Artist Barbara Kruger covers Hirshhorn lobby with ‘Belief+Doubt’

“A RICH MAN’S JOKES ARE ALWAYS FUNNY” is pasted on the underside of an escalator at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

“BELIEVE ANYTHING FORGET EVERYTHING” covers a back wall.

(Stefanie Keenan/WIREIMAGE) - Barbara Kruger’s ‘Belief+Doubt’ is site-specific not just to the Hirshhorn lobby but in its proximity to power: ‘It is a museum, but it is also in D.C.,’ she says. ‘That brings its own information, context and baggage.’

In the new exhibit, “Belief+Doubt,” by Barbara Kruger, words taller than the average person stretch across floors, ceilings and walls. Words climb up, down and around the escalator. Quotes wrap walls, not stopping for corners. Questions — big and small — cover the expansive lower lobby.

People, twist, turn, circle, stumble and crane in a dizzy choreography, trying to read messages left by the artist:

“WHOSE POWER?” “WHOSE VALUES?” “WHOSE BELIEFS?”

As visitors descend the escalator, they look up at the ceiling and read: “DON’T LOOK DOWN ON ANYONE.”

A boy in a red cap tilts his head and asks: “What does that mean, ‘Don’t look down on anyone?’ ” But an adult grabs the boy’s hand and hurries away.

At the bottom of the escalator, a woman comes face to face with a gigantic equation: “BELIEF+DOUBT=SANITY.”

“It’s thought-provoking,” says Suzanne Gaff, 63, a church secretary visiting from North Carolina. “Perhaps it means there is always doubt in the back of the mind about what you believe in.”

In the exhibit, which runs through Dec. 31, 2014, words confront museum visitors, confounding them, prompting them to pause in a harried world to interpret what the artist has rendered in an unexpected gallery.

Kruger, whom one artist called “the poet laureate of the age of spectacle,” says the exhibit raises questions about desire, money, faith and power.

“Power doesn’t just exist,” Kruger says in an interview from New York. “It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I’m interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.”

The most crucial aspect of her work, she says, lies in getting people to question. “It is important for us all to try to live an examined life and understand why things are the way they are.”

The exhibit, which covers more than 6,000 square feet of the lobby, is made of vinyl donated by 3M. “This used to be an area nobody would look at. People would walk through to get somewhere else,” says Melissa Ho, assistant curator of the Hirshhorn, who helped coordinate the project. “Now, people come down and are riveted. They stop in their tracks as they are reading. . . . In order to read, you really have to walk and move through the space. It involves the whole body, not just your eyes.”

Take Ed Blewett, 47, a well driller from Roxbury, N.J., who descends the escalator, then turns and takes four steps back.

“I had to get back to a spot to get it in focus,” he says. “I couldn’t read upside down.”

The lobby presents a challenging space for more traditional glass-enclosed works, Ho says. “It is not an ideal, calm space. It is much more akin to a public street.” Such a setting requires art that is flexible, and Kruger’s “has always been able to operate in galleries and on the street. It adapts fluidly to being pasted on a bus or on a T-shirt or match book cover.”