THERE WAS SOMETHING UNCANNY about the timing of " Barbara Kruger, " which opened at the National Gallery of Art this past September. While ostensibly scheduled to reinaugurate the museum's series of monographic In the Tower exhibitions on the occasion of the reopening of its newly renovated East Building, the show also spanned the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, the election, and the inauguration. Not that the choice was overtly controversial: Kruger's searing critiques of the Reagan era are by now so canonical that they have even been absorbed into the AP Art History curriculum. Yet, as installed in the heart of our capital this past fall, Kruger's strategic juxtapositions of image and text appeared urgently relevant. Indeed, several of the most prominent works could almost have been conceived as campaign posters for the election. Centered on the wall facing viewers entering the exhibition hung Untitled (We don't need another hero), 1987. A blond girl in braids prods the biceps of a posturing boy: Perhaps this is how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would have interacted as children. Timing-wise, the source image could be about right, the children's dated hair and clothing—as well as their stereotypical, almost palpable whiteness— placing them firmly in a nostalgic 1950s America. When I saw the show in December, I thought about how differently I would have read this piece, with its wry send-up of gender stereotypes and masculinity, back in September. If, during the run-up to the election, I let go of my reservations concerning Clinton's neoliberalism in favor of my excitement about the possibility of the country voting in its first woman president, Trump's victory raised the specter that the work of my own heroines—Kruger among them— was all for naught. The deadpan cynicism of Kruger's Pictures-generation critique was, after all, still tinged with optimism—invested in the power of appropriation to turn the tropes of mass media and advertising against themselves. Now, however, at a moment when the most powerful mobilization of identity politics might arguably be that of white masculinity—not the ascendance of marginalized peoples but the dying gasp of a waning majority—the sly promise of Kruger's works was like salt in my wounds. Instead of fleeing in despair, though, I stayed; in fact, seduced by both the sheer aesthetic prowess of Kruger's work and the scholarly sophistication of the installation conceived by curator Molly Donovan, I rather enjoyed myself. Cued by Untitled (Think of me thinking of you), 2013, I had some version of the titular Tin Pan Alley song playing in my head as I moved through the show—the lyrics are stacked vertically atop the profile of a young woman's face as she looks coyly at herself in a handheld mirror. Kruger rewards those of us who love show tunes and old Hollywood movies, even as she compels us to question the nostalgia she harnesses. She often draws on images culled from the same era that Trump seems to be evoking when he refers back to that mythical time when America was " great. " Glumly recognizing the applicability of Kruger's particular brand of mass-media appropriation, honed on Reaganesque telegenics, to this new celebrity turned politician, I allowed myself to wallow in another nostalgia—for a time just a few months past when the polls had been reassuring. But the exhibition wasn't conducive to wallowing. Comprising just twenty-one works, including two mock-FEBRUARY 2017
Bibiana K Obler