You.
You cannot avoid the call. It confronts you in capped letters two stories tall:
You. You are here, looking through the looking glass, darkly, seeing the unseen, the invisible, the barely there. You. Whoever you are. Wherever you are. Etched in memory. Until you, the looker, is gone. Unseen. No more. You too.
Already feeling small and overwhelmed, I shrank to the mental size of Alice as she went down the rabbit hole, reeling around at the parade of pronouncements rising around me in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s four-story project space, the Marron Family Atrium. Barbara Kruger, the artist who has hectored us and questioned our allegiances and thoughts for four decades, was screaming at me—though in well-designed type— from every surface (except, for some reason, the ceiling) of the room. Called Thinking of You. I mean Me. I Mean You, the exhibition installation is by far the most effective use of the atrium I have seen.
Kruger’s curious blend of questions and statements, assertions and ambivalences, and graphics that operate as works of art have often left me a bit ambivalent. Part of the reason I have not always warmed to her art is the ease with which it has been appropriated. I Shop, Therefore I Am is a wry comment on consumer society, but has also become an less-than-ironic statement on shopping bags. Your Body is a Battleground, a text placed over the face of woman, half of it in negative, is a clear political statement—Kruger produced it for an abortion rights march. It is better than a slogan because of its lack of affect and its declarative, seemingly neutral stance, but still is more effective in the realm of public opinion than in that of art.
In the last decade, however, Kruger’s work has taken a turn for the bigger and, I think, the better. She has moved from framed works of art that also appeared as posters or printed t-shirts to billboards and then on to environmental graphics. The MoMA installation is the largest of these, presaged by projects almost as expansive, such as the recent one for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Liberated by technology that lets her print with precision at scale, she has also become more poetic and discursive in her statements, so that the texts become larger in both length and scope.
This is about loving and longing, begins one of the texts printed on one of the lower walls of the atrium. It continues: about shaming and hating. About the promises of kindness and the pleasures of doing damage. This is about crazy desire and having a gift for cruelty. This is about the difference between the figure and the body. About the fickleness of renown. About who gets what and who owns what about who is remembered and who is forgotten. Here. In this place. This is about you. I mean me. I mean you.
As I believe happens only too rarely, the texts’ graphic presence, meanings, and atmospheres they evoke, as well as the spatial qualities, all work together to blow open the confines of this bunker of Modern art. As you spin around the space—as that is really the only way to experience the work—the words pulse in and out of focus, an effect Kruger enhanced by printing several of them as if you were reading them through a giant, distorting lens. Other texts are interrupted by the cutouts that give glimpses into the galleries around the atrium. A few cartoon faces peek down from corners. The texts are clear. The type is that of business and communications. The meanings and effects are ambivalent, layered, and lost in the scale of printouts you cannot read from one perspective.
Kruger is one of the few artists, if not the only one in recent memory (perhaps Marina Abramović came closest in the same space by the reverse tactic of creating intimate connections between people), who have managed to defeat the machine that is MoMA in its efforts to frame and contain the diversity and danger that is (or should be) Modern art. Her work overwhelms, but also appropriates and uses the architecture, and the capture of the audience within the structure of isolation the institution represents, and then opens up new spaces and meanings with the room she was granted. By taking over the space, rather than just placing objects and images in it, Kruger makes the building her own, obliterating what are usually white walls that serve to frame art in institutional blandness. The very structure screams her messages.
Perhaps it is a slight revenge: According to several people I spoke to at the opening, Kruger was promised a much larger exhibition, only to see her allotted gallery reduced to this one central statement. She made the most of it. In so doing, she has made MoMA’s architecture her own, turned her art into building, and shown how a graphic art can transform seemingly neutral structures into carriers of meaning.
Ultimately, MoMA will have its revenge: the exhibition will “come down”—the vinyl on which the words are printed peeled up and the surfaces painted over—by January 2023, and some other artist will have a go at the space. We can only hope that Kruger, with the tailwinds of such a major presentation—and the fact that she is now represented by one of the most aggressive and effective gallery dealers in the business, David Zwirner—will have the chance to transform other spaces outside the institutional art confines. I, for one, would give her the U.S. Capitol as a site, or at least some of the acres of banal space that have and are being created for New York’s new airports. Give the artist her due and her room. She will make us question, wonder about, and see our world in new ways.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
