‘As subtle as a brick in the face’: Barbara Kruger’s cacophonous Trumpspeak premonitions

Hello? Hello? Sorry. Ker-ching! Kerching! Sorry again. A metronome beat is becoming a machine-gun burst of hammering and clanging, interspersed with Big Ben chimes and distant echoes from other rooms. This is Barbara Kruger’s Thinking of You. I Mean Me.

I Mean You, at the Serpentine. The title is anything but an equivocation. This is a show filled with switchbacks, reversals, reworkings and visual and verbal plays, as Kruger, nearing 80, lifts us up and grinds us down, second to second, minute to minute, through room after room of a show that refuses to quieten down into a conventional retrospective.

Greeting the viewer immediately on arrival at the London gallery, this onslaught – a mix of specially recorded audio snippets and sound leakage from the installations and individual screens that fill the galleries – adds to what is already a cacophonous riot of word and image. Often the words are the images, scrolling down the walls and launching from the screens. So many words, too many to try to grasp as they roll by. They doomscroll us as we doomscroll them, taking up all the room in our already overstuffed heads. So many words, so much catching up to do. the words fill screens, cross the floors and rage around the walls.

Kruger’s stream-of-consciousness routines can feel like a speed-freak comedy act, or a mix of deranged stump-speeches, parodic university lectures, and the kind of statements artists would make if they harboured messianic dreams of world domination. Kruger came to fame in the 1980s, the child of a cut-and-paste analogue culture, but her art has a cumulative effect and increasing range. Everything in her art is and always was polit