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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‘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/