Barbara Kruger on remixing her own art and her visits to 4chan
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and Emerita Distinguished Professor of New Genres at UCLA Arts. LACMA’s “Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” gathers adaptations and appropriations of Kruger’s images, and is on view through July 17th.
"In 1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Kathleen McCarthy Gauss organized a series of exhibitions exploring new ways in which photography was being deployed in art. Among the seven featured artists was a former Mademoiselle magazine graphic designer who had landed in Los Angeles at the end of the previous decade for a teaching gig. That artist was Barbara Kruger and the series, “New American Photography,” was significant for her — one of her earliest solo museum presentations.
In those days, Kruger was producing small-scale pieces that, in form and technique, borrowed from her graphic designer career. Her paste-ups — a term from the language of magazine layouts in the days before desktop publishing — consisted of found images over which hovered words and fragments of texts, often in a punchy sans serif font.
“HOW COME ONLY THE UNBORN HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIFE?” demands a text placed over a negative image of a child’s face. Another piece from the mid-1980s shows a canine’s snarling teeth and the deadpan line, “Business as usual.”" — Carolina A. Miranda, April 4, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
Read more about Barbara Kruger.
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