American artist's work reflects on mass communication. Anne James reports

Barbara Kruger, regarded by many as an icon of the modern art world, visited Oxford in 2013. From that visit developed the current exhibition at MAO, in which Kruger explores the way contemporary culture uses its powers of persuasion and coercion, advertising and mass-media reportage to shape and mould individual behaviours.

She says: “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t.”

The exhibition covers a broad swathe of her long and well established career. The large Upper Gallery plays host to a contemporary installation specially created for that space. The Middle Gallery hosts a series of classic paste-up works from the 1980s, revisited by being shown alongside her film Plenty LA, from 2008. Here the film is played out on twin screens set at a 90-degree angle, capturing the enthralled gaze of a cellphone-obsessed individual who cannot break away from the handset for even a moment to engage with the world around her. The handset provides her with a direct avenue into the compelling domains of bling and the ephemeral, both of which become addictively essential until a flashing ‘Enough’ brings the fantasy to a close, at least for the time being.

Kruger’s career included a period in the late ’60s and ’70s when she worked as a designer on a range of Conde Nast publications. There her exposure to the juxtaposing of language and pictures provided her with a rich mine from which she developed her trademark combination of images and dominant lettering as in the challengingly cruel paste-up piece Untitled (You delight in the loss of others) 1982, where a deliberate manicured hand spills the milk, with a drenched carpet of milk suffocating the immediate and creating globules that break off to inflict additional losses. In another, Untitled (Free Love) 1988, a vulnerable naked small child is labelled as free love yet is anything but free, caught between the unattractive thighs of its, presumed, progenitor.

Oxford Mail:
In print: Installation, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

In the Upper Gallery the words make the pictures as well as providing the messages in their own right. Kruger has made the whole gallery into an installation of Gothic proportions; a false wall has been erected between it and the Middle Gallery, inscribed with the word Joyful, the letters and their comparative sizing crescendoing across the gallery. The residual walls, ceilings and floor are similarity covered in slogans and statements often contradictorary. The whole provides a positive cathedral of language, which on closer examination reveals the contradictions, complexities and at times bullying nature of the message each of us receives every day via mass media, social media and collusive press persuasion.

In the Piper Gallery there is a four-screen presentation of Twelve, Kruger’s 2004 film of a series of exchanges between 12 different people that are at times confrontational, at times solicitous but never comfortable. The 360-degree experience the film provides serves to highlight the impact of the subliminal messages that surround each of us every day. All evoke a casual cruelty, sometimes meant, sometimes not, that are epitomised by soap operas and ‘in depth’ television reportage. Added reinforcement is given by an underscore-typed message, as if of breaking news, running across the base of each screen, sometimes coinciding and sometimes at odds with each character’s script.

A companion exhibition of work by Patricia L Boyd: Metrics provides a contrast to the Kruger exhibition. It was commissioned by MAO and is Boyd’s first exhibition in a UK public institution and a sequitur to her New York-based project, also titled Metrics. Both explore the transformation of poor, neglected and down-at-heel areas into gentrified and sanitised environments, modern cafes and offices: easy spaces for smart new mobile and wireless people to work and play in. The political and social changes that Metrics explores serves to challenge our contemporary values, via a visual and physical critique of everyday space, which resonates well with Kruger’s pictorial and language-based challenge.

The exhibition comprises 15 sculptures each clad in 6mm of material lifted from the floor of Boyd’s studio in Soho. The forms of each sculpture have been taken from furniture found in surround-ing cafes and offices, their titles referring to their addresses: Great Windmill St, Rupert St, Oxford St and others. The empty simplicity of the space creates both a focus on each piece and the chance to link each together into a collective dialogue and a commonality.

Barbara Kruger
Modern Art Oxford
Until August 31