Villain of the piece

[imomus]

It was hard to be a man at the Barbara Kruger installation at the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art yesterday. A whole room was covered with text about what monsters of sex and violence men are, and in the information area it was all related to life in Glasgow with a series of chilling facts and figures about wife-beating in the city. It made Glasgow's Argyll Street feel like Elm Street and all men look like potential Freddy Krugers, about to batter their pinch-featured, ruddy-nosed wives or slay the Umbro- and Vodaphone-blazoned wee'uns they dragged behind them through the drizzle. It made Aidan Moffat's bruised, obscene, honest, romantic, depressing, dour lyrics at the Arab Strap acoustic show we saw immediately afterwards all the more apt.

Comments

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

Saw a Kruger exhibit in Siena, Italy a few years ago. The space of the exhibition was so incongruous with the feeling of the city, your typically fossilized European small-city center with gothic arches, cobbled piazzas, and very little ambient advertising. This last feature somehow made Kruger's whole schtick seem pointlessly shrill, but if your coming out of an environment that's basically permeated with commercial iconography, then there's a continuity between inside and outside that makes her art take on greater subtlety, a insidious force that prompts Momus to see potential rapists in the streets of Glasgow.

Moronically cynical art?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

"Pointlessly shrill" is right on the nose, I'd say. "Preachy" comes to mind, too.

I've seen many of her installations over the years, and while I think they make powerful graphics, they always strike me as linear and one-dimensional, containing very little in the way of ambiguity: we're being spoken to, not with. Maybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy aesthete, but to me, her work epitomizes that crunchy, moronically cynical, whiny, glib, paranoid late 80's-era political agitprop that made the '93 Whitney Biennial such a self-righteous bore. In the long run, I think her work will probably be of more historical interest than artistic; but in the meantime, such work will continue to place crap-colored glasses upon the noses of all who encounter it.

Re: Moronically cynical art?

[(Anonymous)]

that's spot on mr. W . that green set-up looks seriously nasty. Is B K some sort of Keith Richards of 80s PC Art? The only interesting B K display I've seen so far were I shop therefore I am Tshirts worn by people shopping in markets and supermarkets in Bangkok Thailand.