Why Barbara Kruger Is Plastering Los Angeles With Existential Questions ‘About What It Means to Live Another Day’

Artist Barbara Kruger‘s
signature sans-serif slogans are being plastered all over Los
Angeles this week as part of a new public art commission from the
Frieze art fair, which is opening in the California city on Friday.
But the average Angeleno, Kruger suspects, won’t even notice
them.

“Most people in the country don’t know the name of one artist,”
Kruger told Artnet News. “People are deluded to think that the
visual arts have any real mainstream currency!”

Kruger’s latest work features confrontational, open-ended
inquiries, such as, “IS THERE LIFE WITHOUT PAIN?” or “WHO DO YOU
THINK YOU ARE?”

The work is part of in her ongoing series “Untitled
(Questions).” Last year for Frieze she presented
works from the series in the form of unobtrusive stickers, slapped
on sidewalks both at Paramount Studios, where the fair was being
held, and near various Los Angeles art institutions.

This year, Kruger has a newly revised set of 20 questions,
presented on a much larger scale: 179 street banners; murals at the
NeueHouse Hollywood, the Standard, and outside of the Geffen Contemporary at
the Museum of Contemporary Art; a bilingual presentation at the
Union Station Passageway Art Gallery on the Los Angeles Metro,
among other sites.

“The questions have always been broad-based, ranging from more
particularized concerns to sort of wider questions about what it
means to live another day,” Kruger said. “I’m not saying this is
going to change the world. I’m trying to engage with issues and
ideas in ways that have constituted my work for the last 40
years.”

Kruger’s boldly graphic works, typically in black, white, and
red, often juxtapose photography with pithy phrases set in Futura
Bold Oblique typeface. It tends to offer biting commentary on
social issues, but Kruger doesn’t want her art to be pigeonholed by
politics. “I am a woman and I consider myself a feminist, but I
don’t make women’s work and I don’t make political work,” she said.
“I hate those categories.”

A Los Angeles resident since 1990, Kruger has seen the city
change dramatically since she first visited in the mid-1970s—and
not all for the better. “It’s getting increasingly expensive and
increasingly hard for working-class poor and even middle-class
people to live here now,” she said. “That’s a global problem for
cities, especially where gentrification is rampant and housing for
working class people is at at crisis point.”

On the other hand, some things have undeniably improved for
artists. “One thing that’s gratifying is the number of people who
get to call themselves artists now has grown so much from when I
started out, when there were 12 white guys in Lower
Manhattan—there were many other people of color and women making
art back east other than them, but the recognition was afforded to
a select group,” Kruger said. “Now, people of different
colors, of different classes, of different genders, are making work
and making commentary. That’s important.”

Even as Los Angeles’s art scene grows, however, Kruger is
hesitant to assign much import to market forces such as Frieze, or
the arrival of mega galleries such as Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth.
“I welcome whatever Frieze brings, but artists are here regardless
of whether there’s an art fair or are hot galleries,” Kruger said.
“Even without an increased gallery presence, without an art fair,
Los Angeles would still be an important place for people to make
culture.”

And despite the prominence of her work at this year’s Frieze,
don’t expect to spot Kruger there. “I’ve never been to an art
fair,” she said.

The project’s unveiling comes on the heels of the announcement
of Kruger’s first major US museum survey in 20 years, which will
touch down at the Art Institute of
Chicago on November 1, titled “Thinking of You. I
Mean Me.” The show will then travel to New York’s Museum of
Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in Queens, London’s Hayward Gallery, and
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

An exhibition of this scale “is terrific and totally unexpected
even after all these years, because I so know what it feels like to
be absent and to be marginalized,” Kruger said. “I worked for a
long time in relative anonymity—it took so long for me to even call
myself an artist.”

“It never ceases to surprise me that people know my name and my
work,” she added. “It’s very thrilling that it played out this way,
but the art subcultures are very arbitrary and brutal and
fickle, and I try not to take myself, or it, too seriously.”

Frieze Los Angeles will take place at Paramount Pictures
Studios, entrance at Lot B 5400 Melrose Avenue or 801 N Gower
Street, Los Angeles, February 13–16, 2020. Barbara Kruger’s works
will be on view at various locations across the city beginning
February 10, 2020. 

The post Why Barbara Kruger Is Plastering Los Angeles With
Existential Questions ‘About What It Means to Live Another Day’
appeared first on artnet News.