Blending AIDS Awareness, Art for a Day : The Artist: For Barbara Kruger, whose works will be on view in Newport, the less that is said or written about her pieces, the better.

Barbara Kruger may have a closer relationship with the media than any other contemporary artist: Her work has appeared on the covers of Esquire, Ms., Newsweek and the New Republic. Don’t ask her to actually talk to the press, however.

Recently, in a very brief interview about two of her pieces that will be displayed at Newport Harbor Art Museum for Wednesday’s A Day Without Art, she said she’d prefer not to have her works written about at all.

“I just like to have them reproduced as much as possible, with as little captioning as possible,” she said.

If that guiding ideology doesn’t make for lengthy newspaper profiles, it has well served Visual AIDS, a New York-based AIDS collaborative that originated A Day Without Art in 1989 to enlist the arts in the fight against AIDS.

Kruger was one of several artists to produce images for Visual AIDS “broadsides,” which the group defines as “artworks” to be reproduced on everything from billboards to T-shirts “to educate diverse audiences about AIDS and to promote action that addresses the AIDS crisis.”

Her broadside image--which will double as the museum’s A Day Without Art program--is one of her signature couplings of words and images which, like those exhibited around the world and emblazoned on the magazines she contributed to, unflinchingly address such issues as domestic violence, sexual harassment and consumer culture. It depicts a human skeleton, belting out a song, superimposed with the message:

“Girl, don’t be dumb, don’t be coy, don’t be intimidated, don’t think it can’t happen to you. Do safer sex because AIDS kills. Don’t die for love.”

Kruger, a graphic designer and picture editor for two national magazines in the ‘60s and ‘70s, explained, albeit tersely, that the work’s genesis was no different from that behind any artistic project.

“I am sort of constructed and contained by the world we live in, and my work is a response to that world,” she said, speaking from her New York home. “Like all artists, we reflect the culture we are in. AIDS is very prevalent.

“I think that somehow all art--whether it’s a motion picture, a novel, a building, a TV show, a good piece of journalism--is a shorthanding of what it feels and means to be alive. . . . I pick images and words to put together to be effective on a visual level.”

The same applies to Kruger’s untitled photographic work the museum will exhibit, she said. The image of a stopwatch, clutched in a woman’s hand, is repeated nine times. Beneath each image is a different word: Happy, Sad, Awake, Asleep, Hopeful, Doubtful, Relaxed, Tense, Alive.

The words describe states “we experience from moment to moment,” she said, “and I believe that moments congeal into hours and days and construct a life, and I was just trying to reflect on those moments, those thoughts, those feelings, those fears, those pleasures.”