You, I Mean Me, I Mean You
Barbara Kruger's retrospective and social media projection
Hello friends,
I need to do work chores responsibility capitalist-cog-things work that I get paid for as well as work that I don’t get paid for but need to do anyway and I’m also gearing myself up to write a deeply personal cringe TMI waste of time waste of space personal essay about some things that happened recently. Instead of doing any of that, though, I’m here, thinking about the Barbara Kruger exhibition I saw today at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), entitled Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.
I really didn’t know anything about her or her work before going in, except that of course I did. I just didn’t know I knew it, because it’s either been memed to hell and back or it is so reminiscent of contemporary meme imagery/language as it exists now that it’s immediately recognizable, from the mostly sans serif fonts to that intense, bold bright red. I’ve definitely seen this image before:
Although I couldn’t tell you where. Maybe some feminist Instagram account?
According to the NYT, the piece above was originally created as a street poster “in 1989 to promote the women’s march on Washington, which was spurred by anti-abortion legislation undermining Roe v. Wade.” This image is older than I am by a year, but here we are again.
Kruger was clearly doing the meme thing before the internet became what we know it as today, even if these weren’t thought of as memes at the time. She uses the same mechanisms that many memes now use, which is to say, the same mechanisms that advertisers use: short, memorable slogans; large, easy-to-read letters; bold colors.
What struck me as I walked through the exhibition today wasn’t just how familiar it all looked. It was also the size. The largeness of the artwork at the retrospective was especially gratifying; in part, I suspect, because she’s a woman artist (also Jewish) taking up ALL! THIS! SPACE!!!; in part, too, because as a millennial hooked on the attention economy, the size and spacing of the pieces made them easily digestible at a glance. Once I glanced, though, it was hard to look away, and when I did look away, I kept thinking about it.
Several rooms had only four pieces in them, each on its own wall, the letters on the canvas so huge you had to stand in the middle of the room to read them; other rooms had text on the floor or wrapped around the walls, everywhere, enclosing the viewer inside the artwork.
I kept thinking about social media as I walked through the exhibition, even when there was nothing that seemed directly related to it. So often, on social media, I use the plural, general “you” when I am really talking about me. This is a common flex, common in spoken conversation as well as on social media. We extrapolate and project onto others all the time. My partner and I occasionally catch ourselves doing it to the damn cats: “Abigail seems depressed…” “I think Meg is angry…” I’m not saying my cats aren’t super smart and perfect and wonderful and all that, but I am aware that they are not depressed or angry in the ways that I would be depressed or angry. I don’t mean they are lesser than humans - but they are different, their needs are different, and they don’t have the specific kind of emotional life that human beings tend to project onto, well, everything.
Especially each other.
Who is this “you” that Kruger keeps evoking in her work? It’s always there, even when the “you” isn’t stated. There’s the piece that reads “GREEDY SCHMUCK” in large green letters on a black background. There’s another that reads “I LOVE MYSELF AND YOU HATE ME FOR IT.” There’s the text in both the photos above. Are we, the viewers, the greedy schmuck, or are we in solidarity with the artist who is calling someone else a greedy schmuck? Are we meant to feel vindicated if we love ourselves and feel hated for it? Or ashamed that we hate people who love themselves? Is it my body that is a battleground, or the many, many bodies like mine, or all bodies everywhere, really, that are the battleground?
Whether you (I? we?) feel like the text is about us or someone else, directed at an individual or a collective, the fact remains that all these reads are possible. The work can be extrapolated from in a multitude of ways, and can raise question after question about definitions, categorizations, and assumed knowledge or association. My greedy schmuck associations are not your greedy schmuck associations; the use of the word “schmuck” itself might strike me differently, as a Jewish person with roots in Poland, than it might strike a Jewish person with roots in Morocco or Yemen or Spain, let alone a non-Jewish person for whom “schmuck” is just one of those words from another language that has entered a particular English lexicon; “greedy” has a particular connotation for me as a Jewish person, but it also evokes for me the capitalist systems we’re trapped in and the individuals whose accumulated wealth is truly unfathomable to most of us.
Perhaps my favorite piece in the show was the one that directly addressed this kind of extended questioning and thinking. It also made me laugh because this shit sounds exactly like how my most erudite (or, to be quite frank, high) conversations with fellow writers sound like; it also sounds like the way I sometimes try to teach my students to parse through meaning:
This was a projected piece, that began with only the black text in the image above appearing, word by word. On this wall (the piece was projected on two), the black text reads:
Our brief: Today, in our endlessly pluralist and globalized world, we are supposedly post-identity, post-race, post-gender, even post-human. But at the same time, the most identitarian of politics is being mobilized, both by advanced culture—which has seemingly rediscovered cultural difference, both its aesthetic possibility and its market value—and by the extreme ideologies or fundementalisms of the…
Once the black text is complete, various words are circled in red and annotated onscreen, also typed out word by word. For instance, the first “post” in the black text is circled in the image above, and the red text, the annotation, reads:
A post used to be something you hooked a horse up to. And then it became what you did to get a message from one person to another. Following these semi archaisms, it became a prefix that indicates a condition, circumstance, event, or person whose time has passed. So what does it mean to stick the word post in front of the words “race”, “gender”, and “human”? Categories are useful tools that can parse the complexity and thickness of the world. But they are also canny devices that feed us that world in increments, in spoonfuls and slices that make for both understanding and misunderstanding. They are the forensics that might allows us to (mis)perceive wholeness.
On the one hand, the piece feels like a not so subtle ribbing of precisely the kind of thinking on display, the endless parsing of words and meanings and the attendant self-satisfaction that doesn’t tend to accompany action so much as intellectual circle-jerking. On the other hand, it feels sincere, a real attempt to ask questions, to give context, to explore the multitude of meanings that a word can have and the complexities that arise from those meanings coexisting.
In other words, it felt—to me, anyway—that the piece as a whole was enacting the very both/and-ness that its text was evoking.
Maybe there’s a much simpler explanation to why I was moved by this exhibition and provoked myself into writing about it. Maybe it’s just its abundancy of words.
When I got back from Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., I checked social media for the first time today, and had that pathetic little jolt of dismay that something I’d posted got almost no attention. Immediately, I felt bad about myself.
Then I read a newsletter aggregating literary news of the week, and immediately felt bad about myself again because a specific author was mentioned in it, again, as they are in almost every newsletter by any literary organization I follow.
And then, for good measure, I felt bad about myself for feeling bad about either of these things. The post I shared included no effort and wasn’t particularly interesting - it was vulnerable and enthusiastic, but that doesn’t mean it was good. The author I felt envious of deserves every bit of their success and, besides, actually puts out new work of their own that brings them attention, whereas I haven’t published anything but reviews of other people’s work in ages.
So then I felt bad about being reliant on social media to feel good, and felt bad about not publishing anything of note for its own sake in a while, and felt bad about experiencing jealousy, and felt bad about feeling bad about it all.
And then I thought about Barbara Kruger, and how so much of her work in the retrospective today was about perception and commodification. There’s a reason some of her work looks like advertisements: she’s evoking the constancy of ads in our lives, the ways in which we are consumers, yes, but also consumed by our desire for consumables. Some of those may be literal objects we can buy, sure, but other consumables may be more abstract, things like respect, love, kindness, friendship, success. After all, ads play on our desires for these things too—why else are there families gathering for meals in a soup commercial, or friends taking selfies at Disneyland in an ad for the happiest place on earth?
That I can turn anything in my vicinity to a reflection of how I am not enough is particular to my personality, my specific history, my emotional bandwidth, my coping mechanisms, my needs, and my desires. But it also isn’t—it is also something many if not most of us are trained in by American and/or capitalist culture, its expectations, its projections of what happiness or fulfillment are supposed to look like, and ultimately, its constant false promises that if you just buy achieve succeed optimize be buy the right thing, you’ll (I’ll) be actually happy.
Anyway. If you can go look at art sometime, do it. It doesn’t have to be at a museum, although it can be. There’s a lot of art in all sorts of places. And art, although it exists within capitalism, at least doesn’t promise—not unless it’s propaganda—to hold the answers or keys to your (my) happiness. It just is, to do with, feel about, and experience as you (I) will.
Thanks for being here, friends. If you feel like it, tell me what you’re reading or what art you’re enjoying these days.
Yours, etc.,
Ilana
I love your introspection and wondering. So many reflecting surfaces here.