It’s possibly one of the best-known pieces of art world folklore that the famous US artist Barbara Kruger never set out to be an artist-icon. Rather, she spent years doing graphic design work for women’s magazines before experimenting with the fashion world vernacular to create her own promotional poster for a Women’s Rights March in 1989. She then adapted that to make a large-scale print-based installation artwork.
That work, named Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, shows a young, perfectly proportioned white woman’s face in classic 1950s style, but her image has been split down the middle to separate its “true” appearance from an inverted version that has been made to look grainy and blurred.
The bold red text running down the centre of work displays the pithy slogan, ‘Your body is a battleground’ and it has helped position the piece as a powerful symbol of the fraught place of women’s bodies in the Western world (especially in the US), at that time.
