Barbara Kruger: Snap, Crackle and Pop : Sesssion at UC Irvine Showcases Artist’s Flashes of Wit and Social, Political Commentary

A photograph of a woman’s face is superimposed with the printed words, “Your gaze hits the side of my face.”

On a photograph of a mouth undergoing dental work, the words read, “You are a captive audience.”

On a photograph of a child’s toy frog: “Buy me. I’ll change your life.”

On a photograph of a little girl feeling a boy’s biceps: “We don’t need another hero.”

On a photograph of an empty pocket turned inside out: “Your loss is our gain.”

On a photograph of Howdy Doody: “When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook.”

On a sign: “God said it. I believe it. And that settles that.”

Consumer culture, women’s rights, the religious right, the role of the art market, the governing of America--celebrated New York artist Barbara Kruger takes them all on in snappy pairings of words and images that have been shown at major museums in the United States and Europe as well as at numerous urban outdoor locations.

Some of her pieces are as small as matchbooks; others are as large as billboards (in Los Angeles, one is painted on the side of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary building). Several of the billboards have been translated and displayed in Germany, Japan and Poland. At least one piece was made into a T-shirt.

On Wednesday night, Kruger--who is regents professor at UC Irvine for the winter quarter--gave what was billed as a public lecture on her work. It turned out to be a protracted showing of slides of her pieces, with sparse commentary (mostly about architectural competitions she entered, and how problematic they were), followed by a question-and-answer session with the near-capacity audience, composed largely of students, at UCI’s Fine Arts Concert Hall.

While the hourlong session proved a showcase for the artist’s political rhetoric and flashes of wit, it provided little information about her background and the development of her work (all of which incorporates photographs from other sources).

Still, along the way, one could pick up such tidbits as Kruger’s tempered but positive opinion of women’s progress in art (“We see things changing incrementally”), Kruger’s opinion of shock-radio deejay Howard Stern, about whom she is writing an article for Esquire magazine (“I think it’s great he’s a parody of himself . . . but his racism is deeply disturbing”) and Kruger’s negative view of journalists (“They collapse the complexity of ideas into simple buzzwords”).

Asked how she feels about television, Kruger replied, “TV has changed our lives more than anything else” because “it’s the way we receive history.” Viewers need to learn how to read TV’s messages critically, she said, adding--in the resigned tones of someone who spends a fair share of her time glued to the tube--that TV does have its “vegetative pleasures.”

She praised Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” as “a really important artist. It’s astounding that someone who thinks as conceptually has reached the audience he’s reached.”

“Has your work been censored?” someone asked, referring to her earlier statement that only one American museum (the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) owns a large-scale work of hers.

“It’s hard to say what that means,” she answered. “In this culture, we’ve internalized so much of our oppression.” Her credo, she said, is to “get away with as much as you can,” while realizing that the issue is really “about the huge and enveloping discourse of taste. To many curators, my work is simply not to their taste. It somehow doesn’t incorporate that contemplative moment.”

Kruger mentioned that she recently made one of her “male pregnancy” pieces for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. The piece was a photograph of Bush as a young man superimposed with the words, “ . . . Things are going well. It’s time to enter politics. I just found out I’m pregnant.”

“The thrill was, you know he saw it,” she said.

A young woman asked whether some of the pieces weren’t too verbally sophisticated for audiences that didn’t have a college education. The more accessible ones were made into billboards, while others were more “ atelier- oriented,” said Kruger, sounding oddly prissy as she used the French word for studio. Her work appealed to “different languages, different subcultures, different interests,” she said.

A young man asked her what made her more angry: politics or advertising.

“Neither,” she said, with a touch of irritation. “I’m not angry.” But, she added, “The frightening thing is, there is politics everywhere, in every classroom . . . every dinner table. . . . Politics is not something ‘out there’ you do art about.”