Words worth a thousand pictures
Taking in Barbara Kruger’s career-spanning exhibition at Art Institute of Chicago
It’s not easy to single out an individual phrase or sentence from the reams that make up “THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.,” Barbara Kruger’s career-spanning exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Nevertheless, here are some that stuck:
ADMIT NOTHING / BLAME EVERYONE / BE BITTER
YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND
THE WAR FOR ME TO BECOME YOU
NOT RIGHT ENOUGH / NOT WRONG ENOUGH / NOT NOTHING ENOUGH
Kruger was born in Newark in 1945, and she worked as a page designer and picture editor at women’s magazines before coming to prominence in New York in the ’80s for her searing pasteups. Made from found imagery overlaid with bold type, they felt like advertisements turned inside out. Their direct address echoed sales pitches and propaganda, but what they offered instead of easy commerce and political messaging was critical thinking. Over the past four decades, working on every kind of surface from gallery walls to T-shirts, magazine covers, billboards and buildings, in an increasingly technology-crazed, shame-inducing, politically extreme world, Kruger has proved herself again and again one of the art world’s fiercest cultural critics — and its most formidable wordsmith bar none.
Before you imagine a dreary, finger-wagging show in which sedate reading replaces sensuous looking, know that this is no ordinary retrospective. It is a full-body assault. With the exception of 20 original black-andwhite photo collages from the 1980s, neatly hung in their frames, Kruger has replayed, animated and supersized her oeuvre, ensuring its ability to reach an audience with ever-shrinking attention spans. She has quite literally taken over the museum, writing on the stair risers, playing robocall voices in the elevators, plastering across the Monroe and Michigan Avenue windows, overlaying the Griffin Court’s 8,000-square-foot floor. She has desirable items for sale in the gift shop, a mural that asks WHY ARE YOU HERE? in ticketing, and a statue that looks almost at home amid the neoclassical marble figures of the sculpture court. Her messages ring loud outside the institution, too, from posters on CTA train platforms and bus shelters to an Art on theMart projection that covers the Merchandise Mart facade nightly.
The exhibition proper is a saturating, three-dimensional, audiovisual experience. The galleries form a sort of giant, meandering stage set, down to the television-static vinyl flooring. The walls, wrapped in enormous, floor-to-ceiling lettering, constitute backdrops against which viewers inadvertently position themselves. Huge LED screens cycle
through sharp imagery and piercing puns. Speakers alternately whisper uncanny prerecorded murmurings or provide jarring noise effects. There’s even a selfie room, in which consenting visitors are filmed on a closed-circuit camera against one of two murals — I HATE MYSELF AND YOU LOVE ME FOR IT or I LOVE MYSELF AND YOU HATE ME FOR IT — their images broadcast on monitors placed throughout the museum. What a choice.
If this sounds akin to the WNDR Museum or one of those “Immersive Van Gogh” spectacles, it is not. There are no easy pleasures here. (If you think you found one, think harder.) Kruger rebuffs the very notion of museum as site of cultural diversion, even if that is what a majority of museum visitors seem to want. This impression was borne out by this writer’s very unrigorous counting of bodies in places, of which there were many in the Impressionist galleries, some in “THINKING OF YOU.,” and next to none in two of the AIC’s bravest current shows. Those, should you wish to visit, are “If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust,” a crushing video installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme that uses avatars, desert landscapes and internet footage to reveal the fragmentation and dispersal of Palestinian selfhood, and “Is the Museum a Battlefield?,” a whipsmart lecture by Hito Steyerl originally performed at the 13th Istanbul Biennial, tracking the weapons manufacturing of the Biennial’s own sponsors.
But don’t get the wrong impression. It’s not that Kruger is never fun. Her wordplay almost always is, as in a video that spells out the Pledge of Allegiance in white on red, cycling through alternatives as it goes: I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE / ADHERENCE / ADORATION / ANXIETY / AFFLUENZA / ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES / UNDEFEATED TEAMS / DIVIDED SENTIMENTS / INHERITED WEALTH / MARGINALIZED BODIES …. Hilarious, right? But also horrendously true. Sometimes the humor is situational, like a mural in the AIC balcony cafe (currently closed, as are all dining facilities), whose final sentence proclaims: TODAY IS THE FIRST TRY AT EATING RIGHT. Maybe don’t swallow your maple-fudge brownie and pumpkin-spice latté while reading that.
The style Kruger developed in the ’80s and has used ever since is immediately recognizable. She employs two sans-serif fonts, Futura Bold Oblique and Helvetica Ultra Compressed, mostly set in boxes against bold images or on their own, in a palette of red, white and black, with recent forays into green-screen green. Her look has also been infinitely copied, a cycle of appropriation she smartly acknowledges by wallpapering the exhibition’s entrance hall with hundreds of Kruger-esque images not her own. Think it’s so easy to do what she does? Evidently not. At the center of these poor relatives is a wall-sized LED screen that animates a jigsaw puzzle version of one of Kruger’s own most iconic borrowings: a play on René Descartes’ philosophical maxim, “I think therefore I am.” In Kruger’s variant, a hand holds a credit-card-like rectangle that reads, I SHOP THEREFORE I AM. Stay a little longer and the text updates: I SHOP THEREFORE I HOARD / I NEED THEREFORE I SHOP / I LOVE THEREFORE I NEED
/ I SEXT THEREFORE I AM / I DIE THEREFORE I WAS. All to the ka-ching of a cash register. Buy that.
Nearly everything in “THINKING OF YOU.” put me on the verge of nausea, the kind triggered by being immersed in an environment in which the profound wrongness of the world has been made undeniably, repeatedly explicit. The rooms in which this hit me nearly to the point of knockout were two of Kruger’s forays into the world of digital culture: a rapid-fire video that simulates surfing the web and engaging in social media, complete with cat and hairstyling videos, and the aforementioned selfie room, which I could not even bring myself to enter. What does it mean if for some visitors, these rooms are cool places to hang out, while for others they induce loathing? Generational explanations offer little comfort.
Barbara Kruger has been seeing through all our fancy lies about money and power and technology and justice for forty years now, and her vision has only gotten clearer and more terrifying. As she herself put it, somewhere in the middle of this exhibition: THIS IS ABOUT THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
“Barbara Kruger: THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.” runs through Jan. 24 at the Art Institute of Chicago,
111 S. Michigan Ave., tickets and more information at 312-443-3600 and www.artic.edu