the world

On 27 March 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location “The Globe
Shrinks”, a new video installation by Barbara Kruger.

“The Globe Shrinks” (2010) is a multiple channel video installation that continues
Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of
declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address,
and the unspoken in every conversation.

the world

Barbara Kruger
still from The Globe Shrinks
dimensions variable
four-screen digital video installation
2010

Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was. At least, that’s the way it looks in “The Globe Shrinks,” an immersive new multichannel video installation that is challenging the presumptions of all who dare to enter the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea.

Balancing self-possession with self-doubt and rage with tenderness, Kruger’s art does exactly what one of her subtitles says: it show us to ourselves. The globe may shrink for those who own it, as another phrase (borrowed from the critical theorist Homi K. Bhaba) puts it, but Kruger’s perfect calibration of life’s crueler ironies performs a kind of miracle, allowing the blind to see all.

the world

This is the third of a series of video works with which Kruger has translated her widely copied graphic designs — superimposing red or white text over cropped images, or enlarging words into slogans the size of buildings — into propulsive action. Some of the text in “The Globe Shrinks” came out of “Between Being and Dying,” her installation last fall at Lever House, where she covered the windows, columns and floor of the lobby in phrases like “A rich man’s jokes are always funny,” speaking truth to the lords of power and ambition who build palaces like, well, Lever House.

www.maryboonegallery.com
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

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