Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.
Art Institute of Chicago, through Jan. 24
Even if you’ve never heard her name, you know the work of Barbara Kruger, said Kyle MacMillan in the Chicago SunTimes. Kruger’s “instantly identifiable” style, which frequently uses “eye-catching” white-on-red text to question consumerism, long ago migrated from art galleries to T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and social media—sometimes with the help of imitators. For the first
U.S. museum survey of her work in two decades, Kruger, 76, is bursting out into the streets again, with her images emblazoned on Chicago billboards, bus stops, and storefronts. She has also revised 40 works, adapting them either to exploit new technologies or to address the current sociopolitical climate. Kruger’s signature move, in any setting, is to appropriate and repurpose the visual language of tabloids, advertisements, and other mass media, said Nora McGreevy in SmithsonianMag.com. “Her best-known works employ pithy epigrams and images to arrest viewers’ attention in humorous, thought-provoking, and sometimes disconcerting ways.”
“This is no ordinary retrospective. It is a full-body assault,” said Lori Waxman in the Chicago Tribune. In the main exhibition, the walls are wrapped in floor-to-ceiling lettering, giant LED screens cycle through striking images and pointed text, speakers play murmuring voices, and the floors look like static on a TV screen. Kruger’s wordplay is often funny, yet “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.”
Consider just two Kruger bannersize quips: “I Shop Therefore I Am”; “Admit Nothing / Blame Everyone / Be Bitter.” I couldn’t even bring myself to enter the selfie room, in which visitors choose a mural-size slogan—perhaps “I Hate Myself and You Love Me for It”—and pose in front of it while their image is broadcast to screens scattered about the museum.
With Kruger, “the soul-crushing force of state power and capitalism” hits you with “the force of a genuine epiphany,” said Philip Kennicott in The Washington
Post. And though the media landscape has changed “almost beyond comprehension” since this Newark, N.J., native began making art more than 40 years ago, she has kept up with the changes while sharpening her wit. Take 2015’s Untitled (Connect), in which she updates an iconic 1987 work by showing a hand that now holds up a smartphone screen displaying apps with names such as Pleasure, Knowledge, Ignorance, and Spam. “As new generations encounter her work for the first time, they will find it as bracingly smart as when their parents discovered it.” In the end, “few artists have produced work as genuinely unsettling to established ways of thinking.”