Art Essay on Your Body Is a Battleground by Barbara Kruger

Your Body is a Battleground' is an art created by Barbara Kruger. The image is composed of a woman's face who is staring directly at the viewer. At the middle of the picture, there is a line that divides the image into two parts. The symmetrical face is cut into a positive side on the left and the negative side on the right. The woman's face has black and white color, with the white color on the left and darker color on the right. The slogan specifically addresses the viewer with the words inserted on a red background but written in white print. The white colored words with the Futura bold are borrowed from the press of Yesteryear. The image is medium in size, and the woman's face covers three-quarters of the whole image. The woman's face is split into two, the red, black and white color utilized in the art indicates the inner struggle of good and evil in a female's life. Kruger has emphasized the subject of her work by making the woman stare straight ahead through the images print and the viewer can easily interpret the picture through the gaze and words across the face (Robertson and Craig 87).

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Barbara Kruger used the techniques of the oppressive society to come up with the art which mostly addresses women. Barbara has used vintage images from the magazines which she has been able to portray that a woman's physicality in the world is a battleground. The artwork was designed in 1989 and used as a placard in a women's March in Washington as they protested for rights to decide about child's abortion and birth. Several women organization held the demonstrations on April 9, 1989, over the law that had been passed to restrict public funds for institutions that conducted abortion (Robertson and Craig, 96). The purpose of the photomontage created by Barbara was to attract many people to the event. The woman in the image is from magazines of 1950's. She has a neat hairstyle, perfect makeup and her face reveal a feminine ideal that is contradicted by the division on good and evil.

The beliefs and customs of the white culture were that a woman must correspond to certain aesthetic, moral and political principles. The art signifies that a woman has the right to choose what to do with their bodies. The art has expressed ideas and emotions of how culture expects women to act and how the beliefs and customs affect women differently in the community. Your body is a battleground' represents a woman's body in a way that underlines the superiority of the body to denounce it better. The artist has focused on how the values and ideas of the culture control sexual issues, racial minorities, women bodies and their behaviors.

Barbara Kruger also intends to draw people's attention with the help of a powerful image and words so as to break the calm in which social norms had been imposed on every woman (Robertson and Craig 91). This art specifically addresses women and how the society expects women to behave. It is a direct and individual invitation for the audience to react and give up being passive. Generally, the society has constructed unoriginal image of how a woman should present herself regarding entity of beauty. The positive and negative sides show how men view women as objects that must fight to be noticed in the society. This is the feminist struggle revealed in the art with the two sides meaning women versus stereotypes and women versus patriarchal society.

The image also shows some political significance, the split of the face indicates right and wrong. The ideas of power are mentioned since women are deprived of the option of fighting for their rights in the society. The art raises questions of the place women occupy in law and a male dominant society. The art addresses women rights in childbirth and the manner in which Barbara portrayed the work has a political significance because it was used to fight for women rights. Your body is a battleground' art was a deliberate action by Kruger to support the demonstrations as it attracts many people in the event. Kruger created the work because of the infamous Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade. The art also signifies how authoritative the control figures in a community have the power to control how a woman manages her body.

The artwork by Barbara Kruger clearly illustrates that a woman in the society has to wage constant battles with her image when she had no rights to make her own decisions. As a feminist, Barbara helped fight for women rights and stop the people in power to make decisions that oppress women. The art reveals how the female body is dominated by the standards imposed by men and the rules they set in the society hence becoming more powerful than women. The art led to the reflection of law hence giving women the right to make decisions about their bodies.

Works Cited

Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.

"Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)." Society Swallowed Beauty. N.p., n.d. Web.

2 Mar. 2017. <https://lflynn1997.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/untitled-your-body-is-a-battleground/>.