This is one of the most powerful and moving exhibitions I’ve ever been to.
Chris Killip was one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers. He was born in 1946 and died in October 2020. He is best known for his gritty photos of working class life in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s and we really mean ‘gritty’ – portraits of people living in the depths of poverty, immiseration, neglect, illness, marginalisation, scraping a living in grim, depressed, forgotten communities.
Spread over the top two floors at the Photographers’ Gallery, including some 150 black and white photographs as well as a couple of display cases of ephemera (magazines, posters, publicity flyers) works, this exhibition amounts to the most comprehensive survey of Killip’s work ever staged. And dear God, it’s devastating.
I’m going to replicate the structure of the exhibition and summarise the wall labels because it’s important to get a good understanding of time and place to really appreciate the work.
Off to London 1964
In 1963, aged 17 and living on the Isle of Man, Killip opened a copy of Paris Match looking for news about the Tour de France and instead came across the famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson of the little boy carrying two bottles of wine along the Rue Mouffetard in Paris. On the spot he realised he wanted to be a photographer. He bought a cheap camera and worked that summer as a beach photographer saving up the money to move to London in 1964, just at the start of Swinging London.
Here he found work as an assistant to the commercial photographer Adrian Flowers. They were heady times and he was at the heart of London, arranging commercial photoshoots for magazines, fashion, commercials.
New York 1969
In autumn 1969 he went on a visit to New York which changed his life. He went to see the exhibition of Bill Brandt photos at the Museum of Modern Art but it was the museum’s permanent collection which made his head spin. Here he saw photos by Paul Strand, August Sander, Walker Evans and others like them, documentary photographers who tried to depict the life of the common people in communities often remote from flashy urban living.
He returned to England, quit his job in flash London and returned to his homeland, the Isle of Man, a man with a mission, to photograph his truth, to record the traditional peasant lifestyle of the island before it was eroded and swept away by the very commercialism he had formerly served.
Isle of Man 1970 to 1972
Between 1970 and 1972 Killip photographed the island and its inhabitants during the day and worked at his dad’s pub by night. In 1973 he completed his book, Isle of Man.
This was the first of the long-form or long-term projects which form the basis of his achievement. the next few decades would see him applying the same in-depth approach to capturing marginalised communities on film, living in them, getting to know them, sharing their privations, getting under the skin of their physically and spiritually impoverished lives.
As you would expect, many of the photos of the Isle of man are landscapes but they are not that great, they are not as powerful as, say, Don McCullin’s louring, threatening studies of his adopted region of Somerset. But it’s not the landscapes that matter, it’s the people.
My God, what a wonderful, wonderful collection of portraits, warm, humane, detailed, candid but compassionate portraits of the kind of plain-living, rural workers who were dying out as a breed even as he photographed them. You know those lines from Yeats’s poem, Easter 1916:
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in verse:
Invoking that mood of respect, it feels like an act almost of worship to write out the names of the people Killip photographed, the children, teenagers, farmers, wives and widows:
- My cousin, Stanley Quirk, Cooil-Sleau Farm, Greeba
- Laurence and Judith Quilliam, two children
- Mr Radcliffe
- Mrs Pitts, Slieu Whuallian
- Miss Redpath, Regaby
- Sonja Corrin, a small girl in her best white dress with a white bow in her hair
- Mr John Willie Garrett holding a wrench and spanner
- a host of old men in caps at The Mart
- Mr and Mrs Corlett, Ballakilleyclieu
There is no God, no plan and no redemption. But images like this, full of understated dignity and wholeness on the part of the sitters, and respect and humanity on the part of the photographer, make you think maybe human love and compassion does redeem something, save something from the human wreck, raise us above our everyday lives into a higher realm blessed by more than human love.
(Note the way in the list above all the people are given titles, Mr, Mrs, Ms. It’s an old-fashioned mark of respect.)
Immersion
He became an immersive photographer, living for months or more among the communities he sought to depict. His mission and his sympathies were not with the well-educated and well-heeled who run the country and write about it, but with ‘those who have had history done to them‘, the proles and chavs and pikeys and white trash who are dismissed by all commentators, make no impact on official culture, live and die in caravans or shitty council houses on sink estates at the arse end of nowhere.
Huddersfield 1972
In 1972 the Arts Council commissioned Killip to do a photo essay comparing and contrasting Huddersfield in Yorkshire with Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the exhibition ‘Two Views: Two Cities’. As far as I could see there was just one photo from Bury in the show, a neat-looking shot of some nice castle ruins. By contrast, as you can imagine, the rundown streets of Huddersfield with its mills, tenement housing, crappy high streets, boarded up shops and sad bus shelters grabbed Killip’s sympathies.
Newcastle 1975 to 1979
In 1975 Killip was commissioned to undertake a British Gas/Northern Arts fellowship. In his spare time from this commission he roved the streets and suburbs and slums of the city and as far afield as Castleford and Workington. My God, the squalor, the neglect, the decline, the decay, the old Victorian slums being demolished and the new cut-price, cheap council estates falling to pieces before your eyes. A landscape of vandalism and graffiti.
Killip stayed in Newcastle for years, getting to know the area. For two years, 1977 to 1979, he served as director of a photo gallery, Amber’s Side Gallery. The May 1977 issue of Creative Camera was entirely devoted to Killip’s North East photos (a copy of it is one of the ephemera gathered in the display cases I mentioned earlier).
- Children and terraced housing
- Terraced house and coal mine
- Two men on a bench
- Looking East on Camp Road, Wallsend, 1975
There is a huge difference between the Manx series and this one. The Manx photos are dominated by large portraits of people who fill the screen, who are at home in their surroundings, their crofts or workshops. They’re big. They fill the photos as they fill their lives, at ease with who they are. They are fully human.
In the North East photos what dominates is the built environment. People are reduced to puppets, physically small against the backdrop of the enormous or decaying buildings. The buildings come in two types, terrible and appalling. The terrible ones are the old brick terraces thrown up in a hurry by the Victorian capitalists who owned the mines and steel works and shipbuilding yards and needed the bare minimum accommodation to keep their workers just about alive – badly built, no insulation, draughty windows, outside toilets and all.
Though Killip didn’t plan it, his time in Newcastle coincided with the wholesale destruction of the old brick terraces and their replacement with something even worse: the concrete high rises with broken lifts reeking of piss, the windswept plazas, dangerous underpasses, and oppressive network of toxic, child-killing urban highways, all the products of 1960s and 70s urban planners and brutalist architects.
This is why I call the architects room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the room of shame. Go on a tour of British cities to see for yourself the destruction of historic centres and their replacement with brutal concrete urban highways full of thundering traffic, concrete underpasses tailor made for muggers and rapists, bleak open spaces where the wind blows dust and grit into your eyes, the concrete facias of a thousand tragic shopping precincts and, looming above them, the badly built tower blocks and decaying office blocks. Concrete cancer.
This isn’t an architecture for people, it’s an architecture for articulated lorries. Thus the human beings in Killip’s harrowing photos of these killing precincts are reduced to shambling wrecks, shadows of humanity, scarecrows in raincoats, harassed mums, bored teenagers hanging round on street corners sniffing glue. This is what Killip captures, the death of hope presided over by a thousand architects and town planners who could quote Le Corbusier and Bauhaus till the cows came home and used them to build the most dehumanised environment known to man.
As Philip Larkin wrote of young northern mums in their headscarves supervising their unruly children in some suburban playground:
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.
(from Afternoons by Philip Larkin, 1959)
It’s epitomised by the photo of the silhouette of an old lady sitting in a half vandalised bush shelter in Middlesbrough. She’s wearing a headscarf and slumped forwards because her life, in this gritty, alienated environment, is bereft.
Compare and contrast with the proud, erect, unashamed men and women of the Isle of Man. Pretty much all the humanity has been stolen from the mainlanders.
At some point I realised a lot of these grim Tyneside photos show a disproportionate number of children, children imprisoned in squalid houses, hanging round on derelict streets, trying to play in a crappy playground overshadowed by mines and factories, left outside the crappy, rundown bingo parlour, the cheapest nastiest, knockoff 60s architecture, complete with collapsing concrete canopy. A landscape of blighted lives and stunted childhoods.
- Two girls in Grangetown
- Terraced house and coal mine, Castleford, 1976
- Terraced housing, County Durham, 1976
- Children and terraced housing, Byker, Newcastle, 1975
- Butchers shop, Byker, Tyneside, 1975
Skinningrove 1982 to 1984
Skinningrove is a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast. Killip had noticed its striking landscape on a drive up the east coast back in 1974 but found it difficult to penetrate the community. In fact locals chased him off the couple of times he tried to photograph them. His way in was through friendship with a young local named Leso, who made Killip feel welcome and reassured locals of his good intentions. Between 1982 and 84 Killip documented the crappy, poor, hard scrabbling lives of Leso and his mates – Blackie, Bever, Toothy, Richard, Whippet – as they fixed nets, repaired boats and hung around bored.
This is an extraordinary, remarkable, amazing portrait of a dead-end community, poverty, low expectations and young people bored off their faces. No wonder they took to sniffing glue and as the 80s moved on and adopted the punk look pioneered down in London to express some kind of sense of identity and worth, rebellion against grey-clad council houses, the grey sky and the unremitting rhythms of the grey, cold, freezing sea.
This section is given tragic force when we learn that Leso, who got Killip his ‘in’ into the community and of whom there are many photos, fixing nets, waiting round for the tide to turn, hanging with his punk mates, walking across a dirty road carrying a rifle, he died tragically during Killips’s stay.
The fishing boat he and some mates were in was overturned at sea and Leso and David were drowned, tubby Bever made it back to shore. In tribute Killip made Leso’s grieving mother an album of three dozen photos of her lost son.
- Family on a Sunday walk, Skinningrove (1982)
- Leso with his dogs and a gun, Skinningrove (1983)
- Skinningrove photos
Seacoal Camp 1981 to1984
Killip discovered Lynemouth, Northumberland, in 1976. It had a strange and eerie vibe because there was a massive coalmine not far from the sea and waste coal was expelled into the sea, only to be brought back to shore on the incoming tides.
And a community of travellers or extremely poor people living in caravans and using horse-drawn wagons in and near the sea had sprung up which made a living scavenging this coal, using it to heat their homes, cook food, and to sell to other locals. An entire lifestyle based on coal scavenging.
Once again Killip had trouble penetrating this closed and fiercely protective community. From 1976 when he first came across it he made repeated attempts to photograph the people but was chased away. Only in 1982 was he finally accepted when, on a final visit to the local pub he was recognised by a man who’d given him shelter from a rainstorm at Appleby Horse fair and vouched for his good intentions.
So Killip set about taking photos, delicately tactfully at first. But in winter 1983 he bought a caravan of his own and got permission to park it alongside the community’s ones. Once really embedded he was able to record all the different types of moments experienced by individuals or between people engaged on this tough work, at the mercy of the elements, permanently dirty with coal muck.
In the unpublished preface to the volume of poems he was working on when he was killed in the last days of the Great War, Wilfred Owen wrote:
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Same, with modifications, goes for Killip. The poetry, the deep, deep poetry of these photographs, derives from the immense love and compassion they evince, love of suffering humanity, the candour and accuracy of the shots, finding moments of piercing acuity amid the grinding poverty and mental horizons which are hemmed in on every side by slag heaps, metal works and the four walls of a cramped caravan.
- Boo with his rabbit (1984)
- Rocker and his toad, Lynemouth, Northumberland
- Nini and Helen sorting coal (1983)
- Rocker hand-picking coal (1984)
- Helen and her hula hoop (at the top of this review)
- Alison and two carts, 1983
- Selection of images
- Killip’s caravan and car, 1983, with huge aluminium smelter in the background
- Three lads in Killip’s caravan
Photography and music
Photography is like music. Regarding music you can describe the notes and cadences, the technical manoeuvres and key changes, the invocation of traditions and forms and write at length about the ostensible subject (the Pastoral symphony, the Moonlight sonata etc). But in the end you have to let go of all of that and experience it as music, let the music do its work, what only it can do, triggering emotions, memories, fragments of feelings or thoughts, stirring forgotten moments, making all kinds of neural connections, filling your soul.
Same with these photographs. I’ve described what he was trying to do, bring respect and compassion to people right on the margins of society, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten. He’s quoted as saying he had no idea he would end up recording the process of de-industralisation, it just happened to be going on as he developed his method and approach as a social photographer. Long essays could be written about class in England, about deindustrialisation and then, of course, about the Thatcher government which supervised the destruction of large swathes of industry and British working class life alongside it.
But at some point you pack all that way and let the photos do their work, which is to lacerate your heart and move you to tears. This is the best our society could offer to God’s children. What shame. What guilt.
The Miners Strike 1984 to 1985
A friend of mine at school in the Home Counties, his older sister was married to a copper. He told us the Miners Strike was great. They were bussed to Yorkshire, put up in army barracks, paid triple time wages and almost every day there was a fight, which he and his mates always won because they had the plastic shields, big truncheons and if things got really out of control, the cavalry. Killip apparently treated the long strike as another project with a view to producing another long-form series.
But images from the Miners Strike project aren’t treated separately as the other projects are. Instead they’re rolled into the In Flagrante section.
In flagrante 1988
In 1985 the publisher Secker and Warburg told Killip they’d be interested in publishing his next book. This would mean access to a larger audience than previously and Killip was inspired. He worked with editor Mark Holborn and designer Peter Dyer to produce the 1988 book In Flagrante. Unlike all his previous projects which were heavily themed around specific communities and locations, In Flagrante deliberately cut his images adrift from their source projects to create a randomised cross-section of his career (although anyone who’d studied the previous projects has a good idea where each of them come from).
- Glue sniffing, Whitecraven, Cumbria (1980)
- Royal wedding celebrations, North Shields, 1981
- Selection from In Flagrante
- Slideshow of images
- Images from Gateshead’s punk venue, The Station
- Leso at sea, 1983
- Seven images with commentary
For the bitter bleakness and the unerring accuracy of the images, In Flagrante has been described as ‘the most important book of English photography from the 1980s.’ I was particularly taken by the set of photos of miserable English people from the 70s and 80s on various English beaches, at Whitley Bay, and so on. Narrow lives, no expectations, the quiet misery of the English working classes. They’ve come to the seaside for a break, for a ‘holiday’ and none of them know what to do there. Images of a nation at a loss what to do with the land it finds itself in.
Revolt
Respect goes to the tribes of young people who forged ways of rebelling against the poverty and low to zero expectations of their environment. In Flagrante contains a surprising number of photos of young punks who took the form to baroque extremes long after it was abandoned in London. There are lots of shots of the Angelic Upstarts of all bands, playing sweaty punk gigs in Gateshead. In fact the gallery shop has a music paper-size fanzine-style publication entirely full of shots he did of sweaty punk gigs in the mid-80s. ‘We’re the future, your future.’
America 1991
What happened to Killip after that? America. I was disappointed to read that in 1991 he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994 to 1998. He only retired from Harvard in 2017. Well, no doubt taking the Yankee dollar was the right move for him, but it meant the abrupt end of the sequence of breath-taking portfolio projects which had begun in 1970.
Summary
Killip’s oeuvre represents not only an invaluable document of social history 1970 to 1985 and, as such, a blistering indictment of an incompetent, uncaring, bewilderingly lost society – but it is also a testament to love and the redeeming possibilities of art.
The compassion and humanity of his work is embodied in its closeness and intimacy with its subjects, not the fake intimacy of eroticism, but being right there with poor suffering humanity; right up close as the dirty kids play in their abandoned playgrounds, the dispirited losers chain-smoke in a wretched bingo hall, an old lady loses the will to live in a vandalised bus shelter, bored young men sniff glue in a remote fishing town, and lost children spend all day every day clambering over filthy mounds of coal to help their mums and dads scrape a flimsy living The poetry is in the pity.
Levelling up
In the 50 years since Killip took these photos generations of politicians have come and gone, promising to narrow the North-South Divide and level up the whole country. All bollocks. Life expectancy for babies born in the North-East, like per household income, remain stubbornly below the national average. Pathetic, isn’t it. What a sorry excuse for a country.
Go and see this marvellous, searing, heart-rending exhibition.
The promotional video
Related links
- Chris Killip retrospective continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 19 February 2023
- Chris Killip’s website
- Chris Killip photos at the V&A
- Chris Killip article and photos at Tate
- Chris Killip photos at the Martin Parr Foundation
- A selection of images with audio commentary by Killip himself
‘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/