Barbara Kruger has the meaning of words. Big, bold, often visually strong words.

Kruger combines exceptional graphic design skills with a deep knowledge of the structural complexities of art and language, not to mention the media whirlwind in which modern life is lived. For 40 years, the Los Angeles-based artist has surveyed the social, cultural and political landscape with a deft combination of acute insight and lacerating wit.

She’s no stranger to city museums, where her work has been featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art (a terrific mid-career survey from 1999, plus two incisive building murals), the UCLA Hammer Museum ( a soaring 2014 entrance installation) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (a somewhat less successful 2008 commission for the three-story elevator shaft inside BCAM, which was too busy for the available space) , the artist is now the subject of a sensational LACMA retrospective.

In the title of the show, “Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I mean me. I mean you.” (with Xs on the “you” and the “me”), the equivocal shifts that ricochet between the personal pronouns “I”, “you” and “me” open up a space of transparency in which the The artist lets viewers know to beware for the slipperiness of what they are about to see. Who is speaking, who is listening, and who is overseeing – or benefiting from – the exchange is not as clear or simple as one might suppose.

Take “Untitled (Truth),” a 2013 digital print on a vinyl sheet nearly six feet tall and 10 feet wide. A pair of hands separates a stretchy elastic bandage overprinted with the word “truth,” all in capitals in the conventional Helvetica typeface. Somewhere between a billboard and a mural, the sign confuses productively and convincingly.

Is the elasticity of facts, reality or certainty under urgent scrutiny? It would seem so. The word crimson printed on a field of vivid green causes a chromatic dynamism rattling opposites on the color wheel, creating a purely visual sense of alarm.

The hands belong to a businessman, judging by the outline of the shirt cuffs and the suit jacket. Is this then a conscious reference to the power of patriarchy to define – and to manipulate, disfigure or distort – truthfulness?

Shiny fingernails are manicured and polished, a distinct inference of social class, while the function of a compression bandage is to dress wounds and aid healing. Has the dominance of male corporate wealth altered reality?

This bandage is stretched and twisted, but the flat, clean, bright red word is not distorted or deformed at all. Is the stable truth he declares the one represented in Kruger’s carefully crafted images, on which he superimposes?

The floor of the gallery where the work is installed further blurs the message. Initially, confusing descriptions of never-before-seen images are presented in wall-to-wall vinyl text of white letters on a red background. All relate to the human body.

“The body that vomits and screams ‘kiss me’.”

“The praying body that whispers ‘save me’.”

“The numb body that mutters ‘shock me’.”

The text, printed on the floor of a large hall, can only be read by moving through space and glancing between the legs of other museum visitors. Their physical bodies – and yours – become entangled with these painterly references to bodily experience, bringing a ghostly, incorporeal imagery home.

Disembodied experience is now commonplace in contemporary life – a truth – as anyone who gazes into the flickering light of a cell phone screen will attest. (“Feeling is something you do with your hands,” insists another large digital vinyl print, its image showing a perfectly manicured woman’s hand hovering over a deadly x-ray of skeletal bones.) The main difference between this survey and Kruger’s mid-career MOCA retrospective nearly a quarter of a century ago is that, in the meantime, a universe of analog images has almost completely transformed into a digital one.

Kruger reviewed and adjusted things accordingly. A great thing about her work is how she starts with a visual environment already familiar to the audience. She doesn’t complain or dodge the mass media context, but unpacks it for us.

Born in Newark, NJ, in 1945, Kruger attended art school only briefly, gaining most of her media education through a combination of hands-on experience and independent curiosity. She read widely while working in New York as a graphic designer and image editor for trade magazines including Mademoiselle and House & Garden.

Barbara Kruger, “Untitled (How is it that only unborn children have the right to life?)”, 1986, photograph and typescript on paper.

(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)

Across Wilshire Boulevard from LACMA, in an exhibition at Sprüth Magers Gallery, 20 collages for the early 1980s work that made her famous are simple collages of the kind once regularly used in commercial publishing . (The collages were featured as part of the retrospective when it debuted last fall at the Art Institute of Chicago, but LACMA didn’t have enough space.) She primarily uses variations on a font of sans serif typeface called Futura, created in 1927 by German designer Paul Renner, later persecuted by the Nazis. Among the collages are some of his classics, including collages declaring: “Your body is a battlefield” and “How come only unborn children have the right to life?”

In the late 1970s she began to incorporate techniques of abstraction and typographical eccentricity pioneered by Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova and others of the early 20th century Russian avant-garde. Their brilliantly adventurous graphics were “A slap in the face of public taste”, as the famous poet David Burliuk put it in a 1917 manifesto.

Kruger, however, avoids such opposing positions. Instead, she drew inspiration from the pop, minimalist and conceptual art of the immediately preceding generation to understand and question, in her words, “the systems that contain us”.

Not only was the strategy successful, but it also inspired legions of amateur imitators. The show’s witty opening gallery features a lot of them.

In recent years, the digital transformation of society has led to rethinking past works for new digital presentations. The show has many examples – among the most effective a 2020 video version of “Pledge” from 1988, which is just over a minute long.

Rather than deleting and replacing the words of the American Pledge of Allegiance with a static graphic, like an editor with a blue pencil crossing out text until the correct word is found, she digitized the evolutionary process. To the relentless, rhythmic beat of a ticking soundtrack, the words unfold across the video screen.

Beginning with “I pledge allegiance”, the last word is replaced by the sequence “membership – adoration – anxiety – affluenza – I pledge allegiance to the flag…” You ponder a vow that you can probably recite by heart, stumbling over feelings and, elsewhere, as the text continues, even shocking cruelties and bigotry. Finally, you come to a better understanding of your participation in the construction of a social contract.

The digital ephemeral collides with “Justice”, an inert statue from 1997 in fiberglass painted white. FBI strongman J. Edgar Hoover, known for using secret records of illicit sexual activity to control politicians, is pictured with closeted gay lawyer Roy Cohn, a brutal mentor to Donald Trump, who masterminded the mass firing of gay government employees at the start of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s term. 1950s “Afraid of Lavender.”

Barbara Kruger, “Justice”, 1997, painted fiberglass.

(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)

Kruger’s composition is reminiscent of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous 1945 photograph showing a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on VJ Day. Hoover and Cohn, who are wrapped in an American flag skirt and raise a high-heeled pump, are about to lock lips in a loving embrace.

“Justice” pokes fun at Eisenstaedt’s celebratory pose. A throwback to 19th-century American neoclassical statuary, which idealized established values ​​of morality and virtue, the statue asserts that freedom from the fascist threat was hardly appreciated by everyone – then or now.

The exhibition was jointly organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (where it travels in July) and LACMA, where it is overseen by director Michael Govan and curator Rebecca Morse. Rather tight in its current incarnation, with just 33 works, it includes printed vinyl panels, full-hall installations, single-channel videos, large-scale LED videos, and wallpapers.

It comes with a catalog with two unusual features – both valuable.

One is a captivating 12-page opening sequence of documentary photographs of Kruger murals, billboards and magazine designs from the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and months of protests. public after the murder of George Floyd. It is disconcerting to see armed soldiers patrolling MOCA’s Kruger mural wondering ‘who is outlawing’.

The other is a final 30-page sequence of previously published essays by various writers, which Kruger used as a course curriculum when she taught for many years at UCLA. Topics range from economics and identity politics to sexuality and comedy.

For an artist whose work is based on the tensions between image and text, the photographs and essays are an exceptionally insightful catalog framing device. Together they evoke an artist determined to successfully situate her work outside the hothouse environment of an often parochial art world.

My husband’s favorite t-shirt is a Kruger design with the apt caption: Belief + Doubt = Sanity. Wise words for everyday life, especially in a media environment saturated with dubious promises.