This Barbara Kruger Mural from 1990 Has Become the Year’s Most Poignant Artwork

History repeats itself, and so does Barbara Kruger. Over and over, she has created text-heavy artworks that make visible secret forms of power and control in the media. Over and over, she has returned to these past works, many of them situated in public spaces, and revised them, most recently for a series of videos that she calls “replays.”

Why so much repetition?

Look for an answer in Untitled (Questions), a piece that Kruger initially produced for a temporary venue of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 1990, then revised for the institution’s Geffen Contemporary space in 2018. The 2018 version, which measures 191 feet long, was supposed to remain on view through the 2020 Presidential elections in the US, but it continues to loom above the Geffen Contemporary’s parking lot today.

There have been at least two times when the National Guard stood ominously beneath Kruger’s mural. One was in 1992, when LA became a site of widespread protest following the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department police officers accused of using excessive force on Rodney King. In a photograph shot that year by Gary Leonard, three soldiers can be seen brandishing guns as they walk away from Kruger’s mural, which resembles an American flag whose stripes are replaced with foreboding words. “WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW?” Kruger’s piece asks.

An answer to that question arrived this week, when the photographer Jay L. Clendenin snapped another picture of Untitled (Questions) towering above National Guardsmen wearing protective gear. The National Guard had been deployed by President Donald Trump to combat people protesting ICE, which raided locations in LA in search of immigrants whom the organization claimed were undocumented earlier this month. But the protestors are nowhere to be seen in Clendenin’s picture, which is eerily static and disturbingly calm—even as vandalism, looting, and arrests were taking place not far beyond its frame. “WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW?” Kruger’s piece asks once more.

There are simple responses to that question, of course. Here’s one, according to the Supreme Court: the president. Last year, before Trump was re-elected, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents have legal immunity for actions exercised while they led the country. “The President is not above the law,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion, which essentially declared the opposite.

But the protests also raise new answers to that question as well. Is ICE beyond the law? Is the National Guard? One can easily imagine Kruger making similar inquiries with her art during ’90s—and even before then—and that is only a testament to her prescience.

Kruger has always been a keen observer of power. During the ’80s, she saw concealed forms of it in the mass media. Relying upon skills learned in the world of editorial while working as a page designer and picture editor for publications such as Mademoiselle and House & Garden, she cast images beside text printed in Futura Bold Oblique and Helvetica Ultra Compressed—sans serif typefaces that can “really cut through the grease,” as Kruger herself once put it. She’s used these typefaces to communicate directly about how power functions, and so her work has been commonly referenced by activists, who find resonance in artworks made decades ago by her.

Untitled (Questions) was always a protest of its own, though it didn’t initially have much to do with Trump. The mural was commissioned by MOCA in 1989 and was initially meant to feature the text of the Pledge of Allegiance. Even though Kruger began conceiving the work two years prior, the gesture seemed to refer obliquely to conservative handwringing in 1988 over attempts to keep the Pledge of Allegiance out of classrooms, with George H. W. Bush, then vice president under Ronald Reagan, claiming that such a gesture was unconstitutional. One Republican representative’s spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that Kruger seemed like “a left-winger blowing off smoke.”

Her initial proposal was ultimately nixed, not because of Republican vitriol but because of concerns from local Japanese Americans, who said the piece would bring about harmful memories of their ancestors being forced to recite the Pledge while incarcerated during World War II. Ultimately, the mural became a group of clipped queries: “WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES TIME? WHO FOLLOWS ORDERS? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?”

The work has since shown up in at least two cities and in various forms. In 1991, with the Gulf War having begun the year before, Kruger painted Untitled (Questions) onto the exterior of Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Then, in 2018, an anonymous donor gave MOCA the money to have Kruger remake it once more.

Kruger had by then begun amassing a body of work that explicitly called out Trump, including a 2016 New York Magazine cover that overlaid an ugly candid of the president with the word “LOSER.” It was a work that was widely talked about at the time, though it seems more than a little embarrassing in retrospect—as though Kruger were telling its intended audience something it already knew. Untitled (Questions), by contrast, contained no Trump references, even though it was now clearly about him in some capacity. In fact, Kruger didn’t even change most of her text at all. With characteristic bluntness, in a 2018 interview conducted by the museum, she said, “It’s both tragic and disappointing that this work, 30 years later, might still have some resonance.”

Therein lies the magic of Untitled (Questions): the work is unfortunately timeless because abuses of power will always take place. They occurred back in 1992, when LAPD officers and National Guardsmen killed 10 protestors during the fallout from the Rodney King case, and they are happening again, with the National Guard now acting in a way that Governor Gavin Newsom has described as “unlawful.”

They have also happened many times in between, including in 2020, when another Kruger work, commissioned by the Frieze art fair before the pandemic and also called Untitled (Questions), played a role in fresh protests over the police killings of Black Americans. “WHO BUYS THE CON?” read one mural covering the facade of a building down the street from an intersection that ended up being blocked off by LAPD officers. Kruger spotted her work on CNN on June 1, 2020, photographed her screen, and used the picture as one of the opening folios for the catalog for her 2021 Art Institute of Chicago survey. “7TH NIGHT OF PROTESTS AS TRUMP THREATENS MILITARY CRACKDOWN,” reads the chyron for that broadcast. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

History repeats itself, and so does Barbara Kruger. That may be why the Los Angeles Times has now run not one but two features about Untitled (Questions) in the past decade alone. Queried by the Times this week, Kruger said of the protests, “This provocation is giving Trump what he wants: the moment he can declare martial law. As if that’s not already in play.”

So why not ask her work’s titular questions again?

“WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES TIME? WHO FOLLOWS ORDERS? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?”