How to Read Art

The Museum of Contemporary Art has run some radio ads for its newly opened exhibition, “Barbara Kruger,” during Howard Stern’s show, L.A’s morning drive-time ratings powerhouse. It’s an excellent fit.

The shock jock is loud, graphic and in-your-face. So is Kruger’s art.

Stern is obsessed with subjects like sex, power, race and religion. So is Kruger.

The self-proclaimed King of All Media has spread his domain from radio into publishing, movies and television. Kruger has made the dizziness of experience in the modern world of mass media a linchpin for her art, in the process producing graphics, billboards, TV spots, installations, murals, sculptures, magazine and book covers, newspaper editorials, T-shirts and other merchandise.

Stern was an early avatar of the Populist phenomenon of pushy talk radio and TV. Kruger, with her keenly honed text-and-image aesthetic of punchy visual sound bites, is the artist for our noisy Age of Talk.

In addition to these cursory links, though, another more direct connection between Kruger and Stern helps clarify the profoundly liberating quality of her work. In 1992, Kruger wrote and designed an Esquire magazine cover story about Stern (a copy is in the MOCA show, reverently shielded under plexiglass). The cover features Kruger’s trademark graphic style: black and white publicity photograph of the subject, his face partly obscured by fire engine red blocks containing clean white type in Futura Bold Italic. The headline blares, “I hate myself.”

Across the bottom of the page, in a small, narrow red block with even smaller type comes the kicker: “And you love me for it.”

The snappy cover generates a whipsaw chain-reaction that ricochets from the subject to the reader to the author to the mass media context, holding all four in dazzling equilibrium. Witty, smart, double-edged and right on target in locating the celebrity’s hugely popular ethos, this is brilliant graphic design. In the cover story, Kruger went on to give a carefully nuanced analysis of the Stern phenomenon, acknowledging the full range of political positions, progressive to reactionary, he embodies.

Herein lies the primary achievement of Kruger’s best art: She forces open a space for critical thought within mass media representations otherwise characterized by uncritical judgments. In analyzing stereotypes and bending media techniques toward her own purposes as an artist, she relocates social experience onto a gray scale--the indistinct place where life is actually lived, but where mass culture rarely goes.

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Banished are black and white distinctions. Gone are thumbs up/thumbs down conclusions. Battles between absolute good and evil are recognized as stemming in part from the very stereotypes inevitably made of both.

As a feminist, Kruger certainly makes her areas of greatest interest plain. Throughout the MOCA show, which was organized by curator Ann Goldstein and surveys 20 years of productivity in an ambitious installation of some 70 works at the Geffen Contemporary, issues of special concern to women proliferate. And they are of concern to men because they are of concern to women.

They range from abortion to battering, domestic labor to breast cancer. While it’s easy to surmise what the artist might do in a voting booth, where only one lever can be pulled, Kruger seems profoundly uninterested in making art that describes her expressive self.

Building instead on traditions of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art, she looks at a classic feminist dictum from the other side of the looking glass: Here, the political gets personalized.

A terrific work like 1989’s “Untitled (Your body is a battleground),” which also became a popular T-shirt, shows how. It utilizes Kruger’s standard approach: black and white photograph, which instantly distinguishes itself from today’s color-intensive norm; photo pulled from an archive or technical manual, rather than shot by the artist herself; image enlarged and screen-printed so that the dots show and transparent photographic truth disappears; white typeface (declaring the subtitle) spelled out inside emergency-red boxes.

The image shows a woman’s face, frontally and split down the middle. The right side is a photographic negative, the left side a positive. Darkness and light, good and evil, the battleground of opposing forces--contemporary issues like abortion, AIDS and the flux of mass media itself emerge without being specified.

Precisely where the artist or the viewer stands on these pressing, polarized public issues is here less important than their transformation from ethereal abstraction to visceral embodiment. Regardless of position, your body is the field on which ideological warfare is waged.

MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary is a great space for the display of art, but it’s not always the best for the narrative rigors of a retrospective survey. The Kruger installation packs a wallop, but audiences could benefit from a floor plan.

Like many Conceptual artists in the late 1970s--from Alexis Smith to Vernon Fisher--Kruger began by pairing literary text with images. This rarely seen formative work is housed in rooms tucked beneath the mezzanine.

On the mezzanine itself are examples of ephemera and merchandise, from T-shirts and coffee mugs to magazines and photographic documentation of large-scale public projects, such as billboards. Also upstairs are three recent sculptures in fiberglass painted white, all on the theme of sex, power and deceit. These perverse “monuments” owe something to the wildly over-the-top precedent of Jeff Koons.

The main gallery features the trademark work that evolved in the 1980s and for which Kruger is best-known today: large photographic silk-screens and lenticular images. Because she hasn’t shown much in L.A. since 1990, the more recent works are perhaps the most intriguing.

They include two tour de force installations. “Untitled” (1994) is a hair-raising meditation on the deep human need for spiritual faith and the potentially corrosive power of organized religion, its disembodied voice-of-God narration and voluble soundtrack of shrieking crowds reverberating throughout the entire exhibition (think “Monday Night Football” merged with a Nuremberg rally). Building on video installations pioneered by Bruce Nauman, 1997’s “Power/Pleasure/Desire/Disgust” personalizes the collapse of the public world, elucidating everyone’s aching need to be heard by another human being--that is, to be freed from an awful prison of privacy.

Stereotype being a printer’s term, the proliferation of stereotypes in mass media is inevitable. But works like these avoid the easy, polarizing postures of much politically oriented contemporary art. Kruger has a rare gift for maintaining visual simplicity, all in the service of enlightening conceptual complexity.

* “Barbara Kruger,” MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Feb. 13. Closed Mondays.