On the Sunday of Paris Fashion Week, at about the same time as the Miu Miu show, Barbara Kruger and I were meeting at her hotel near the Bourse de Commerce, where she had spent the past week installing a site-specific work, The History of Tears, in the soaring rotunda and surrounding passage.
Less a formal interview than a compelling, wide-ranging conversation, most of what we speak about—whether people’s dwindling attention spans to artificial intelligence, her brouhaha with Supreme several years ago, or even her path to becoming an internationally recognized artist—is tinged with a kind of disbelief. One gripe that surfaced early on, for instance, is how public figures on the left in America have lost basic communication skills.
“Even when I agree with them, the word salad, they’ve lost me. I’m watching the news, I’m watching the commentators, and I’m saying, ‘Say it in four words; get to the point,’” she says, sounding exasperated.
Kruger, 81, knows exactly how to get to the point, even when that point is left open to interpretation. She credits this directness in her art to the years she spent as a graphic designer at Condé Nast. From her late teens to her early 20s, working in the art department (elsewhere at the company were the likes of Betsey Johnson, then a secretary, and Deborah Turbeville, then a fashion editor for Vogue), Kruger created page layouts using the “paste-up” technique that would come to define her work.
While this show is not a retrospective, Kruger is more or less at its center. The Bourse de Commerce is home to the Pinault Collection in Paris, where curator Matthieu Humery has assembled some 700 works tied to the invention of photography 200 years ago. Presented with breadth and depth, the ambitious exhibition is titled “Remember Me,” which nods to Kruger’s Untitled (Remember Me) from 1988. Only slightly larger than the largest iPhone, the original is a photo of a single eye collaged atop a close-up of skin—both in black and white—with the two words set in signature Futura Bold typeface. In 2020, she followed it up with a large LED version that also included other phrases; it can be found nearby.
Kruger’s The History of Tears installation in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce.
Courtesy of the artist and the Bourse de Commerce.
