The following text "Love and the Paraliterary: On Barbara Kruger’s "Picture/Readings" by the writer, poet, essayist, and curator William J. Simmons originally appeared in Flash Art No. 329 (February – March 2020).
Barbara Kruger’s work has come to represent a host of negative affects for art historians and critics, and it is in those dark, painful, and discomfiting emotions that the work finds its criticality and deconstructive qualities. So we are told, or perhaps, ironically, indoctrinated — fictions become history, indeed. We understand Kruger’s work to be oppositional, paranoid, skeptical, probing, threatening, refusing, dismantling, denuding, castigating, withholding, chastising, ridiculing, combative, dissecting, extracting, exposing, embarrassing, accosting, and detached. In many activist contexts, these qualities are necessary, but I wonder if they take a toll, if they produce stasis instead of opportunities. I have always thought of Kruger’s use of text as written on the wind, as it were, somewhere between the page and the pen and an untethered gust. - William J. Simmons
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