This is a huge, stunning, world-bestriding and often very challenging exhibition. Its 250 photographs (and some films and video installations) cover the subject of women and the environment, providing a wide-ranging survey of the multiple ways the planet is being exploited and degraded, how women too often bearing the brunt of environmental destruction, and the scores of ways women artists and activists are fighting back, often creating a sense of female community in the process – hence the punning title of the show which is designed to promote the work of re-sisters, in the realms of social politics and art.
Huge volume of material
It’s a challenging exhibition to get your head around because the curators interpret the notion of environment in such a wide way as to bring together a huge variety of specific instances and examples of environmental degradation, each one of which is like reading a Sunday supplement feature. You could say it’s like reading about 50 serious magazine articles in a row i.e. quite demanding on your ability to process facts and figures. But it’s challenging in other ways, which I list below.
Environmental stories
Firstly, it’s about such a huge subject, the industrial-scale destruction of the environment, which comes in such a huge variety of forms and prompts some pretty big and scary thoughts.
Some of the subjects, such as vast open-cast mining in places like Australia or Namibia (in photo series by Simryn Gill and Otobong Nkanga), or the catastrophic impact of oil extraction in the Ogoniland area of southern Nigeria (depicted in the photos of Zina Saro-Wiwa), I knew about already.
Similarly, the ruinous pollution of the world’s oceans, as conveyed in a video given a room of its own, A Draught of the Blue by Minerva Cuevas (2013) is a topic I feel I’ve been reading about for years.
But other subjects were completely new to me, such as the ruinous extraction of sand from places like the Mekong Delta in Vietnam (photos by Sim Chi Yin); or the impact of oil extraction in Azerbaijan. Although I knew about Azerbaijan’s historic importance, going as far back as the First World War, I don’t think I’d seen pictures of the area and its culture as evocative as the series of photos on display here by Chloe Dewe Matthews.
I don’t think I’d come across the word extractivism before, which the curators define thus:
‘Extractivism is the exploitation, removal or exhaustion of natural resources on a massive scale. Rural, coastal, riverine, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by mining and other extractive industries, resulting in severe negative consequences on local livelihoods, community cohesion and the environment.’
There was lots and lots of new information about numerous aspects of environmental destruction to be read, understood and processed.
Women as victims
The curators move on to claim that environmental destruction or ‘ecocide’ particularly targets women, and especially women from Indigenous communities, and they’ve chosen exhibits and stories to back up this claim. Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, is quoted as saying:
‘In this era of deepening ecological crisis, we are proud to present RE/SISTERS which interrogates the disproportionate detrimental effects of extractive capitalism on women and in particular Global Majority groups.’
The curators claim there is a direct link between men’s degradation of the planet and men’s oppression of women. They are part of the same oppressive system. They call for the same kinds of resistance.
Straight men as culprits
Because the exhibition asserts (repeatedly) that the environmental crisis is caused by men, that it derives from male capitalism, from a male colonial and imperial mindset, from masculinism and white supremacism, from male-led multinational corporations, all of which are underpinned by patriarchal, masculinist, cis-heterosexual ideologies.
In the 80 or so very wordy, very theory-laden wall labels and picture captions, the curators claim that only men run ‘the mechanical, patriarchal order that is organised around the exploitation of natural resources’ and deploy the ‘masculine cultural imperialism’ that underpins it.
‘Terms such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Anthropocene act as cultural-geological markers that make clear that the violent abuses inflicted upon our ecological processes are inherently gendered, and shine a light on the toxic combination of globalised corporate hegemony and destructive masculinities that characterise the age of capitalism.’ (Catalogue page 16)
‘The violent abuses inflicted upon our ecological processes are inherently gendered’ and that gender is male.
‘Ecofeminist scholars have long critiqued feminised constructions of “nature” while challenging patriarchy, the masculinism of capitalism, and colonial abuses against nature, women and marginalised communities.’
And:
‘Caycedo’s photographs of rivers and waterfalls are remixed into pulsating, fractal, perception-shifting images that invite the viewer to reflect on the fluidity of bodies of water, which consistently resist the phallogocentric logic of extraction.’
The exhibition is based on notion of:
‘the connections between patriarchal domination and the violence perpetrated against women and nature’
The notion that the ongoing destruction of the environment, ravaging of nature, destruction of ecosystems and disruption of traditional ways of life of Indigenous peoples around the globe is a distinctively heterosexual male practice, with which women have no share or responsibility, is obviously controversial and debatable. It may be true in many aspects, and certainly when viewed through the exhibition’s strongly feminist lens, but surely some women somewhere are a bit involved in the capitalist extractive system, buy products, run companies, benefit from consumer capitalism?
Can the destruction of the earth really be blamed on just one gender? That’s what the curators are claiming. Along with the idea that only by overthrowing male power can the world be saved:
‘Critical of the term “revolution”, in 1974 the French ecofeminist Françoise D’Eaubonne proposed the term “mutation”, which, she argued, would enact a “great reversal” of man-centred power. This grand reversal of power does not imply a simple transfer of power from men to women, instead it suggests the radical “destruction of power” by women – the only group capable of executing a successful systemic change, one that could liberate women as well as the planet.’
Women as political resisters
But women aren’t just victims, no feminist would leave it at that. The curators move on to give lots of examples of the way women as individuals or groups are fighting back against all this ecocide. They are, in the curators’ words, practicing ‘a radical and intersectional brand of eco-feminism that is diverse, inclusive, and decolonial’.
I also found this theme challenging to get my head around because the examples of women’s resistance were so varied. For example, there are two big sections devoted to the anti-nuclear weapons protests led by women in the 1980s, one in the UK, one in the US (as documented by American photographer Joan E. Biren). The UK one was the women’s camp at Greenham Common airbase.
I worked my way along the wall of photographs from the camp’s heyday and the display case of posters and leaflets and badges and was a bit confused. I suppose this is an early example of women very consciously organising as women to resist an obviously destructive technology, but it felt different from protesting the environmental degradation of the mines or oil pollution or ocean pollution. OK, the nuclear missiles imported into the base threatened nuclear armageddon but…It felt slightly askew from the theme of the environment.
Not only that, it felt very old and a bit, well, clichéd. Greenham has been trotted out in umpteen different contexts, in anti-war exhibitions I’ve been to or shows about the 1980s or about political art and, well, it feels like trotting out a tired old favourite. Better to have had much more up-to-date and specifically environment-focused content.
Third World resistance
This was highlighted, somehow, by the series of photos in the same room by Poulomi Basu’s who has been documenting the activities of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army who are fighting, with actual guns, against the activities of mining companies in south central India and the Indian security forces. Women take a lead role in the group and are depicted looking very warrior-like. But this obviously jarred with the message that conflict is somehow a very male creation, which emanated from the Greenham Common display.
It was also at odds with the other striking exhibit in the same room, which is a series of black-and-white documentary photos taken by Pamela Singh of the Chipko movement of women from the villages of the Garhwal Hills in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand, northern India. These protesters took to peacefully embracing trees to save them from state- and industry-sanctioned loggers.
According to the curators, these women ‘became emblematic of an international ecofeminist movement eager to showcase the subordination of women and nature by global multinationals while underscoring women’s environmental consciousness.’
Women artists
So far I’ve given the impression that this is a very political exhibition, and it is, and movements such as Greenham Common or the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army or the Chipko treehuggers are obviously collective movements or organisations which brought women together to achieve social and political goals.
However, this is an art exhibition in an art gallery and half or more of it has a significantly different feel from the early sections I’ve been describing with their factual, documentary feel.
Interwoven from the start are works by all kinds of artists who interpret the subject of the environment in the widest possible way and generate a very wide range of environment and protest-themed art. So in the early sections about mining and ‘extractivism’ are hung huge long flowing abstract fabrics by Carolina Caycedo.
These, we are told, are part of her multidisciplinary project Be Dammed, which critiques the ‘mechanics of flow and control of dams and rivers’ to address ‘the privatisation of waterways and the social and environmental impact of extractive, large-scale infrastructural projects’.
These specific hangings are part of a series titled Water Portraits (2015 to the present), printed on silk, cotton or canvas and portray the water that carves through the long, narrow chasm known as Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), a canyon in the Iguazú Falls, on the border between Argentina and Brazil.
Now this is conceptually challenging because how are we meant to understand these lovely, colourful, semi-abstract hangings (there are 3 or 4 hanging from the ceiling throughout the show) as in any way really ‘resisting’ the activities of mining companies. They obviously don’t, or not in the same way that the Greenham women or the tree huggers were carrying out ‘direct action’ and explicit protest.
These kinds of works exist purely in the realm of art and art galleries, a realm which is, above all these days, extremely conceptual and intellectual. What I mean is Caycedo’s work is the result of a deep training in modern art and in turn triggers lengthy commentary from the art curators.
It’s a different world and a different type of discourse from that surrounding the political activity of Greenham and the huggers, which itself felt very different from the opening sections about the mining of oil and sand and ore.
What I’m getting at is there’s not just a lot of stuff and stories to read and process, but that they are drastically different types of information, from the kind of engineering stuff about extraction, to the rather nostalgic politics of the 1980s anti-nuke protests, through to something like this, what you could call traditional contemporary art, which asks to be processed and assessed partly for its ‘political’ intent, maybe (addressing ‘the privatisation of waterways and the social and environmental impact of extractive, large-scale infrastructural projects’) but also as works of art i.e. how you react to the size and shape and pattern and design, the fabric and the way it hangs in space. Whether you like it.
This requires activating a different part of your brain, a more floaty open receptive part, than the bit which had just been reading about mining techniques, or the bit which is activated by nostalgic photos from the 1980s.
Art about women’s bodies
But that’s not all. As the name of the work suggests, Multiple Clitoris is also saying something not just about women’s politics but about women’s bodies. According to the curators, Caycedo’s fabrics evoke ‘the feminist, orgasmic energy of our “corporeally connected aqueous community”‘ and are an example of the importance women artists give to their bodies.
It’s a truism of healthcare that women are more aware of, and take better care of, their bodies than men do. This is reflected in much contemporary art where women artists, and especially consciously feminist women artists, often take their own bodies as their subject, finding endless material in reflecting on and depicting their own or other women’s bodies.
This gender difference in attitudes stands out to me, in so many of the art exhibitions I’ve visited, because I’m a typical bloke and think of my body as a dumb machine which I use to carry around my mind, which is the thing which interests me. I consider my body boring. Not so many many many feminist artists.
Thus it is that, as the exhibition develops, the idea of organised political resistance which we encounter in the first few rooms develops into the idea that women’s bodies are themselves somehow a force of resistance or sites of resistance.
Whenever you go to an exhibition of women’s art you are going to read about ‘the male gaze’ and women’s attempts to escape, evade it and reclaim their own bodies, not as objectivised objects for male pleasure, but as the vehicles for their own perceptions and thoughts, to do with as they please. To reclaim ‘agency’ over their bodies.
And so it is that on the upper floor of the show that the visitor comes to a room devoted to feminist body art i.e. women artists who get naked, paint themselves, carry out performances naked, and so on. A good example is ‘Immolation’ from the series ‘Women and Smoke’, where, in the dim distant past of 1972, performance artist Faith Wilding got naked in the Californian desert, painted her body, set off smoke bombs and had herself photographed by artist and photographer Judy Chicago.
The curators explain that:
‘In Immolation Chicago captures the performance artist Faith Wilding sitting cross-legged in the desert, enveloped in orange smoke. This work referenced the ongoing Vietnam War, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, and similar acts by people in the United States, who were setting themselves alight to protest the war and advocate for peace, while the orange smoke alludes to Agent Orange, the herbicide that was sprayed to devastating effect in Vietnam.’
Women’s bodies and nature
I’ve always been confused by the disagreement among feminists themselves as to whether women – because their bodies are designed to conceive and bear children and they have historically done most if not all of the child care – are uniquely nurturing and caring and, therefore, have a kind of mystical understanding of Mother Nature unavailable to men. Or whether that’s a load of patronising, sexist, stereotyping garbage cooked up by the heteropatriarchy to keep women in their place.
The great universe of feminist thought seems to contain both, completely opposed, points of view. This exhibition seems to lean towards the women-as-nurturing and close-to-nature view. Here’s another example. I include the curator’s commentary in full.
Nature Self-Portrait #5 by Laura Aguilar (1996)
‘For Laura Aguilar, photography was instrumental in visualising her identity, and in the mid-1990s she began creating powerful black-and-white nude self-portraits in nature. In contrast to the heteropatriarchal settler-colonial tradition of landscape photography, Aguila’s portraiture homes in on her identity as a large-bodied, working class, queer Chicana woman. Mirroring the natural forms of the rocky desert landscape of the American Southwest, in her Nature Self-portrait series, Aguilar inserts herself into a “racially stratified landscape” to become a boulder or perform as a tree. As Macarena Gomez-Barris notes, Aguilar seems to want us to “trespass into the territory that feminists have long considered taboo by considering a profound relationship between the body and territory, one that provides a possibility for ecology of being in relation to the natural world. In that sense, her self-portraits provide a way to foreground modes of seeing that move away from capitalism, property and labour altogether, into a more unifying relationality that allows for haptic and sensuous relations with the natural world.” Ultimately, by affiliating her body with the natural beauty of the landscape, Aguilar’s work both empowers and transcends the various categories of her identification.’
Of this specific photo they say:
‘In these works, Aguilar photographs herself resting beside large boulders that seem to echo her curvaceous bodily form. Facing away from the camera, and folding inward, her body emulates the cracks and dents of the boulders while the shadows cast from her body intensify the affinity with the stones before her. In a sense she has “grounded” herself in a landscape that oscillates with “the largeness of her own body”.’
The sequences of photos of women taking their clothes off and painting themselves in natural settings could be considered as the kind of entry level of the women-and-nature theme. However, some of the artists here have gone one step further to play with the idea of women turning into nature or natural objects; certainly moving beyond the merely human. Here’s what I mean:
The Body Covered with Straw by Fina Miralles (1975)
‘Fina Miralles’s conceptual photo-performance works from the 1970s embody a return to a profound relationship with nature. As she wrote in 1983 following a transformative five-month journey travelling through Argentina, Bolivia and Peru: “I am abandoning bourgeois culture and embracing Indigenous culture. The World Soul, Mother Earth and the protective and creative Pachamama.” Read through this lens, Miralles’s series Relating the Body and Natural Elements, in which the artist cocoons herself in straw, as seen here, or surrenders her body to sand or grass until she disappears, her body merging with the land, illustrates Donna Haraway’s concept of “becoming with” and offers a metaphysics grounded in connection, challenging the illusion of separation – the erroneous belief that it is somehow possible to exempt ourselves from earth’s ecological community.’
The most striking variation on this theme of women-as-nature is the series of photos by Tee A. Corinne, titled Isis, where she photoshopped large close-up photos of a woman’s vulva into traditional landscape compositions so as to create surreal, disturbing (and beautiful?) juxtapositions.
The curators explain that landscape painting has not only long been historically dominated by men, but in its very conception contains the idea of land ownership, precisely the kind of capitalist-colonial mindset which has brought the earth to the brink of ruin. So these ‘vulva landscapes’ are a way of subverting the male tradition of landscape painting and reclaiming it. They’re certainly about as in-your-face as the women-as-nature theme can be.
It is typical of the curators that they can’t explain the purpose of this kind of women’s art without taking a pop at the men’s equivalent. I was saddened that they have a go at Land art which I love and have always thought of as promoting the value of walking through unsullied nature, leaving environmentally friendly, transient works, like a circle of stones. But, alas, Land art has mostly been created by men and so, in the eyes of the curators, is invalid:
‘In contrast with much Land art, which has staged large-scale and controlled interventions into the natural environment predominantly by men, the ecologically oriented works presented here by women artists place the body in communion with the land.’
Anyway, to go back up a couple of levels, my overall point is that all these women stripping off in the desert have brought us a long, long way from the highly factual documentary items which opened the show and recorded actual political resistance to open cast mines or oil exploitation in Nigeria, to tree felling in India or the deployment of nukes to Britain.
Taking photos of yourself naked in the woods or superimposing the image of a vulva onto landscapes is obviously a different register of information: it’s a different kind of subject matter, treated in a different way, to be processed with a different part of the mind.
It was this continual switching of subject matter, approaches, tones and registers which I found so challenging and exhausting about this exhibition. Which explains why, having read my way through the extensive wall captions on the ground floor, I realised I needed a break. I walked out of the gallery and spent five minutes staring out over the grey Barbican pond at the church of St Giles Cripplegate, trying to let all this information and babel of concepts soak in, before going back in to tackle the 12 further rooms on the first floor.
Other-than-human
Up here, on the first floor of the show, the curators arrive at the idea of the animals who live in these destroyed environments. In fact animals and wildlife in general are surprisingly absent from the exhibition. Maybe wildlife is excluded because the focus is overwhelmingly on women as the endangered species in this narrative.
When plants and trees, animals, birds and fish do crop up, it’s under the slightly odd terms of ‘other-than-human entities’, ‘other-than-human organisms’, ‘other-than-human habitats’, ‘other-than-human communities’ and so on.
The only exhibit which actually focuses on all the animals we’re driving to extinction is a film, ‘Ziggy and the Starfish’ by Anne Duk Hee Jordan (2018) which, characteristically, isn’t about pollution or extinction, but the curators’ number one subject, which is gender and sexuality. The curators turn animals into symbols of the kind of gender-fluid, anti-binary type of sexuality we are all nowadays meant to admire:
‘Taking its name from Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous, extraterrestrial rock star persona that musician David Bowie personified in the early 1970s , Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s sculptural video environment that houses the film Ziggy and the Starfish (2018) celebrates the fluidity of marine sexuality. The film pictures the sexual exploits of various ocean creatures with an exuberance and playful excitement, recalling the earlier work of the French photographer and filmmaker of marine life, Jean Painlevé. The effects of human-made climate change on the hydrosphere have become a key factor impacting the reproductive lives of marine animals, and by focusing on this aspect of the ecosphere Jordan underscores our deep entwinement with our fellow earthly inhabitants. In response to the present ecological crisis, the work offers a portal into the vivid world of our nonhuman cohabitors and looks to their colourful erotic lives as an example of how not only to think against binary dualisms, but to desire the seductively plural.’
Referring to other life forms on earth as other-than-human, defining them solely in terms of the species that is destroying them, feels like an odd conceptual strategy. I doubt whether the feminist curators would like being referred to as other-then-men.
The rights of ice
The theme of the non-human reaches a kind of logical conclusion with Susan Schuppli’s film reflecting on ‘the right of ice to remain cold’, as advocated by the Inuk activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Conceptually mind-bending though this sounds, in reality it is a lament for the global warming-triggered melting of sea ice of a pretty conventional, David Attenborough kind.
Queer art
It is axiomatic of contemporary art that the only good man is a gay man, preferably Black. Toxic heterosexual white men have been oppressing women and destroying the planet for centuries so what we need is the opposite; gay Black men. So it is that a handful of men were allowed into this exhibition about women resisters, on the strict condition that they are gay.
This reminded me very much of the last big exhibition I came to here, the ‘Masculinities’ exhibition where, after a sustained and prolonged rubbishing of white heterosexual men, the ideal of masculinity held up by the curators was the writer James Baldwin, American, Black and gay. Same mentality here: white heterosexual men bad; Black gay (ideally American) men good.
Looking for ‘Looking for Langston’ by Ada M. Patterson (2021)
‘Looking for “Looking for Langston” by Ada M. Patterson is both inspired by and directly references Isaac Julien’s eponymous 1989 film, which offers a meditation on the life of the queer poet Langston Hughes and the wider cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York. As the title of the work suggests, Patterson, whose quest to learn more about the film ended in failure, constructs her own response that borrows from Hughes’s poetic imaginary as well as fragments she’s gleaned about Julien’s film. The result is a surreal and phantasmagoric exploration of Blackness and desire, using symbols such as the sailor and the sea to explore the fluidity of queerness. Patterson’s film also incorporates allusions to the histories of colonialism extant not only in Barbados (the artist’s birthplace and where this film was mostly shot) but also in Hughes’s United States and Julien’s United Kingdom. The film pays homage to these forebears, connected through oceanic bodies, legacies of Blackness and queerness, and the forever speculative pursuit of desire.’
Personal favourite
A lot of the photography, especially the documentary photography, was good, very professional, but didn’t really pull my chain. My favourite image from the whole exhibition was this:
Mud by Uýra (2018)
‘Uýra is an indigenous artist, biologist and educator from Brazil who works in and around the riverine communities of the Amazon region. In these photo-performances, Uýra transforms into multi-species characters, fluidly merging the human and non-human by adorning herself with organic matter. Borrowing from the aesthetic language of drag, and its ability to disrupt the stasis of gender-normativity, Uýra exuberantly shows how other binaries, such as the one between human and nature, can also be understood to be fluid states that are performatively constructed. As an educator, Uýra also uses her works as pedagogical tools to uncover different forms of knowledge about the land that have been suppressed by the logic of Western extractive capitalism. In doing so, the works call for a material and spiritual restoration of the ravaged ecologies to which we belong.’
Last word
Although I of course understand what the curators are getting at, and wouldn’t dispute the claims that women, especially in the developing world, often suffer most from the rapacious activities of multinational extractive corporations and of environmental destruction in general.
(It’s such a sweeping claim, it’s difficult to see how you’d even start to gather the evidence for the other side of the debate. I guess you’d start by pointing out that plenty of countries have or have had women leaders; plenty of multinational companies are run or staffed by women; plenty of women benefit from the products of all this extractivism e.g. cars, airplane flights, cheap clothes, cheap food, digital gizmos, that kind of line of argument).
But granted the truth of a lot of what the curators say, nonetheless, I still think I fundamentally disagree with their premises or, rather, I approach the whole situation from a different, more totalising angle.
For me it is blindingly obvious that it’s not heterosexual white men, it’s humans who are the problem. Whether they’re men or women, gay or straight, white or Black, from the developed or the developing world, humans everywhere are degrading and destroying the environments and ecosystems they live in.
I can see that the curators have a gallery to fill and so need clear, strong propositions to hang their exhibitions on. I appreciate that they are women, and feminists, so naturally see the environmental crisis through their personal and professional biases, through the ‘lens’ of their title. I can understand that women artists, even contemporary ones, might be considered overlooked and under-represented and so an exhibition which pulls together works from half a century by 50 or more women photographers and artists a) redresses the balance b) promotes the specifically womanist point of view and c) creates a sense of community and continuity between them. I think I do understand where this is all coming, and the sizeable merits of a feminist exhibition like this.
But, in my opinion, trying to portray all men as capitalist villains and all women as heroic resisters is not only patronisingly simplistic, it misses the bigger, more obvious point: that it’s people, people of all genders and skin colours who are destroying the world, the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians every bit as much as the wicked white Eurowesterners.
By trying to exempt women from any blame and cast them either as tragic victims or heroic resisters, I think the exhibition seeks to hide a bigger, bleaker truth: If you want to overthrow something, it isn’t the subset of issues to do with the cis-heteropatriarchy or white Western neo-colonialism, it isn’t one particular gender who you can pin everything onto – you should be trying to overthrow the tyranny of Homo sapiens over all the organisms of the world. We have to abolish ourselves.
Related links
- RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology continues at the Barbican until 14 January 2024
Related environmental reviews
Books
- The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson (1992)
- The Sixth Extinction by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (1995)
- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
Exhibitions
- Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis @ the Hayward Gallery (2023)
- Eco-Visionaries: confronting a planet in a state of emergency @ the Royal Academy (2020)
‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger @ Serpentine South
When hippies go bad…
Barbara Kruger is an American artist. She was born in Newark in 1945, the same year as Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend i.e. she is 78 years old and from the generation which made their names in the later 1960s and 1970s.
At the start of her career Kruger worked as a graphic designer for American magazines, and when she branched out into fine art she brought with her a feel for the impact of combining images and words. Over the decades she’s developed a powerful visual language that borrows, adapts and expands the techniques and aesthetics of advertising and other media.
It comes as no surprise to learn that, as a white American female artist of the 60s generation, her artworks have, to quote the curators, ‘continually explored mechanisms of power, gender, class, consumerism and capital’ – in other words, exactly what you’d expect.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You’ at Serpentine South is Kruger’s first solo show in London in over twenty years, so an opportunity for Kruger fans (and a friend of mine did describe himself to me as ‘a Kruger fan’) to catch up with her work this century.
These aren’t pictures hanging on a wall so that you stroll from one to the next, they are massive installations plastered across entire walls and, in some cases, round corners and into the next alcove or room. It feels like a total environment and one in which really important messages are being SHOUTED at you from disturbing and challenging billboards or hoardings.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
So you feel you’re being bombarded with really important messages, the only problem being that it’s quite frequently hard to make out what they are, although the general vibe is disillusioned, cynical, confrontational, an outpouring of negativity and doom. Take the text in the big room with black and white text all over the wall:
This is about loving and longing, about shaming and hating, about the promises of kindness and the pleasures of doing damage. This is about crazy desire and about having a gift for cruelty…
Already my attention is wandering but it goes on, covering the entire wall:
This is about the difference between the figure and the body, about the fickleness of renown, about who gets what and who owns what, about who is remembered and who is forgotten, here, in this place, this is about you, I mean me, I mean you.
Now, words are words and unavoidably spawn meanings and intentions, triggering our instinct for decoding and interpretation whether we want to or not. It is fairly common for modern art works to feature words, or be entirely made up of text, or even hoarding-sized presentations like this. (I immediately think of current Royal Academy exhibition which includes a set of 8 or so picture frames containing coloured paper on which are printed the names of native American tribes. That’s it, just the names, no images. Words on a coloured background.) Here in Kruger’s works the variety of layout and design is visually pleasing, up to a point – although the use of the same tone of red for all the frames and captions quickly becomes monotonous and wearing.
But the main experience of reading these words, which we are condemned by our literacy to do, is of struggling with their calculated, in-your-face negativity and either responding to them or giving up. How much of the following should you read before you realise you don’t care?
You. You are here looking through the looking glass, darkly. Seeing the unseen, the invisible, the barely there. You. Whoever you are. Wherever you are. Etched in memory, until you, the looker, is gone. Unseen. No more. You too.
The texts are not rubbish. They are obviously aspiring to a kind of poetic, not a million miles away from Samuel Beckett’s minimalist and repetitive prose. But I liked neither their style nor their content. If the message of this black-and-white piece is that you, the gallery visitor, are seeing (and taking part in) a series of choices and selections which include some artefacts (based on certain institutional and cultural values) but excludes other things (for the same reason), this is fair enough, if a bit obvious, like a lot of the other sentiments on display.
But having read hundreds of examples of prose poetry in my lifetime, I think Kruger’s stuff is on the poor side. Putting the meaning to one side, it lacks any rhythm or flow. It’s often staccato. In fact it’s remarkable how many words there are on display and how few of them are at all memorable or striking. Which is the exact opposite of advertising, where immense time and effort goes into trying to coin short phrases which will catch our distracted attention and burrow into our minds (‘Every little helps’, ‘Domino ooh hoo’).
Instead, all the texts have that dire, stricken quality of so much art text, emotionally numb phrasing conjuring up a dire sense of crisis and emergency. It’s like reading the gasped utterances of a Kafka character having a panic attack.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
That’s when it’s not being patronisingly dumb, as in the set of wall panels presumably satirising the self-righteousness of American Republicans, or maybe ‘the West’ in general, sixth-form sarcasm expressed in the big red panel reading:
Our people are better than your people. More intelligent, more powerful, more beautiful, and cleaner. We are good and you are evil. God is on our side, our shit doesn’t stink, and we invented everything.
Presumably this a satire on the imagined attitude of ideological defenders of America, for example the circle round George Bush who launched the fabulous invasion of Iraq, or maybe of Western conservatives in general. Or maybe it’s a critique of anyone of any nation or race who adopts these kinds of chauvinistic attitudes. But the triteness of its attitude undermines your faith in the level of her analysis or interpretation. Makes you realise you’re dealing with not very sophisticated stuff.
In the same vein of crushing obviousness, the three panels on the left contain the entire texts of 1) the marriage vows 2) the US pledge of allegiance and 3) the oath you take in a court of law. They are presented without any comment but, in the context of this exhibition, you can almost feel the irony and sarcasm dripping from them. It reminds me of the famous shots of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sarcastically ‘applauding’ Donald Trump after he made his State of the Union address. It has the same feel of self-undermining childishness. Because some people actually do want to get married and do mean their vows; some people actually do feel patriotic about their country. And from an aesthetic point of view, having the words slowly appear one by one, in the style of a lame PowerPoint presentation, doesn’t make them any more intelligent or interesting.
Kruger’s works are visually striking but textually weak, and most of them are made of text or heavily rely on text, so the overall effect was, for me, limp and disappointing.
‘No Comment’
The exhibition marks the UK premiere of ’Untitled (No Comment)’ (2020). This is an immersive (i.e. a room containing a) three-channel video installation. This kind of thing is pretty common nowadays: right now in London there’s a huge and stunning three-video installations in the Edward Burtynsky exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, and one by John Akomfrah (‘Vertigo Sea’) in the Royal Academy’s ‘Entangled Pasts’ exhibition.
Kruger’s piece is much more modest in scope than those two pieces (which are huge, world-encompassing depictions of a) man’s destruction of the natural environment and b) cruelty to animals, respectively). Much more narrowly, ‘No Comment’ is about the brave new digital world, conceived as exploring ‘contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online’.
It combines text, audio clips, and a barrage of found images and memes, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats. Cats. Yes, there are definitely more cats in this piece than in the Burtynsky or Akomfrah films. This piece includes a barrage of nihilistic slogans, hippy idealism turned very sour indeed, warnings about how FAKE NEWS can turn us AGAINST OURSELVES, yawn. I was standing next to three student-age young women who were recording it on the smart phones and the only bit they reacted to was when the cats started talking, which made them explode with giggles, nudge each other and try to capture it on video so as to TikTok or Instagram it. This stuff doesn’t interrogate or subvert anything, it’s just tired slogans and strained sight gags.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
The exhibition also features recent video ‘reconfigurations’ – or what the artist calls ‘replays’ – of several of Kruger’s most iconic pieces from the 1980s. I think this refers to the collage-type assemblages of magazine photos all splattered with controversial slogans, and includes ‘Untitled (I shop therefore I am)’ (1987) and ‘Untitled (Your body is a battleground)’ (1989). (Personally, I find it irritating when an artist calls their work ‘untitled’ and then immediately gives it a title.)
I think the ‘updating’ of these amounts to the fact that they are no longer static artefacts but videos of these ancient works which assemble the originally static images from jigsaw pieces, each piece of the jigsaw slotting into place with an amusingly literal click. Again, like a basic PowerPoint animation.
Anyway, the titles of these pieces alone indicate Kruger’s intention to ‘subvert’, ‘interrogate’ and generally question the consumer capitalism and sexualised imagery which have shaped our culture for decades. But after forty years of challenging this consumer culture and these sexualised images, have they been erased from the face of the earth, has the good fight been won – or are they more ubiquitous and powerful than ever before? Obviously the latter so, to be a little harsh, the content and aim of most of these pieces began to feel like art school whining rather than anything which might have any impact outside a lecture hall or gallery.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
The wall labels tell us that over the past 40 years, Kruger has displayed her work in numerous types of urban settings, including on buildings, billboards, hoardings, buses, in skate parks and so on. So a feature of her work is how adaptable it is to the setting or environment. Which explains why, for this exhibition, we are not, as I said, strolling between individual pictures hung on a wall, but, at several points, ‘immersed’ in works which have been adapted to the scale and layout of the Serpentine Gallery’s rooms, very impressively designed to fit around them.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
Massive works. Clever videos. Loud audio. Images interspersed with text. The same monotonous tone of red everywhere. And the same monotonous, psychologically null, Kafka expressions of art school alienation:
You ask a question. You wait for an answer. You want to keep on breathing. You want a room with a view. You want to change your life. You try to be generous. You never lie. You fall in love.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
Suddenly I knew who all these texts remind me of – Talking Heads lyrics:
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’
The same dumb repetition, the same American suburban nervous breakdown aesthetic, the same panic attack chic. If you think Talking Heads are cutting edge (the song this lyric is from, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, dates from 1980, 44 years ago), then Kruger’s approach is for you.
Text and commentary
One room contains what looks like a ‘brief’ from an art school lecture, a text which is packed with buzzwords such as ‘globalised world’, ‘post identity’, ‘post gender’ and so on, which has been blown up and pasted onto two boards. And then Kruger has crudely circled all these buzzwords and written in notes querying and questioning them. For example:
[Sentence in the text]: ‘It’s clear that identity is back.’
[Kruger’s commentary]: When and where did it go? Its new renditions come with the added features of agency, disruption and exchangeability. In what venues, locations, events and discourses was identity missing and mistaken?
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
Three points:
1. The Biter Bit
It is a bit rich of Kruger, an American artist committed to ‘subverting’ and ‘interrogating’ ‘modes of discourse’ around ‘gender’, ‘identity’, ‘consumer capitalism’ and so on to suddenly notice the riot of sociological jargon which has overtaken and infested the humanities, and then to object to it – because this is her intellectual environment, the one created by decades of hyper-intellectualising, left-wing, feminist and post-colonial critique in the academic and art worlds, the kind of thing to which she and her work have made a notable contribution
And this runaway discourse above all stems from the United States, her United States, which pioneered this clotted, exclusionary jargon and then exported it to universities and humanities departments around the world, where it now runs rampant. Kruger herself is deeply imbrued in this jargon and the art world she operates and flourishes in is itself a global epicentre of this sociological-cum-aesthetic discourse, as a glance at the wall labels, let alone the exhibition catalogue, instantly reveals.
2. Cultural politics turn out to be stunningly counter-productive
So when it comes to mocking academic jargon, she is like a fly stuck in the flypaper of the impenetrable postmodern jargon which she and her generation helped to create. But, after decades of bubbling in the background (where I was taught it all decades ago) this kind of sociological argot is now spilling over into mainstream politics. And what’s interesting about our times is how this is creating the same toxic divisions as it has done in academia for decades, but now out in the wider world – triggering unwinnable arguments in which everyone accuses everyone else of antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, transphobia, xenophobia – a world, especially down in the sewer of social media, in which the campaigns in favour of wokeness, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, no matter how well-intentioned, have in practice created a whole roster of toxic touchstones by which the zealous can judge and accuse others, while the ones accused can fight back with their own forms of toxic catchphrases and slogans – calling out, wokeness, slagging off the ‘Guardian reading, tofu eating wokerati’ and so on and so on.
No matter how well-intentioned and morally right all these left-liberal campaigns may be (as well as all the environmental ones like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion) the practical, real world impact has been to alienate huge numbers of people who feel (or are manipulated into feeling by the right-wing media) that their core values and identities are being got at, threatened, denied.
This, in the cultural sphere (along with stagnant economies and ecosystems coming under stress in the economic and environmental spheres) helps to explain the rise of nationalistic right-wing populism around the world. Technology is changing fast, the planet is fucked, and everywhere pressure groups are attacking the conservative staples of the religion, family and racial identity. Hence, in Kruger’s US of A, 50 years of feminism, anti-racism and university Marxism are more than likely going to result later this year in…the return of President Trump.
It seems like the more hyper-complex and impenetrable the radical academic jargon becomes, and the more it spreads throughout all the humanities and then leaks out into the real world, the more the very forces it sets out to question and undermine (capitalism, consumerism, environmental destruction, inequality, racism and sexism and homophobia) triumph, going from strength to strength, as if there is some deep, voodoo social law at work, some law of paradoxes so that the more feminists write about the male gaze (and the more you read the phrase on caption after caption at exhibition after exhibition), the more sexist and objectifying the media become; the more post-colonial studies books pour from the presses, the more openly racist leading politicians become.
I can’t be the only one feeling we’re living through a kind of death vortex of ever-accelerating abuse and anger, claim and counter-claim, outrage and cancelling, naming and shaming, whose clamour drowns out all moderate conversations.
‘Your body is a battlefield’ by Barbara Kruger. Photo by the author
3. It’s a generational thing
As I pointed out at the start, Kruger was born in 1945 and began her career in the late 1960s. This makes her a second wave feminist:
My daughter is a Sociology student and fourth wave feminist, extremely sensitised to the third wave issues of race and intersectionality, and in addition a fourth wave child of the internet and social media. She calls Woman’s Hour white feminism, a term she cheerfully interchanges with ‘BBC feminism’ – nice, clean, middle-class, private school-educated and white feminism. Emma Barnett.
Having had so many conversations with her on the subject(s), having helped her revise for her Sociology A-level and proofread her essays for her Sociology degree, I now see many issues, articles, movies, books and art works through her eyes. Above all, I recognise how completely different the worldview and assumptions of people under 25 are from those of me and my generation, even the supposed ‘radicals’ or ‘left wingers’ of my generation. We have been left waaaaaay behind by cultural and sociological assumptions which have moved on, light years on, sometimes – in the every day, every minute, every second use of social media and how that affects communication and perception and people’s sense of themselves and of the world they’re moving through with their smartphones set permanently to ALERT – beyond anything I can really understand or take in.
All I really know is that the assumptions, beliefs and worldviews of my 20-something daughter (and my son, too) are radically different from mine, far more switched on, plugged in and attuned to the subtleties and complexities of issues around race and gender in polyglot multicultural societies than my clodhopping old ’70s leftism ever dreamed of.
I’m sharing all this because it explains why, as I moved through this exhibition of Barbara Kruger, I felt like I was listening to the sound of a white, second-wave, American feminist tutting and disapproving of a world, and of a discourse, which have moved on and left her far behind, as it’s left most of us behind.
Reading Kruger’s cranky comments on these huge billboards (what else are we intended to do?) was not only:
1) Tedious – too much like my day job of proofreading government documents where I spend a good deal of time reading the impenetrable original text and then breaking my head trying to understand the cryptic, sometimes bad-tempered comments scrawled over them.
2) Amusing – but not in the way she intended it to be. It felt like listening to my Dad complaining about how football is nowadays all about Saudi money and American owners and nothing like the simple, honest sport it used to be in his day. Or listening to Rod Stewart complain that modern music’s all made by kids with laptops in their bedrooms, instead of honest bands performing in front of live audiences in their local clubs, like back in the good old days.
‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You’ felt, in other words, like the voice of the old generation railing against the new-fangled jargon and technology of the young – the take-home message of the annotated comments artwork I described above could be summarised as ‘Things were so much simpler and more honest in my day’.
Kruger’s installations complaining about tired old subjects like the perils of consumer capitalism (‘I shop therefore I am’) read like tattered old banners from the Miners’ Strike or posters from CND marches – relics from a bygone era, beautifully presented, stylishly designed, and completely out of date.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by the author
The merch
It goes without saying that after you’ve been bombarded with slogans and messages telling you to Stop Consumer Capitalism Now, Our Earth Is Not A Trash Can, I Shop Therefore I am etc, you emerge from the exhibition into the, er, gallery shop. Here you can buy loads of Barbara Kruger merchandise, such as anti-consumerist tote bags, posters, postcards, t-shirts and the expensive glossy catalogue. There! That’s your ‘continually explored mechanisms of power, gender, class, consumerism and capital’ all wrapped up in a tidy box and good to go. Have a nice day, sir.
Night falls
Dusk falls over Serpentine South gallery, highlighting one of Kruger’s text-heavy works.
Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell
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Posted by Simon on March 13, 2024
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/thinking-of-you-i-mean-me-i-mean-you-barbara-kruger-serpentine-south/