Barbara Kruger’s Anti-Retrospective

ALLISON RAUCH, REPORTER: You know Barbara Kruger, even if you don’t think you do.

For instance, if you know Supreme, you know Kruger. The streetwear brand’s logo is a ripoff of her iconic style, which uses white text in oblique Futura bold type on red backgrounds to create provocative messages. These messages, often pasted over black and white photographs, use personal pronouns like you, we, I, and our, to pull the viewer in.

Some famous pieces include 1987’s Untitled (I shop therefore I am), depicting a hand with a red text box overlaid, and 1989’s Untitled (Your body is a battleground), created for the 1989 Women’s March. It shows a woman’s face split in positive and negative exposures with the message overlaid in red and white text.

Her art addresses themes of consumerism, power imbalances in society, and feminist issues.

SAM RAUCH, DESIGN STUDENT: The original context in which I first saw her artwork was at that Broad (museum in Los Angeles) installation, and it was about feminist artwork. It was right about the same time the Me Too movement was going around. And the piece that I saw was one of her most famous ones, the “Your body is a battleground.” And it just struck me. I mean, I think with a lot of feminist artwork obviously you have to be pretty anti-establishment in order to to really pull off the message, you know. It has to be something that breaks the established systems of artwork that have been in place for so long by a male-dominated art world. And it was striking and it was huge. And it was this bright red text — you see so much artwork in a museum that doesn’t have text in it and there she was, just so absolutely unafraid to just use it and create this experience that you’re just sucked into when you’re looking at it.

A. RAUCH: That’s Sam Rauch, my sister and second-year design student at Carnegie Mellon University. We both love Kruger’s art, but I wanted to know what she thought of it from a design perspective.

S. RAUCH: Well, it’s interesting, being a design student, I come from a primarily fine arts background. And you kind of learn as a fine artist that words are tacky and, you know, words are also — in the realm of design, communication, design advertisements, that kind of stuff — so oftentimes used to just ever so subtly manipulate you.But what Barbara Kruger does is she takes that archetype of advertisement and using words to direct thought, and just completely breaks it. And she uses words to open thought and to free thought and to talk to you directly rather than like you as a consumer. And just make you break out of a mind frame instead of inserting yourself into one. You don’t have the choice to be just a passive bystander. She just pulls you into her world and there’s no choice whether you want to or not.

A. RAUCH: Kruger came to fame in the 1980s and 1990s, but many of her messages still resonate today. On September 19, 2021, her exhibit “Thinking of You I Mean Me, I Mean You” opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s the first museum survey of her work in the United States since 1999. It’s also arguably one of her biggest exhibitions. Thinking of You fills 18,000 square foot Regenstein Hall, as well as Griffin Court, an 8,000 square foot atrium. Still more of her art spills over into other places in the museum. There are pieces designed for the ticketing office, the museum cafe, the stairs leading up to the exhibit — even a sound installation in the gift shop. Kruger’s art even transcends the museum itself, seeping into the city of Chicago with pieces on billboards, CTA bus shelters, and a video projection played nightly on the Merchandise Mart building as a part of their Art on the Mart series.

The exhibition is an anti-retrospective, according to associate curator Robyn Farrell. It does not take a chronological look at her career, but instead engages all her pieces in the present moment, as they resonate in the present. The exhibit also reexamines older, iconic pieces on giant LED screens that flash different meanings, exploring new layers. “I shop therefore I am” becomes “I sext therefore I am,” “I die therefore I was,” and so on.

So given a rainy Sunday and free Wildcard access to the Art Institute, my good friend Jacob Milendorf and I took the red line down to see Thinking of You for ourselves.

JACOB MILENDORF: Yeah, a very encompassing experience. You walk into the first room, there’s stuff on every wall, there’s a screen, you walk in even more. There’s text on the floor on all four walls. And so initially, it was overwhelming in a good way.

A RAUCH: The installation begins with a roomful of collages in black, white and red, flanking an LED screen. Venturing further into the exhibit, you come across a room covered in black and white text. Messages are written on every wall, including the floor. Other rooms reveal multi screen video pieces, collections of older art, sound bites repeating through speakers in the ceiling, and a room that asked for viewers’ consent to be filmed, displaying the footage on screens in other parts of the museum.

A RAUCH: What was your favorite piece? Did you have a piece that stood out to you?

MILENDORF: It was a fairly small room with a TV on three or four walls. And each one had a well known passage…the Pledge of Allegiance. And there was one that was like the marriage union speech. And it basically went word by word, like typing it out as you would on a computer. So you’re seeing the words kind of appeared in real time. And each time they got to a noun or some word that she wanted to kind of break down and think about better, it would flash quickly to another word, like a synonym, or something that she was critiquing. So we the people of the United States, and then the United States was changed to different words. Like questioning what is the United States?

A. RAUCH: My favorite piece from the exhibit was Untitled (In the beginning there was crying), which was part of a three-image series in a room with red and white text on the floor. The piece shows a visceral image of the brain, overlaid in tiny white and red text with the words: “In the beginning, there was crying. In the middle, there was confusion. In the end, there was silence.”

Thinking of You, as Milendorf said, is encompassing. It’s immersive, like Kruger’s art, sucking you into her world. And it’s overwhelming. Her declarative statements and her direct questions demand an answer from the viewer, something the typical museum-goer may not be used to. But stepping into this discomfort is rewarding.

Thinking of You runs at the Art Institute until January 24, 2022.  For WNUR News, I’m Allison Rauch.