Barbara Kruger has a way with words. Big, bold, often visually loud words. Kruger mixes exceptional graphic design skills with deep knowledge of the structural complexities of art and language, not to mention the media maelstrom in which modern life is lived. For 40 years, the L.A.-based artist has surveyed the social, cultural and political landscape with a deft combination of acute insight and lacerating wit. No stranger to the city’s museums, where her work has been prominently featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art (a terrific 1999 midcareer survey, plus two incisive building murals), the UCLA Hammer Museum (a blaring 2014 entry installation) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (a somewhat less successful 2008 commission for the three-story elevator shaft inside BCAM, too busy for the available space), the artist is now the subject of a smashing LACMA retrospective.
In the show’s title, “Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” (with Xs over the “you” and “me”), the equivocal shifts that ricochet among the personal pronouns “I,” “you” and “me” pry open a space of transparency in which the artist lets viewers know to watch out for the slipperiness of what they are about to see. Who is speaking, who is listening and who oversees — or benefits from — the exchange is not as clear or simple as one might assume. Take “Untitled (Truth),” a 2013 digital print on a sheet of vinyl almost six feet high and 10 feet wide. A pair of hands pulls apart a stretchy elastic bandage overprinted with the word “truth,” all in capital letters in conventional Helvetica typeface. Somewhere between a billboard and a mural, the sign confounds in a productive and probing way. Is the elasticity of fact, reality or certainty under urgent examination? It would seem so. The crimson word printed over a field of bright green causes a jangling chromatic dynamism of opposites on the color wheel, creating a purely visual sense of alarm.