Review || Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I mean Me. I mean You, at the Serpentine — Heartbreak edition.
It’s quite a thing to visit an exhibition whose iconic piece states ‘Your body is a battleground’ with a broken heart.
I wasn’t expecting much. Only to take my mind off it. To get out of bed and do something as well. Society makes me feel guilty for doing nothing while curing my heartbreak… How long is it going to last?, I suspect they all are thinking. These days, it seems I’ll never get better, and I’ll never be able to do anything anymore. And so, I left home for London on a Sunday morning, all wrapped up in my guiltiness and a warm coat my mum wanted to get rid of because it brought back bad memories, she said.
It was early in the morning, but he was working on his laptop already. He has been working a lot since the break-up. He must finish his art theory book before he can leave for good. I wondered if he cared about where I was going to, and if he liked my coat, and if he found me pretty, but I’m not sure he even looked at me.
Walking across Hyde Park to reach the Serpentine, I thought about the name of the exhibition… ‘Thinking of You. I mean Me. I mean You’… That sounds pretty romantic for an often labelled ‘political’ artist, I thought. I hate labels, and, specifically, the ‘political artist’ one, which I find reductive, sensationalistic, and basically annoying. But they have an impact, even on those who hate them.
Because of the few papers I had read, all of them focusing on the political dimension of Kruger’s practice, I was expecting to discover a historically pertinent, theoretically stimulating and certainly effective work, but I did not anticipate being moved by it. I was wrong. Behind its cold and repetitive form, Kruger’s art is intelligent in a very human way. An intelligence that pulled me out of numbness for a bit more than just a visit.
I had booked a ticket for five different time slots because my anxiety has been out of control these days. I don’t know what I feared, but that’s the way it is. Over-planning reassures me, I suppose. My voice was weak, I noticed, when I said hello and showed my 2.40 pm ticket to the lady at the entrance of the gallery. Was it the long line of couples and groups I had just passed that made me feel intimidated? Or my throat being tight because I hadn’t spoken to anyone for several days? Either way, my voice was propelling the sound of loneliness. When we were together, my voice was never weak.
I got into the first room of the gallery carrying the pain of this new reality like a sombre woman in a Munch painting. There, was exhibited Untitled (That’s the way we do it), 2011/2020, a series of collages composed of images created in Kruger’s style that she found online and re-appropriated, then arranged in the palm of the hand from her Untitled (I shop therefore I am) piece. It could be shots of my mind: too many thoughts, messily bumping into each other, a profusion of images and texts that I could have scrolled through on social media, frenetically, but which I didn’t care for, ultimately… Profusion implies depreciation. That’s the time you spend on your rose that makes it so important, isn’t it?
I headed to another room where I discovered Pledge, Will, Vow, 1988/2020, a three-channel video work playing with the words of legal oaths: those of a will, those of a pledge, and those of marriage vows.
‘I take/ embrace/ arrange/ remove/ rape/ take you, (…)
to love/ elevate/ isolate/ exaggerate/ obsess/ love
and to cherish/ value/ abuse/ worship/ cherish
till death/ the disappearing act/ the end/ death do us part/ divorce/ part (…)’
This is the type of work an AI couldn’t create, I thought. An AI couldn’t feel the irony behind an official discourse crumbling down, nor the tragedy of human banality, certainly not when it comes to big phenomena, such as power, death, or love. You fall in love. Your person is unique, the story of you together is remarkable, and your love has no rules. It’s like you’ve reached something bigger than yourself, and you feel powerful for the first time in your life. But then you both fall apart, and you realise that no matter how remarkable that love story has been, you’re eventually going through the same crap as those other people whose views you’ve always despised. Conflicting feelings. Sadness. Anger. Bargaining, crying, screaming, ‘can’t stand him anymore but miss us already’… Break-ups remind you that you’re just a human, in an atrocious banality. And perhaps your love was banal as well. Didn’t you value/ abuse/ worship as much as you cherished, after all?
Untitled (No comment), 2020, is Kruger’s most recent work to be shown. It’s a three-screen video installation on which appear texts, some of them being part of previous works of hers or quotes by figures such as Voltaire and Kendrick Lamar, as well as segments as diverse as hair tutorials, diamond patchwork, dance or acrobatics performances… or cats.
Children, seated next to me in the dark room, burst into laughter when images of ‘kitties in toilet bowls’ appeared on screen. I thought it’s cute — the children laughing, not the cats — but I’m not sure if I genuinely found it cute or if it’s just something that I’m supposed to think. A few segments later, a text by Kruger appears: ‘I need you to love me. No really. I mean, without you, I’m nothing. Well, I’m something, but that something is so pathetic, that I’d rather be nothing than the patheticness of that something (…)’. It hit me hard. I’ve loved him that way. But I’m not here anymore. Pathetic, that’s how I started to feel with him, and he would not even understand…
I felt heavy-hearted, thinking that I’d lost our love, and irritated by those little brats who were now laughing like hyenas about another cat declaring some political propagandist stuff this time. Wait, not only brats, but some adults too. What’s up with those fucking cats? I never got it.
Watching Untitled (No comment) propelled me into the awkward reality of our social life: people standing next to each other, not sharing a word nor a glance, all united by the shared experience of watching cat memes on a screen, brushing off what they heard and saw the minute before, desensitised to the thoughts and reactions of the person whose body heat they can almost feel. Indifference — an awkward reality I’ve been trying to escape with him. Caring for someone else than myself. Looking for sense outside of this ambient nonsense.
‘The truth is ours.’ appears on screen. Is it? The truth is mine. The truth is his. We failed to agree on the truth.
The next room is paved with several quotes, including one from Orwell and one from a 1928 lecture given by Virginia Woolf. Conceived as an immersive installation, Untitled (FOREVER), 2017, is the social media-friendly piece of this exhibition. For some reason, the big, central, circled ‘YOU’ that appears on the longest wall isn’t calling me out. ‘YOU’ is him. Realising the line below states ‘You are here’ and is supposed to address me is confusing for a minute.
On the adjoining wall, I read: ‘This is about loving and longing, 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.’ Ironically enough, this doesn’t sound like a proper ‘FOREVER’ thing. Between loving and shaming, desire, and cruelty, getting and owning, the self and the other, the subject and the object, how can a Me and a You remain an Us? I didn’t find the balance, and I doubt I will ever achieve it.
On the adjoining wall, a series of ‘war’ words echo my thoughts on love: ‘War time, war crime, war game, gang war, civil war, holy war (…) war for me to become you’. Reading that line, I smiled with bitterness. Or self-contempt? Then, I left the room.
The last piece I focused on was the iconic Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989/2019. When it comes to my own body, I must say that it has already been inflicted with a large range of violence, either by myself or others. For this reason, I was never indifferent to such a statement. I knew this work had been originally created as a poster to support reproductive freedom, but it bears a cohesive strength to so many other plights women face in our societies, that it can just speak to any of us, regardless of our nationality, age, ethnicity, social status, sexual activity and, consequently, experiences.
The version exhibited at the Serpentine has been edited with new slogans, including ‘Your neck is squeezed’, ‘Your skin is sliced’, and ‘Your heart is broken’, which obviously meant a lot to me on this day.
Let’s be fair… a heartbreak is not a rape. It’s not torture either. Nor state or legal violence against women’s bodies. Yet, some days, I’d rather go through the punishments of the nine circles of Hell than lose the person I love. At least, I wouldn’t be alone. The pain of a heartbreak is tangible. You can feel it striking in your gut, your cheeks, your brain, and it will bury you into such a lethargic and hopeless condition that you won’t expect to ever find peace and rest again. Being heartbroken, you just stop fighting on the battleground.
I left the gallery around 4 pm and walked back to St Pancras feeling some sort of excitement, having been stimulated by Kruger’s work in a surprising and, somehow, personal way. I decided to put my thoughts down on paper and try to come up with something.
Waiting for the train, I sat next to a girl who was complaining about a man she liked because he was taking too long to reply to a simple text. One of her friends said that it was a ‘red flag’. I thought ‘red flags’ were certainly matters that Kruger could work on, then I changed my seat because the girl annoyed me.
I got back home in the late evening. He was eating alone, deep in thought, like he often is. He didn’t look at me. I went to the bathroom to take a burning hot shower. And I cried, for the first time since the break-up. I really don’t want him to leave, but we both know he has to.
