Barbara Kruger Zwirner and MoMA Shows Speak to Past and Present

Long associated with the early 1980s Pictures Generation, Kruger had, in fact, emerged a decade prior as part of the feminist wave washing through the art world. Consistent with attempts at that time to revive and elevate the craft traditions of “women’s work,” Kruger fashioned wall hangings out of yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons, earning her a spot in the 1973 Whitney Biennial. But by the end of the ’70s she became disenchanted with that approach and turned to conceptually oriented photo pieces pairing seemingly random illustrations with meditations on the nature of power. These works, however, lacked the scale and pizzazz of what followed.

During this period, Kruger supported herself by serving as art director for Mademoiselle magazine, a job which required marrying images and texts into eye-catching layouts enhanced by display fonts and color accents. Such tricks of the trade informed Kruger’s signature juxtapositions of black-and-white stock photos from mid-century advertising with red banners or boxes overlaid in white sans-serif type. The most famous example, 1987’s Untitled (I shop therefore I am), features a hand holding a card printed with the eponymous slogan. As testament to their visual potency, Kruger’s design ideas were lifted wholesale by the skateboarding clothier Supreme, and by the street artist Shepard Fairey. 

Parts of the Zwirner show are given over to what are essentially remixes of Kruger classics, with I shop therefore I am given an elaborate makeover as an installation centered on a large digital animation built into a freestanding partition. It begins with the original image collapsing into a heap of jigsaw puzzle pieces at the bottom of the frame, which re-assemble to flash editorial upgrades such as, “I shop therefore I hoard,” “I love therefore I need,” and “I am therefore I hate.” The surrounding walls are covered by a mural depicting repeated views of the iconic hand—which, instead of a message, holds various iterations of previous Kruger works, collaged with additional ephemera like Instagram posts that reference the artist.

Elsewhere, the Pledge of Allegiance and the traditional wedding vow are busily typed out on flatscreens as if someone were taking dictation from the global CEO for banality. Also on view is a video installation that begins with a sequence of chyrons crawling across a man’s worried face reading, in part, “This is about the beginning of the end. This is about the canny use of fear. About doing damage…,” before galloping on from there. 

At MoMA, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You continues Kruger’s tour d’ horizon of our collective consciousness in all its chaotic and delusional glory. An orgy of bromides set in billboard-size type, the piece climbs the walls and spills across the floor of the atrium, as texts running vertically and horizontally go off in different directions figuratively and literally. Several passages set in oval frames are distorted to look as if they were reflections in a convex mirror, while George Orwell’s famous quote about imagining the future as a boot stamping on a face forever rolls out beneath your feet like dystopian carpeting.

Given that the artist originally formulated her work under the monocultural dominance of print and three-channel television, it’s tempting to see these shows as an OK Boomer stab at remaining relevant, while telling us something we already knew. But just as Orwell intuited the totalitarian shape of things to come, she effectively foresaw how a world mired in memes serves the interests of a ruling elite. That we already know what we do is thanks, in some measure, to Barbara Kruger.