PHOTOGRAPHY

BARBARA KRUGER (Annina Nosei Gallery, New York, March 10—April 7). Barbara Kruger's art is a well-honed attack force of word and image. Her recurrent topic, which she portrays in enlarged found photos overlaid by assaulting mottoes, is the mutual dependence of power, sex, war, and money. "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is," reads a typically baneful jingle splashed in boldface type over a picture of chomping false teeth menacing a half-peeled banana. In an art market flooded with romantic personal iconography, Kruger has succeeded on the premise that politics shapes all of art's iconography.

Her aggressive language combined with the pictures she chooses cuts to the core of politics' dangerous rhetoric. Terms that have become innocuous, like "science" and "the cost of living," are imbued with threat. Her speaking subject is decidedly female and feminist. But her tone is Orwellian, for she mirrors the suffocating power of world politics by projecting a fearsomely authoritarian voice.

Kruger's accusatory messages are clear, intelligent, and funny in a painful sort of way. It's to our advantage and our dismay that this kind of art could only flourish in a time of peril and confusion.

CAROL SQUIERS

CHARLES TRAUB: THE ARTIST AND HIS MODELS (Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery, New York, March 17—April 20). Sexuality, profit, and aesthetics are the major ingredients of almost every photograph of a nude woman. Charles Traub disrupts that holy triad with his nude and seminude female figure studies. His models arrive via the ads he places in the "adult entertainment" section of a local paper, and, other fantasies aside, his pictures are about the way these average, mainly white women undress in front of a stranger with a camera. Directed only to disrobe and sometimes to stop in midmotion, the women are variously forthright, awkward, and self-protective, struggling to act natural in a situation that is supremely artificial. Traub manages visually to dissect the myth of the sexually photogenic woman in pictures of naked ladies that are disconcerting, embarrassing, and absolutely riveting.

C.S.

V.F. RECOMMENDS

Exhibits

ARNOLD NEWMAN Daniel Wolf Gallery, New York, March 6-31.

JOEL-PETERWITKIN

Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, March 23—April 21.