barbara kruger

it's very late at the library and the florescent lights are piercing. i am sitting across from kira who is as out of place as a leopard. it is comical for someone so beautiful to be sitting in a place like this. i've been looking at a book of barbara kruger's art when i don't want to look at the screen anymore, and i think it's a lot of bullshit. it's the most simple, shallow and fun nonsense i've ever seen. i think it's got to say something when you rely so heavily on your font; this art would collapse in comic sans, it's only as appealing as it is aesthetically pleasing, which isn't necessarily damming but in her case, blaring platitudes about consumerism, it makes it all rather dumb. one just doesn't get the impression she's thinking very hard. in particular, her pasting "blind idealism is reactionary" on the side of a bus really made me think of her work with its self satisfied one liners. where exactly does "don't be a jerk" take us? is this at all memorable or do we just want to buy a poster in sleek red and white?

also, the introduction with its requisite references to barthes, derrida and other name brand philosophers tossed out uncited (apparently kruger's thinking about 'power' "calls to mind" foucault) is the most irritating kind of pretentiousness.

i mean, i guess you could argue that she's taking up space to convey vaguely (so vaguely) subversive ideas and therefore encroach on capitalist advertising's monopoly on our subconscious. but i really don't buy that, because the messages she's planting (silly word) in peoples' minds are just tidy, feel good ones consigned to oblivion amidst so many other feel good messages (like "oprah says 'you're beautiful!'" (i don't think oprah has an ad campaign like that, but doesn't it fit?))

was looking through "the architectural review" from may 1967 and one of the ads blared "REVOLUTION!" and then, in smaller font just below, "(IN TILE FIXING!)," and it made me think of barbara kruger again. i don't know why, exactly, or if it's a good or a bad thing, but i guess it's just another example of how readily the phrases she loves, the irony she loves, like "our prices are insane!" http://tiny.cc/clvll are coopted by plain old reactionaries looking to sell stuff. i can totally imagine some ad for a low priced soap with a man in a padded cell who's lost his shit over how cheap it is. actually, you know, that would totally be a great ad.

this all reminds me of the conversation i had with people after the talk by that guy W J T Mitchell about how effective or ineffective different efforts to keep the hooded man, abu grahib man, in conversation after people lost interest. mitchell really liked this poster a group had interspersed (that word is spelled so strangely!) with multicolored ipod advertisements, those with a colorful background and a black figure, with abu grahib man's silhouette with the wires with which they threatened to electrocute him in white like the ipod headphones. he thought this was really excellent stuff. from what i remember of us talking about it afterward, and i might just be remembering this the way i want to, we didn't really agree because, well, it fit in all too well, alarmingly, uselessly well.

i think the way to make people remember abu grahib man, or any of the other big issues barbara kruger wants to address, like domestic violence, are best addressed not with witticisms but by reminding us of the humanness of the victims. i think the only hope we have to care about people is in the specifics of who they are, if we are reminded that they have a name, perhaps, and an age and a mother. if we can, in essence, try to make people care about them in the way we care about people that we actually care about: by knowing who they are. if publicity can foist the intimate facts of someone's life into public knowledge we can forget them less readily, there is such a teeming sea of anonymous unhappy faces that for the tidal waves we see not a drop. sympathy and awareness are the inevitable result if we aggressively underline the common ground, the food anyone anywhere has to eat every day, the insecurity they feel about their nose and their hatred of their little brother TOGETHER WITH the torture they have suffered and their friends who have died. because if not, it's just as neat and forgettable as a snapple fun fact, a bit of trivia, a photo