Barbara Kruger Tells You to Love, Shove, Blame … the Art Gallery of Ontario
The Dundas Street façade of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario has been overtaken by a massive block-long banner created by propaganda-inspired artist Barbara Kruger. Titled “Untitled (It)” (2010), the block-long Kruger feels polite and subdued — two words, strangely, often used to describe the city o
The façade of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario has been overtaken by a massive block-long banner created by propaganda-inspired artist Barbara Kruger. Titled “Untitled (It)” (2010), the Kruger billboard is very much unlike her all-over installation last year at Lever House in Manhattan, Between Being Boring and Dying, which warped and wallpapered text around the ground floor of the landmark Park Avenue skyscraper. In contrast, AGO’s Dundas Street installation feels polite and subdued — two words, strangely, often used to describe the city of Toronto itself.
If truth be told, I don’t know if I would’ve thought it was an art work at all or something dreamt up by the museum’s corporate advertising team trying to come across as edgy and cool. My only tip that it was by Kruger was the ubiquitous chatter in Toronto publications that the American artist had touched down in the city.
The billboard, which stretches from McCaul to Beverly Streets, looks like many museum advertising campaigns that attempt to solicit strong reactions from viewers, but its placement up against the street, and with no clear sweeping view, makes it hard to read — does that make it “art”?
In an interview with Toronto art critic Leah Sandals, who asked the propaganda artist what her new Toronto work was about, Kruger replied:
Basically, it’s large-scale images and words that directly address the viewer. I never feel comfortable saying “This is what the work is about,” because it closes down potential readings. The Contact Festival this year is about pervasive images, so I thought it could deal with that image-world we all live in — whether it’s driving down streets and seeing billboards, or going home and seeing sites online. It could even be for those few people who still go to the theatre and see movies! These kinds of images influence all of us. It’s gotten even more so in the past 40 years, because everyone’s become a photographer. Is it even possible for people to live their life today and not do it through a lens? Not do it through a screen?
Her answer may dodge the “meaning” of her latest work — and I really think her claim in a later question that “sustained narrative is in a real crisis” is unclear to me, does she mean master narratives are on the wane? — but I have to say that the new Kruger billboard feels more corporate appropriation than artistic exploration.
Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (It)” (2010) installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario continues until August 30, 2010. It is part of the city’s Contact Photography Festival, which is taking place throughout the month of May.
