At the Bourse de Commerce, Barbara Kruger Isn’t Mincing Words

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.

Meanwhile, her “spatialized” new work is gigantic. In addition to video panels of people at close range speaking aggressively, words wrap around the curving, concrete walls conceived by architect Tadao Ando and cover the entire floor. The texts, in French and English, originate from three late literary sources—Roland Barthes, Aimé Césaire, and George Orwell. Orwell’s is arguably the most chilling: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” But even Césaire’s line, “And above all, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear,” speaks volumes at this scale.

“Unfortunately, that is not archaic,” she says of Orwell’s quotation. “Watching the news on Gaza, Kyiv; watching [Friedrich] Merz’s speech on Ukraine this morning, that was so moving. It’s not going to stop.”

Around the periphery, the 24 elegant wood-framed display cases have been turned into lightboxes beaming out prompts—or orders—like “Break It,” “Own It,” “Steal It,” “Kiss It,” “Slap It,” “Hug It,” and “Hurt It,” and then actions such as “Weaponize,” “Monetize,” “Marginalize,” “Terrorize,” “Theorize.”

There may have been a time when the highly charged environment of this work would feel alarming—and perhaps it is for some visitors. But unlike when Kruger first started producing conceptual art some five decades ago, similar language now swirls all around us more than ever.

Consider also what are arguably Kruger’s two most famous works: (Untitled) Your Body Is a Battleground, originally designed as a poster for the Women’s March on Washington, and (Untitled) I Shop Therefore I Am. Both date from the late ’80s yet are no less resonant today.

As it happens, the latter—in a large format on printed vinyl—belongs to the Pinault Collection and can be found in one of the upper galleries of the current show. It must have been an irresistible acquisition for the family whose business is the luxury group Kering (owner of Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Bottega Veneta…).

Kruger says she approached the consumerist twist on Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum in Latin) like a magazine headline, and that it was never meant to be an indictment. Okay, so was it about identity? “No, I didn’t see it as that,” she replies, noting that she was never really into fashion. Tongue-in-cheek? “Oh, sure!”

We establish that she “hates nostalgia,” yet we circle around it as she reminisces about purchasing Agnès b. when she started to earn some money, and that she made her first trip to Paris before she started making art. She would hit up the discount shops near Tati. An avid reader of Walter Benjamin, who famously wrote about the city’s covered passages—including those near the Bourse—she puts forth an amusing theory. “I think he was a compulsive shopper,” she says, adding, “You know, shopping is not the same as buying.”

Kruger has proven to be media agnostic regarding the convergence of image and text: from silkscreen and collage to audio and video installations; from billboards and digital animations to posters and tote bags. Her magazine covers—calling to mind Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” dictum—span the cheeky and provocative. There was the 2018 issue of New York magazine that swapped Putin and Trump for “Tutin” and “Prump,” and the 2022 issue that revisited her Battleground piece, only the text read: “Who becomes a ‘Murderer’ in Post-Roe America.”

Does she perceive herself as a controversial artist? Her response initially surprises me: “I don’t make women’s art; I don’t make political art. I don’t make feminist art. I am a woman who is an artist, who’s a feminist, and that’s it. Controversial? I don’t know.”

When I suggest this makes me think of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s striped T-shirt bearing Linda Nochlin’s phrase, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” she says she finds the medium effective: the Battleground T-shirt with Planned Parenthood proved a major fundraising tool, and has given her blessing to several others over the years. Naturally, the Bourse is selling its own.

Which brings us to Supreme and the lore that her bold graphics were the source material for founder James Jebbia’s iconic red boxed logo. No attribution was made and Kruger did not seek it. Then, in 2013, when the brand Married to the Mob co-opted the logo as “Supreme bitch,” Jebbia filed a lawsuit (eventually settled). Subsequently, Complex magazine reached out to Kruger for comment, and her reply was biting: “What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers. I make my work about this kind of sad foolish farce. I am waiting for all of them to sue me for copyright infringement.”

So has she ever spoken with him? “Nah, what do I care. But I love it. Because so many young people don’t know who I am, but they know Supreme, bought by Carlyle [Group], bought by these big conglomerates,” she muses. Cue (Untitled) The Drop, her 2017 riposte comprising a live performance and pop-up shop for Performa’s 20th anniversary that doubled as satire.

I told her I had visited her retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao last year where I noticed a photo compilation of all the ways she found people riffing on her style. “It’s just sort of ironic, viral—the way images travel today,” she says, again with disbelief. “People used to use the term appropriation. I would never use that term.”

For the record, Kruger is not on Instagram. She reiterates an observation she has made elsewhere, that “culture today is a collision of narcissism and voyeurism.” What happens on social media—the point-of-view, the direct address—runs somewhat adjacent to her work, only that what plays out on these platforms is voluntarily performative. “It’s such a brutal anthropology; people are happy to show themselves acting out,” she says.

Asked what photos I might find in her phone, she whips out a BlackBerry. Concerned about storage, she uses her camera sparingly. There is a photo of vivid bougainvillea and coyotes near her house in Los Angeles. There are also snaps from watching TV and catching her work spontaneously—whether in a news segment or at the 2022 VMAs, when Jack Harlow performed on a set that was uncannily Kruger-esque. “It’s funny to find yourself,” she says.

Kruger’s work, however, is often “durational,” in that viewers get more from it the longer we spend with it. She has noticed how this interaction has changed in what has been described as an attention economy. “Our attention spans are so much smaller. Starting with infants now, screens are so prevalent. I think it’s the end of eye contact for many generations because everyone has their device,” she says. “The durational text is a challenge to people. Reading books has become a challenge.”

In a show like “Remember Me,” the sheer number of images offers the best kind of challenge: determining where to look. From a ground-floor gallery filled with nearly 450 photographs by Irving Penn to a staging of Raymond Depardon’s views of France (Kruger took some photos of these), this is ultimately a testament to Pinault as a consummate collector.

Kruger, who still can’t believe that MoMA does not own any of her work, describes this moment as “a gift.” “I have no complaints, I have a great career,” she says.

Joking that she is now 101 years old, she says that there’s no simple answer to cursory questions about “advice.” “I have to think intersectionally, a word I have always exercised but only got named decades ago by so many great Black intellectuals. ‘Young people’ is a big category, so [in the end], I can’t.”

But as our time draws to a close, she’s keen to touch upon AI. As in, her disbelief that people think it could achieve consciousness, or that it could set off a plague. “It’s going to rule us all; it can destroy us tomorrow,” she says, adding that she has yet to use it for her art. “New medicines? Absolutely. But how can it cure dead people if we have already been destroyed.” Once again, Kruger gets to the point.

“Remember Me” is on view at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris until January 18, 2027.