Of all the legacies the art market and its institutions have collaborated to spawn and cultivate, the most self-congratulatory of them all by far is that of Barbara Kruger. The fog of memory clouds our collective recollection concerning her signature style – scaled hectoring – is it a relic of the eighties? Or do we just remember our first encounters with a Kruger from the 1980s and have fixed it there along with the ubiquity of young Bono’s mullet in our collective memory of that synthetic, peak-boomer decade?
Walking through the trite attempt at spectacle her insipid catcalls to armchair revolution bring, Kruger’s similarity to another 1980s boomer art grifter became clearer than a bottle of Crystal Pepsi. Barbara Kruger is not just alphabetically and chronologically close to Jeff Koons, she shares his aesthetic to the point where a good historian should perhaps start digging up “Who did it first?”
Jeff Koons borrows from the familiar and enlarges it. Barbara Kruger does exactly this. While for Koons it is a kitschy image of something that embarrasses anyone aspiring toward being hip, for Kruger it is a phrase, a slogan, a quip which mock anyone encountering these sentiments for the first time. With Koons the joke’s on you if you express your sentimentality toward one of his oversized sculptures. With Kruger, you are part of the problem if you haven’t baptized your body politick in her often cynical lexicon of predictable slogans, most as recycled and unoriginal as the visual terrain mined by Koons.
The retrospective at LACMA revels in the conceit of Kruger as having an endless array of hits. In one room at the beginning of the exhibit, each of these “hits” is reproduced amidst a panoply of others, all for once not grossly enlarged. If you feel some allegiance to this artist because the politics of her work matches yours, congratulations, except, millions of people share these views, many artists create works of art that advance these sentiments, and yet your ego demands fealty to a sign on a wall of a palace run by billionaire trustees who don’t care if you live or die or if your passionate political belief ever becomes active policy. Pathetic really, but Barbara Kruger feeds off such loyalty to remain an art market darling, an employed art college professor and the receiver of fawning, uncritical retrospectives such as this.
But wait, there’s more. See what I did there, I took a phrase (“But wait, there’s more”) from commerce and recontextualized it in my “art”. Except I didn’t make it a portable object that art galleries can sell as unregulated securities, darn it. So in this retrospective, Barbara Kruger made a room where the floor and walls contained her sloganeering. Visually edgy if InDesign circa 1998 is your idea of cutting edge, these rooms only serve to make her work seem emptier, like there wasn’t really enough of it to justify an entire floor in the LACMA-Broad building and they just stretched out the works like silly putty into giant simpleton polemics.
So I’m walking on a floor of text. The guard is yelling at a guy to put on his mask and the text says that the future of humanity is a boot stamping a human face forever which is a George Orwell quote and sadness subsumes me. This is the point of Barbara Kruger, for the viewer to feel sad. She is a buzzkill, the ultimate academic. I doubt she is great at parties although nobody gets to her status in the art world without being a cutthroat networker so who knows… Billionaire trustees of museums and private art schools, that’s who knows! But isn’t it sad, the triumph of an artist who, like Jeff Koons, regurgitates established cultural production as a method of mocking any part of the audience who isn’t an irony-drenched insider? And it is sadder that this tripe as text actually makes Koons look layered and sophisticated when the two are compared.
For over forty years Barbara Kruger has grifted the world of fine art, stinking of unoriginality and hiding behind a manipulative insistence that dumb sloganeering is somehow the equivalent of taking action. Her branded signature style has debased art and its audiences with an empty promise that an affiliation with the Kruger-world Brand™ is a brave stance when, as this LACMA retrospective clearly underscores, it places its adherents in a subservient role, attending the unveiling of an indoor billboard in place of getting out the vote and inspiring fealty with re-tread catchphrases that wouldn’t cut the muster at an outdoor advertising company’s intern brainstorming session. We are in an historical mini-epoch where boomer nostalgia is also the affirmation of recent art history as potentially “for the ages”. Let’s hope the vacuous superficiality and Trumpian self-regard of Barbara Kruger is seen as the grift of culture it is by future generations not seduced by the loudest voice in the room.
The Barbara Kruger retrospective runs thru July 17th at LACMA. The exhibition’s page does not even list an individual curator for the exhibit (LINK) so perhaps we can all just credit this garbage to Big Brother.