Dialogue with Spectatorship: Barbara Kruger and Victor Burgin

Abstract

Barbara Kruger’s exhibition We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture and Victor Burgin’s book Hotel Latone are such different kinds of work that at first it seems almost arbitrary to discuss them together, or just a simple exploitation of the fact that both use words and photographs in juxtaposition. Kruger’s enormous enlargements of found photographs are cropped and manipulated for rhetorical effect, then slashed across with words that evoke the pain and anger of sexual oppression. The words are sometimes a silent cry of personal pain, sometimes a slogan of political anger. The images are elusive, like the last fragment of a dream that stays in the memory. These two elements, word and image, are bound together by frames painted bright red. The size is important, echoing the persistent theme of power relations in the works themselves, leaving the spectator both overwhelmed and exhilarated as he or she is faced with a series of possible relations with the image on the wall. To look at the works in a catalogue is an experience of loss. The blown-up, grainy texture of the actual works seems to disintegrate the images from within, and adds to their mystery. Just as the scale of the Kruger work is significant, so it seems suitable that Hotel Latone should have a book format (although it originated as an exhibition in Calais in 1982).

Written as a review of ‘We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture’ held at the ICA gallery and of ‘Hotel Latone’ for Creative Camera in 1983.