Barbara Kruger has a lot to say. The American artist has sloganeered her way to the very top with a combination of sans serif text and sampled imagery that’s as instantly recognisable and influential as it is widely copied. And her show at the Serpentine is a lexical assault, a torrent of word play and semantic shenanigans.
Iconic Kruger works – ‘I shop therefore I am’, ‘Your body is a battleground’ – are reconfigured and adapted for LED screens. Once-static works now move, turned into puzzles with their pieces slowly coalescing to a soundtrack of ticking clocks. The tech approach allows words in other works to be swapped and switched around. ‘Remember me’ flickers to ‘delete me’ and ‘dishevel me’; ‘I pledge allegiance’ becomes ‘I pledge anxiety’ and ‘affluenza’.
Your first impulse with Kruger might be to try and find solid definitions, singular meanings. Does she think shopping is bad? Are bodies meant to be battlegrounds? But the shifting vocabulary here is the point: language is fluid, adaptable, malleable. It can mean whatever you want, but it can also mean whatever they want, the advertisers, the authorities, the corporations. That's the lesson of Kruger’s work: always be wary of language, always question it. She shows how language is a weapon, one that you can wield, but also have to know how to defend yourself against.
In your face, intelligible, approachable, clear as god damn crystal
A new work in the central gallery is a multi-channel video that sees Kruger stealing and sampling memes and rap lyrics. She’s manipulating the language of social media and online culture just like she once did the language of advertising and newspapers. It’s all direct, in your face, intelligible, approachable, clear as god damn crystal.
Kruger’s work is so immediate in its questioning of authority and society, and our place in it, that you leave feeling brilliantly battered by it. But not all of it works. Some of the pieces here get a little lost in the architecture of the gallery, some of her directness gets muddied by the tech she’s using, and an annotated text piece about identity feels like being forced to read someone’s undergrad dissertation.
This show’s not the greatest expression of Kruger’s aesthetic, but it’s still a heady, immersive celebration of one of the few artists around who you can genuinely call iconic.