Preview: Barbara Kruger's "Belief + Doubt" Installation At The Hirshhorn Museum

Image via Complex Original

Last week, we got a chance to preview Barbara Kruger's latest installation, "Belief+Doubt," with curator Melissa Ho at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The installation has changed the entire floorplan of the museum, moving the store downstairs and converting the entire ground floor into space for Kruger's work. It's a site-specific piece, taking into account D.C. as a center of power and the museum's location on the National Mall.

"Belief+Doubt" opens August 20th, 2012, and will be up until 2014.

Enjoy a preview and accompanying commentary from Melissa Ho.

Preview: Barbara Kruger's "Belief + Doubt" Installation At The Hirshhorn Museum

(© Barbara Kruger / Photography by Cathy Carver)

The Choice To Exhibit Barbara Kruger

"Since the 80s, she’s been placing her work in non-art contexts — billboards, matchbook covers, T-shirts, and shopping bags. They effectively and beautifully deploy themselves, even in the midst of everyday life. This is perfect for a place like [the lower level of the Hirshhorn] where it’s multi-purpose — it’s not the inner sanctum of a gallery. It’s both art and commerce, with the gift shop down here now.

As you move in, it goes from a 2-D plan on paper to something that’s spatial and experiential, in the way she's cleverly positioned these texts. Many of the texts deal with consumerism and desire."

The Installation Process

"In the late 70s, Kruger was literally cutting and pasting her photomontages, in the way magazines used to be laid out. Today, the technology has caught up with the themes and scale of the work she likes to do. She did her first room-size language and image installation in 1991, and at the time, it had to be silk-screened on the wall.

Now, she designs everything on the computer, and it’s sent to a fabricator who prints it out. It’s a commercial vinyl material that's made for putting up advertisements in sports arenas, subway stations, and department stores. It’s made to be walked on (in terms of the floor), and on the wall it’s thinner vinyl. All of these surfaces had to be prepared really well. This whole installation took two and a half days to put up."

The Meaning Behind "Belief + Doubt"

"The floor of the store says, ‘LOVE IT,' 'RECYCLE IT,' 'OWN IT,' and 'RETURN IT,’ and the side of the escalator says, ‘YOU WANT IT. YOU BUY IT. YOU FORGET IT.’ These are ideas that she has been interested in for a long time. On the one hand, thoughts about money and buying, and then more generally, power structures and relative positions of social power and social voice.

The larger theme of the piece, I would say, is when you come down the escalator, it says 'Don’t look down on anyone.' Then you pass by these flanking walls along the sides of the escalator pit, where it says, ‘WHOSE VALUES?’ and ‘WHOSE POWER?’ Those are really signature phrases that demonstrate Kruger's preoccupation with systems of control and power. Then you see this wall, which says ‘Belief + Doubt = Sanity.’

"Belief + Doubt" is the title of the piece. Not only is this work site-specific — in terms of the given architecture of our museum — it’s site-specific in terms of it being in Washington, D.C. She’s conscious of the fact that Washington is a center of power. I know she felt really strongly about this message of wanting to introduce doubt and questioning into an environment of partisanship, ideological absolutism, and the idea of blind faith. She says this over and over again; she just wants to encourage people to question and to be a little more critical.

I think it’s significant that a big portion of the floor, for instance, is taken up by open ended questions. She’s not handing over on a silver platter her answers for these things, but her role as an artist is to provoke and pose questions."

The Context Of "Belief + Doubt"

"It’s one thing to show Barbara Kruger in a private gallery, but it's another to be able to show her on the National Mall, in an election year, and in a public institution that's free through funding by tax dollars. We’re able to reach a broad viewership, with visitors from all over the world and country, and that’s what’s so exciting. This is her first major exhibition in D.C., and it couldn't be more opportune timing, location, context, and relevance.

One of our missions at the Hirshhorn is to highlight the artist’s voice. We’re giving her this platform here in D.C. It’s an opportunity to commission major works by outstanding artists, and to use parts of our campus that have not been used that way before."

Kruger's Relevance Today

"I believe that, of her generation, she has kept up with the times most. She was ahead of her time at the outset. Her use of language, to me, gets more and more interesting in this digital age, because in the age of the Internet, you have words and information moving in a totally non-tangible form. There aren't newspapers anymore — it’s all sort of out there on the Internet, and the news cycle is so fast. 

It’s so fascinating how she’s making work so material and huge, while reinforcing the power of words and architecture. It’s the idea that architecture, like verbal language, is a system of representation that is going to address you as a subject and define who you are. That’s partly the message of Kruger’s work.

She’s really made a space that was a 'pass-through' type of area into a work of art. She's converted reading from a private activity between you and the page to a physical process that happens in the public space."