copied from furniture found in the surrounding cafes and offices, with titles that reference the address of the businesses from which they are sourced.

Designed to be load-bearing, the sculptures both visually and structurally resemble the tables, chairs, and shelving that support the bodies, objects and attendant activities of office workers, freelancers and students. Their surfaces are thick with congealed layers of paint spills, pockmarks, stains and dirt; they are engrained with marks generated by the various artistic processes carried out over time by the studio’s occupants.

Metrics addresses the latent political and social forces present in the world designed around us. The exhibition presents an image of artistic labour with the idea that the materials of a building can bear witness to a process – both an artistic process and a social process of gentrification. This transition is apparent in many city centres, where formerly down at heel areas have been replaced by offices and cafes accommodating a new mobile, wireless workforce. The blending of work and leisure activities in these newly sanitised environments is constructed in the image of past bohemian lifestyles. It is also informed by gentrification processes elsewhere, such as the redevelopment of loft spaces in downtown Manhattan that once housed some of the artists who generated the very idea of a ‘process’-based art that became important for late-twentieth century culture.

Metrics follows on from a previous project of the same title, exhibited on a shelf in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at the invitation of Primary Work Surface, a project space in New York.

Boyd’s critique of the everyday spaces in which we live and work resonates with the concerns explored in Barbara Kruger’s exhibition in our Upper Galleries. While Kruger utilises the language of mass media in her installations and text works, she too poses challenging questions about contemporary conceptions of value and materialism.

THE CREATION OF THE URBAN COMMONS

The city is the site where people of all sorts and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if perpetually changing and transitory life. The commonality of that life has long been a matter of commentary by urbanists of all stripes, and the compelling subject of a wide range of evocative writings and representations (in novels, films, painting, videos, and the like) that attempt to pin down the character of that life (or the particular character of life in a particular city in a given place and time) and its deeper meanings.

The recent revival of emphasis upon the supposed loss of urban commonalities reflects the seemingly profound impacts of the recent wave of privatisations, enclosures, spatial controls, policing, and surveillance upon the qualities of urban life in general, and in particular upon the potential to build or inhibit new forms of social relations (a new commons) within an urban process influenced if not dominated by capitalist class interests.

When theorists argue that we should view “the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common,” they suggest this as an entry point for anti-capitalist critique and political activism. Like the right to the city, the idea sounds catchy and intriguing, but what could it possibly mean? And how does this relate to the long history of arguments and debates concerning the creation and utilisation of common property resources?

The primary means by which ‘the common’ is appropriated in urban contexts is, of course, through the extraction of land and property rents. A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the “character” of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse.

By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognisable. Revitalisation meant devitalisation, according to local opinion. This is the fate that again and again threatens places like Christiania in Copenhagen, the St. Pauli districts of Hamburg, or Willamsburg and DUMBO in New York City, and it was also what destroyed that city’s SoHo district.

This is, surely, a far better tale by which to explicate the true tragedy of the urban commons for our times. The better the common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximizing interests.

Extract from Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution - David Harvey

You Want It (2008) / In Violence (2011) Duration: 30:45mins / 23:02mins respectively

Piper Gallery

Middle Galleries

Upper GalleryUntitled (Titled)Dimensions variable2014

1.

Untitled (Who is beyond the law?)Collage, 43 x 26 cm1989

Untitled (You do what you can to get what you want) Collage, 41.5 x 32 cm1984

Untitled (Free Love)Collage, 42.8 x 31 cm1988

Untitled (You kill time)Collage, 40.8 x 31.8 cm1983

Untitled (We don’t need another hero)Collage, 27.5 x 36 cm1988

Untitled (You delight in the loss of others)Collage, 36.1 x 39.4 cm1982

Untitled (Who does the crime? Who does the time?) Collage, 28.7 x 41 cm1988

Untitled (Your misery loves company)Collage, 43 x 26 cm1985

Untitled (Talk is cheap) Collage, 33.7 x 36.5 cm1985

Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard), Collage, 35.5 x 35 cm1986

Plenty LASingle channel video projectiondimensions variable2008

TwelveFour channel video installation, 15 min. loop, Dimensions variable, 2004

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

13.

4.5.

2.

3.

7.

8.

9.10.11.

12.

6.

Café

UPPER GALLERIES MAPAND LIST OF WORKS

PATRICIA L BOYDMETRICSProject Space14 June – 3 August 2014

Patricia L Boyd (b. 1980, London) presents new work commissioned by Modern Art Oxford in her first solo exhibition at a UK public institution.

For Metrics, Boyd has produced a series of sculptures that are clad with a 6mm layer of timber lifted from the floor of her studio in Soho in central London, a prime location for many creative businesses. The forms of the sculptures are copied from furniture found in the surrounding cafes and offices, with titles that reference the address of the businesses from which they are sourced.

Designed to be load-bearing, the sculptures both visually and structurally resemble the tables, chairs, and shelving that support the bodies, objects and attendant activities of office workers, freelancers and students. Their surfaces are thick with congealed layers of paint spills, pockmarks, stains and dirt; they are engrained with marks generated by the various artistic processes carried out over time by the studio’s occupants.

Metrics addresses the latent political and social forces present in the world designed around us. The exhibition presents an image of artistic labour with the idea that the materials of a building can bear witness to a process – both an artistic process and a social process of gentrification. This transition is apparent in many city centres, where formerly down at heel areas have been replaced by offices and cafes accommodating a new mobile, wireless workforce. The blending of work and leisure activities in these newly sanitised environments is constructed in the image of past bohemian lifestyles. It is also informed by gentrification processes elsewhere, such as the redevelopment of loft spaces in downtown Manhattan that once housed some of the artists who generated the very idea of a ‘process’-based art that became important for late-twentieth century culture.

Metrics follows on from a previous project of the same title, exhibited on a shelf in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, at the invitation of Primary Work Surface, a project space in New York.

Boyd’s critique of the everyday spaces in which we live and work resonates with the concerns explored in Barbara Kruger’s exhibition in our Upper Galleries. While Kruger utilises the language of mass media in her installations and text works, she too poses challenging questions about contemporary conceptions of value and materialism.

THE CREATION OF THE URBAN COMMONS

The city is the site where people of all sorts and classes mingle, however reluctantly and agonistically, to produce a common if perpetually changing and transitory life. The commonality of that life has long been a matter of commentary by urbanists of all stripes, and the compelling subject of a wide range of evocative writings and representations (in novels, films, painting, videos, and the like) that attempt to pin down the character of that life (or the particular character of life in a particular city in a given place and time) and its deeper meanings.

The recent revival of emphasis upon the supposed loss of urban commonalities reflects the seemingly profound impacts of the recent wave of privatisations, enclosures, spatial controls, policing, and surveillance upon the qualities of urban life in general, and in particular upon the potential to build or inhibit new forms of social relations (a new commons) within an urban process influenced if not dominated by capitalist class interests.

When theorists argue that we should view “the metropolis as a factory for the production of the common,” they suggest this as an entry point for anti-capitalist critique and political activism. Like the right to the city, the idea sounds catchy and intriguing, but what could it possibly mean? And how does this relate to the long history of arguments and debates concerning the creation and utilisation of common property resources?

The primary means by which ‘the common’ is appropriated in urban contexts is, of course, through the extraction of land and property rents. A community group that struggles to maintain ethnic diversity in its neighborhood and protect against gentrification may suddenly find its property prices (and taxes) rising as real estate agents market the “character” of their neighborhood to the wealthy as multicultural, street-lively, and diverse.

By the time the market has done its destructive work, not only have the original residents been dispossessed of that common which they had created (often being forced out by rising rents and property taxes), but the common itself becomes so debased as to be unrecognisable. Revitalisation meant devitalisation, according to local opinion. This is the fate that again and again threatens places like Christiania in Copenhagen, the St. Pauli districts of Hamburg, or Willamsburg and DUMBO in New York City, and it was also what destroyed that city’s SoHo district.

This is, surely, a far better tale by which to explicate the true tragedy of the urban commons for our times. The better the common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximizing interests.

Extract from Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution - David Harvey

1.

2.

List of Works

10 Kingly Street (DETOX KITCHEN) ply, reclaimed timber, black paint dimensions variable2014

3.

32 Great Windmill Streetply, reclaimed timberdimensions variable2014

4.

5. 38 Lexington Street (1)ply, reclaimed timber10.5 x 7.5 x 4.5cm2014

11 Brewer Streetply, reclaimed timber 60 x 30 x 25cm2014

193 Wardour Streetply, reclaimed timber, steel bar 200 x 150 x 20cm2014

16 Old Compton Streetply, reclaimed timber 19.5 x 50 x 10cm2014

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

73 Beak Street (2) ply, reclaimed timber 20 x 50 x 2.5cm2014

50 Rupert Streetply, reclaimed timber 15 x 200 x 10cm 2014

68 Oxford Streetply, reclaimed timber 53 x 64 x 75cm2014

18 Brewer Streetply, reclaimed timber, metal bar 45 x 35 x 45cm2014

25 Great Pulteney Streetply, reclaimed timber198 x 109 x 92.5cm2014

6.

10 Frith Streetply, reclaimed timber 50 x 20 x 10cm2014

7.

8.

128 Wardour Streetply, reclaimed timber, steel bar 35 x 35 x 74cm2014

73 Beak Street (1)ply, reclaimed timber20 x 50 x 2.5cm2014

38 Lexington Street (2)ply, reclaimed timber6.5 x 9.5 x 3.5cm2014

9.

10.

1. Pyramid (Soul City), 1967

2. Mirror Fragmentation, 1977

3. Holland Park, 1967

4. Park Lane, London, 1968/2013

5. Vitrine One ‘Location’, 1969

6. Vitrine Two ‘Rope Piece’, 1969

7. Reading Table

8 9 10 1113 12

2

1

1514

2

1

113

7

6

54

PROJECT SPACE MAPAND LIST OF WORKS

MAP

Cover artwork by Patricia L Boyd

Extract from WINNERS, LOSERS, BELIEVERS, DOUBTERS

As you enter the Upper Gallery from the stairs, you find yourself stepping on SUICIDES, narrowly avoiding the SURVIVORS just beyond. Elsewhere, the floor is covered with POSERS, THINKERS, INTELLECTUALS, SYCOPHANTS, PROFESSORS and other familiar Oxford figures. At least, those are the words put there by Barbara Kruger as part of her new installation at Modern Art Oxford. All are often used to categorise and dismiss people as though nothing more need be said since one has already been told exactly what types they are. The letters themselves are strident upper case, so plain as to exclude all qualification and nuance. Many of the words are formed from verbs for things all of us do some of the time — think, feel, believe, doubt, win, lose, pose, survive — which become nouns for people who fit the stereotype of doers of that thing. Not everyone who thinks is a THINKER; a THINKER is someone whose typical activity is thinking. A SURVIVOR is someone whose typical activity is to survive; just surviving isn’t enough. The nouns tend to exclude each other in ways the verbs don’t. You have presumably been thinking, feeling and doing today, as other days, but THINKERS, FEELERS and DOERS sound like three mutually exclusive groups, defined by those oppositions. Just as the labels partition the floor space, so we are all divided into separate groups.

A likely reaction to the jostling crowd of labels is to dissociate oneself from it: ‘I’m not the sort of person who goes round labelling people.’ Such self-congratulation is already close to labelling oneself a non-labeller, by contrast with all those nasty labellers out there. Words are labels. ‘Person’ is a label for persons; ‘label’ is a label for labels. Even the verbs are labels for activities. ‘Think’ is a label for thinking. ‘Do’ is a label for doing. We can’t speak, to others or ourselves, without using labels. Still, we can question our own labelling, not with the aim of kicking the habit altogether, but in the hope of learning to follow it with more caution and discrimination. Sometimes the problem is not too many labels but too few. We may forget that some posers are also survivors and feelers as well. Kruger’s installation doesn’t try (vainly) to shame us into silence. Indeed, it seems sardonically to relish the proliferating variety of scathing terms and their rich, powerful associations (FATUOUS FOOLS, BLOATED EGOS, AIR KISSERS, AIRHEADS). But it reminds us that although we need to apply words, they are potentially explosive, to be handled with care.

Timothy WilliamsonWykeham Professor of Logic at the University of

Oxford2014

JOB DESCRIPTION

Your work is aboutthe frame and the confines of articulated spacethe edge and the tension of a peripheral locatorcolour and the signature of saturationlight and the creation of the illusory sitesurface and the dictates of the forearmplacement and the expository groundformula and the elegant solutiondécor and the belated recognition of the practical artsmaterial and the physical embracefigures and the rhetoric of the realstructure and the puncture of spacebuildings and the direction of taskdislocation and the subversion of the habitualthe arena and the business of menopacity and the exhaustion of social lifedesire and the prolongation of stasisshopping and the image of perfectionutopia and the abandonment of contextsex and the collapse of the closetcommentary and the announcement of the additionalaudience and the scrutiny of womenvisual splicing and the resonance of the cutnaming and loosened singularitiestransparency and the desire for restvoyeurism and the long shothooliganism and the lure of the picaresqueprivilege and the tyranny of exclusionfashion and the imperialism of garmentsbroadcast and the short conversationnarrative and the gathering of incidentsdreams and the sliding of meaningmemory and the defeat of total recalltrauma and the sound that only dogs can heardisease and the accumulation of profitproperty and the feel of valuerace and the fear of differencemoney and the velocity of poweranalysis and the maintenance of the laboratoryneutrality and the dealing of the doubleargument and hand to hand combatlanguage and the rubbing of skinquotation and the rhythm of stacked bodiespleasure and the proper name

Barbara Kruger1984

EVENTS

Talks

Friday 27 June 5 - 6pmIn Conversation Barbara Kruger and Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel art gallery, discuss Kruger’s exhibition and wider work.

Thursday 03 July, 7 – 8pmDirector’s Talk: Future Programme and Events at Modern Art Oxford Join Modern Art Oxford Director Paul Hobson for drinks and an informal discussion of future plans at the gallery, particularly focusing on events and public programmes.

Thursday 17 July, 7pmJosefine Wikström A talk about production and labour in contemporary art, followed by a screening of films relating to her exhibition selected by Patricia L Boyd.

Thursday 24 July, 7.00 – 8.30pmPerspectives: Barbara KrugerThe first in a series of short talks given by experts, academics and professionals discussing exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford from beyond the art world. Including:

Exotic to the Prosaic: The strategies of imaging Haiti Leah Gordon discusses the work of Barbara Kruger and how this relates to her wider work as a photojournalist.

Timothy WlliamsonWykeham Professor of Logic at New College Oxford discusses the work of Barbara Kruger in relation to his work on the philosophy of language.

Performances

The Yard: Summer Sessions July and August

During the summer The Yard will host live music, theatre and performance drawing on the tradition of the performed text and the performance of publishing – the various ways in which both material and ideas and be replicated and distributed. Events include

Music

Saturday 6 July, 3-5pmCharlie Cunningham launches the 2014 Yard Summer Sessions with an exclusive performance of new work.

Print Your TextSaturday 2 |16 August, 12 – 5pmPrinter Richard Laurence making limited editions of visitors’ texts in the yard. Have your poem, short story or Haiku printed in letter set or Risograph. Submit your text by email or bring them on the day.

Independent Publishing FairSaturday 16 August, 12 – 5pmA mini festival of publishing and independent thought including performances, book stalls, workshops and talks. Featuring a live performance of the Fifth Runway Radio Show with Paul Carr and Jenna Collins.

Tours

A series of tours of the exhibition by Modern Art Oxford staff.

Wednesday 1 July, 1pmSally Shaw, Head of Programme

Wednesday 16 July, 1pmBen Roberts, Curator of Education and Public Programmes

Wednesday 30 July, 1pmPaul Teigh, Production Manager Wednesday 13 August, 1pmCiara Moloney, Curator Exhibitions and Projects

Every Friday, 2pmA short introduction to the history of Modern Art Oxford, hosted by a member of Modern Art Oxford’s Team.

Sundays, 3pmA short informal tour of the exhibitions hosted by a member of Modern Art Oxford’s team,