Book Description
Through large-scale installations that radically, idiosyncratically combine text and image, Bruce Nauman, Barbara Kruger, and Alfredo Jaar each address social injustice, violence, and the profound ambiguities that shape individuals and society. Working in media ranging from neon to video, Nauman playfully and perplexingly plays language games that disorient the viewer into a critique of the power relations that underlie private and public violence. Kruger, who started out as a graphic designer, uses the ambiguously seductive language of mass media to challenge commonplace notions about body, gender, pleasure, and power. And Jaar, who was born in Chile but is now based in New York, combines photography, text, and architecture to visualize and define the political, economic, and ethnic relations and interdependencies of the First and Third Worlds. Innovatively designed, with plate and essay sections printed on different sizes and types of paper, "Nauman, Kruger, Jaar" deftly differentiates between the strategies these three artists employ in their respective, poignant examinations of the uses and abuses of power. Essays by Nicholas Serota, Peter Fischer, Hans-Michael Herzog. 8.25 x 10.5 in. 60 color illustrations English/German

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Herzog, Hans-Michael