Think what you want: Barbara Kruger and the new media war

In They Live, the science fiction horror film and unsung masterpiece of 1980s Hollywood, Nada, the deadbeat protagonist and listless drifter, discovers a pair of special sunglasses which reveal hidden truths about the world. Specifically: the ruling class are aliens concealing their real agenda by quietly manipulating and coercing the unwitting masses to consume products, to breed, and to generally get in line via subliminal messages in advertising and the media. In one scene set on the baking pavements of Los Angeles, Nada, played by the Canadian professional wrestler Roddy Piper, puts on the sunglasses and looks at a billboard. To ordinary Angelos, it is advertisement for the ominous-sounding conglomerate ‘CONTROL DATA’ as they sell ‘THE TRANSPARENT COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT’. For sunglasses-wearing Nada the real message is revealed: ‘OBEY’. (The streetwear brand of the same name, which was founded in 2001 by Shepard Fairey, adopts this lettering).

By revealing the subliminal messaging of capitalist media, They Live offers a visceral critique of the language of persuasion and the visual look of compliance. The film asks us: you know that the elites are exploiting and lying to you, right, so why do you let them? The political attitude that lay behind the film – and the influence of thinkers like Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that advertising exerted what he called a ‘symbolic violence’ by imposing meanings and values that legitimize existing power structures – was also discovered at a similar moment by artist Barbara Kruger. Kruger knew the inside mechanisms of how this all worked, having started her career in the 1960s as a graphic designer for Condé Nast. Born and raised in a working-class district of New Jersey but now a New Yorker through and through, Kruger is interested in how words and images express one thing but mean another and, by the opposite token, can be used to jolt people into new ways of thinking (for progressive as well as consumerist ends).

Like Nada’s sunglasses, her works remind us that so much of the media landscape in which we stumble about bleary-eyed offers not so much the means of escaping our circumstances but the way it keeps us in check. At her best, Kruger shows us what is really going on behind the bullshit. She is the subject of a new exhibition, ‘Another day. Another night.’, at the Guggenheim, Bilbao, the largest retrospective of her work in Spain to date. At a time when we are grappling with more images than just pasted billboards to get to the truth of things – as screens have revolutionised how we engage with content – and as war proliferates, and so does the language to justify war, I wondered whether Kruger’s image-texts still felt relevant or if they merely harked back to the 1980s.

As with They Live, Kruger’s iconic image-texts were also co-opted by a hip streetwear brand, Supreme, whose white-on-red sans serif logo is inspired by the artist’s 1980s works, most famously Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989, a photographic silkscreen on vinyl. Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) is an arresting work which depicts an attractive woman’s face cut down the middle – disembodied, so to speak – with the left half in positive exposure and the right solarized like one of Man Ray’s portraits. The three-part declarative statement – ‘Your body / is a / battleground’ – is addressed directly to women: it is with and through their bodies that the right for abortion is fought. (Like advertisements on the tube, Kruger often has her texts spoken in the second person: to ‘you’). It remains Kruger’s most iconic picture. The artist made this work for the Women’s March on Washington in support of reproductive freedom. In doing so, she adapted the visual language of advertisements and claims the capitalist graphic form for progressive political ends.

In a vitrine, I was amused to see how these words were printed on a black surgical mask during the pandemic, a reminder of how bodies are frequently directed by political decision makers who allow or restrict the power of those bodies. Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) is one of several such works from the 1980s following the same format of text in direct address, repurposed black-and-white photograph, and nuanced political sloganeering, on display in Bilbao. Others include ‘I shop / therefore / I am’, a play on Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’, and so suggesting that purchasing products has replaced reasoning as the most foundational basis of our existence. In several cases, though, these classic works from the 1980s are transformed into immersive video installations which assemble and disassemble into jigsaw puzzles. They are now stylised like those basic games offered by the apps of national newspapers which you – yes, you – spend longer than you should completing immediately after you’ve scrolled through Instagram seconds after waking up. If your body is a battleground, your mind is an abattoir to be gamified.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, an entire room is dedicated to the appropriations of Kruger’s style – black-and-white image; snappy, acerbic caption – by a whole plethora of users in online social media posts. Some use the striking visual imagery to encourage users to public service (such as a call-out by West Midlands Police to help find missing persons), whereas others, such as ‘Think / what / you / want’ layered over a handsome picture of Joseph Goebbels – Hitler’s propaganda minister – are ideologically ambiguous. It is a huge collage of reappropriations of a reappropriation, a mise-en-abyme of endless information, circulating forever online.

Looking back, Kruger was a visionary. In the 1980s she understood how memes were at once democratic – anyone can make them – and dangerous. The elites knew how to stack the flow of images in their favour (while often using sleight of hand to make it seem like those memes were made by the people, for the people). As such, Kruger is one of the few artists of the 1980s whose work feels like it gets more relevant with each passing year as the ever-growing assault on our freedoms continues apace. “It would be great if my work became archaic, if the issues that they try to present, the commentary that I’m trying to suggest was no longer pertinent”, she said: “unfortunately, that is not the case at this point.”

On the morning of my visit to Bilbao, the self-proclaimed “peacemaker President”, Donald Trump, sanctioned dropping fourteen GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Middle East is on a tinder-keg while the conflict between Ukraine and Russia shows no signs of ending. Kruger’s works speak to the enduring power of what George Orwell called “political language [which is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” A scowling President Trump is featured hugging the Stars and Stripes for a split-second in the video work Untitled (No Comment) (2020), alongside images of bombs falling from the sky and the most egregious image of all: internet cats manipulating to talk like humans. It’s a barrage on the senses – of image after image, as we become desensitised to gratuitous violence, and gently ease ourselves into a state of passive brainrot – but it doesn’t get close to what that barrage feels like in the world outside.

It is perhaps in acknowledgement of this uncomfortable truth that Kruger has sought to invent new ways of engaging with contemporary politics in the real world. On May Day last month, she unveiled a new graphic piece emblazoned on the side of a Ukrainian Railways Intercity train. Inspired by Vasyl Yermylov’s agit-trains of the 1920s which proudly carried Bolshevik slogans across parts of rural Ukraine, Untitled (Another Again) is a site-specific work that is now travelling between Lviv, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi. “The work will be written in Ukrainian”, curator Maria Isserlis said: “It’s not going to be in English so people can actually read the message and understand it. It’s not going to be an alien thing; this was important for Kruger. The train is a symbol of solidarity for her.” Mimicking the der-dun-der-dun rhythms of the passenger train, the text calls for stoic perseverance in the face of adversity (and uses the same text as the Bilbao show):

ЩЕ ОДИН ДЕНЬ ЩЕ ОДНА НІЧ ЩЕ ОДНА ТЕМІНЬ ЩЕ ОДНЕ ЗАРЕВО ЩЕ ОДИН ЦІЛУНОК ЩЕ ОДИН БІЙ ЩЕ ОДНА ВТРАТА ЩЕ ОДИН ЗДОБУТОК ЩЕ ОДНЕ БАЖАННЯ ЩЕ ОДИН ГРІХ ЩЕ ОДНА ПОСМІШКА ЩЕ ОДНА СЛЬОЗА ЩЕ ОДНА НАДІЯ ЩЕ ОДИН СТРАХ ЩЕ ОДНА ЛЮБОВ ЩЕ ОДИН РІК ЩЕ ОДНА СУПЕРЕЧКА ЩЕ ОДНЕ ЖИТТЯ

ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER NIGHT ANOTHER DARKNESS ANOTHER LIGHT ANOTHER KISS ANOTHER FIGHT ANOTHER LOSS ANOTHER WIN ANOTHER WISH ANOTHER SIN ANOTHER SMILE ANOTHER TEAR ANOTHER HOPE ANOTHER FEAR ANOTHER LOVE ANOTHER YEAR ANOTHER STRIFE ANOTHER

In recent years, Kruger has responded to the local languages spoken in the cities where her work has travelled. In the Bilbao exhibition, there is a giant room with floor-to-ceiling text on all sides (including the floor) in Spanish and Basque. I ask the translator to help me make sense of it. One text was a quotation by Orwell: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” Are we in Orwell’s future? Are we in Kruger’s? If her works of the 1980s presented a warning shot to the future, then her most recent image-texts feel gentle and tame. The hyper-visual world she cautioned us about – of mendacious images manufacturing consent for all manner of ills – is here. What she didn’t envisage was how prevalent and how powerful it would be.

The critical argument against Kruger is that she had just one – albeit very good – idea. If advertising can persuade you to buy something, the same form can persuade you to do something more meaningful. Rather than make you subservient and make you obey, images can wake you up. Kruger’s work is for museums what Adam Curtis’ documentaries are for television: they use images to challenge the media and expose how we are lied to by state and corporate elites. In their subtle and often poetic ways, both Kruger and Curtis assure us that they are merely escorting us out of Plato’s cave to witness the real world outside. But are they? Despite all the efforts to make the iconic works digital – more interactive! more digital! more now! – one feels that Kruger is fighting today’s battles with the weapons of yesterday. For now at least, it feels like we are all wearing Nada’s glasses – but we need a new generation of artists to help us do anything about it.