Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
January 2018
January 20–May 13, 2018 This selection of video installations from the Hammer Contemporary Collection features major works by the American artists Charles Atlas, Barbara Kruger, and Kara Walker created in the last decade. Using very different strategies of montage, direct address, and narrative imagery, respectively, each of these artists is among our most eloquent social critics. Barbara Kruger’s The Globe Shrinks (2010) is a four-channel, thirteen-minute compilation of video and text that narrates, in a series of scenes and skits, the conflicting coexistence of kindness and brutality. In this work, the “you” that Kruger’s texts often accost momentarily becomes an “us” as she juxtaposes scenes of different people’s everyday interactions. She pairs both tense and intimate performances, putting emphasis on the possibility of agency rather than the inevitability of exploitation. She invites us to consider the impact of our seemingly banal daily activities and communications by highlighting their nuances. Drawing her title from the cultural theorist Homi Bhabha, who theorized that “the globe shrinks for those who own it,” Kruger reminds us of our common humanity through brief moments of sincerity. Unspeakable: Atlas, Kruger, Walker; Hammer Contemporary Collection is organized by Connie Butler, chief curator, and Ann Philbin, director.
