Barbara Kruger leaves question marks on LA during Frieze
In Los Angeles, Barbara Kruger leaves burning questions in weird and wonderful spaces during Frieze Week
Graphically bold and politically audacious, Barbara Kruger is known for plastering her unmissable slogans all over the place – an assimilation of mass media imagery and words reassembled and thrown back in the face of passive spectatorship. Sex, society and politics are Kruger’s primary materials – three topics that are as hot in the US today as they were when she started making work in the 1980s.
Kruger has legendary status in Los Angeles. As the place where the American myth and magic is constructed, and the heartland of media and entertainment in the US, LA has been an important city for the artist’s work over the years: in 1990 she installed her huge mural work ‘Untitled (Questions)’ at the MOCA, nine blazing questions on the subject of patriotism, civil rights and power, painted in the colours of the American flag across the museum’s south wall. In 2018, the work was reinstated at the museum – and will remain there until later this year.
‘Untitled (Questions)’ is so firmly rooted in the cultural landscape of Los Angeles that it became a natural starting point for Kruger’s latest intervention in the city, as part of Frieze Art Fair.
‘That billboard was installed in another time altogether, before the Internet and social media, and it is still so effective,’ says Bettina Korek, Executive Director of Frieze LA. ‘Barbara’s work is like a mirror the way it reflects back facets of the times. There are different conversations happening today than there were in 1990, but the most pressing ones are equally important. Kruger’s work guides people to listen to those conversations and think about their own experiences.’
Last year, Kruger participated in the fair by installing her questions around the backlot of Paramount Pictures – the location for Frieze – as part of the Frieze Projects programme. For Frieze LA’s 2020 edition, ‘Untitled (Questions)’ will be transformed into a city-wide project, the largest and most ambitious imagining of the work in public yet.
Frieze partnered with multiple civic organisations, including Metro, the West Hollywood Design District and Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Bureau, as well as sites including NeueHouse, The Forum, The Standard and Banc of California Stadium, to realize this sprawling project which will see landmark locations across the LA landscape covered with Kruger’s rousing questions. Each work being revealed up to and during the fair – and others, such as an installation at Union Square, staying on view until the summer.
At NeueHouse Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard a Kruger mural, WHO BUYS THE CON, has just been unveiled. As the first structure built intentionally for broadcast in 1938, NeueHouse occupying the original CBS studios, designed by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, the location is a resonant canvas for Kruger’s ideas on mass communication and meaning. Kruger was also drawn to NeueHouse Hollywood as the site for this piece, as it is the last example of Lescaze’s architecture on the West Coast.
‘It’s incredible to watch the evolutionary life of a project like this’, Korek reflects, on why the work remains as relevant. ‘[Untitled] Questions grabs people’s attention, which is so important to make an impact nowadays. Its enduring power is that even in this intensifying age of distraction, the project trusts that people still pay attention.
INFORMATION
’Untitled (Questions)’, realised in various locations throughout Los Angeles including NeueHouse Hollywood. For more information, visit frieze.com
Wallpaper* Newsletter
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox
Charlotte Jansen is a journalist and the author of two books on photography, Girl on Girl (2017) and Photography Now (2021). She is commissioning editor at Elephant magazine and has written on contemporary art and culture for The Guardian, the Financial Times, ELLE, the British Journal of Photography, Frieze and Artsy. Jansen is also presenter of Dior Talks podcast series, The Female Gaze.
-
The 2024 Ivor Novello nominations for songwriting have been revealed
77 British and Irish songwriters and composers make up this year's nominees, announced tonight at London's Groucho Club
By Charlotte Gunn Published
-
Why Bollinger’s La Grande Année 2015 champagne is worth celebrating
Champagne Bollinger unveils La Grande Année 2015 and La Grande Année Rosé 2015, two outstanding cuvées from an exceptional year in wine-making
By Melina Keays Published
-
Lexus installation explores time at Milan Design Week 2024
Lexus brought designer Hideki Yoshimoto’s ‘Beyond the Horizon’ to Milan’s Art Point, part of its ongoing series of collaborations with Fuorisalone
By Nargess Shahmanesh Banks Published