Barbara Kruger’s Postmodern Jeremiads, Pt. IV
All of this begs the question, for Kruger as well as for any politically engaged postmodern artist: If we’re all patsies of the simulacrum, how can we choose a political program? How does one slip out from under “remote control” in order to make decisions with any but false consciousness? In U2′s Zoo TV Live From Sydney video, for instance, we see the song “The Fly,” from the Achtung Baby CD, staged against a backdrop of video monitors flashing words, phrases, and slogans at almost subliminal speed, à la Jenny Holzer’s truisms: “DEATH IS A CAREER MOVE,” “EVERY THING YOU KNOW IS WRONG” (Firesign Theater?), “AMBITION BITES THE NAILS OF SUCCESS,” “ENJOY THE SURFACE.” But the song’s “punchline” is twenty seconds worth of one phrase, repeated on the video monitors dozens and dozens and dozens of times: “IT’S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHANGE IT.” [Ed.: Flash forward to 2010, and Blu-Ray: Two phrases actually alternate here: the one I quoted and its typographical near-identical twin, "IT’S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHARGE IT." Inneresting, but we’ll just leave that to one side.] Jeepers, guys. How? The sentiment of this closing “truism” seems to come from the U2 of The Joshua Tree who still hadn’t found what they were looking for; but according to the logic of the new, postmodernized U2, such an unproblematic, positivistic assertion of the individual subject’s ability to shape her world seems unsupported by the visual and verbal rhetoric of the song’s performance. Equally problematic, for similar reasons, is the video monitors’ warning that “SILENCE=DEATH,” or the band’s use of live satellite video from war-torn Bosnia during other concert dates, or their trademark blurb to “Join Amnesty International” that appears in the liner notes of even the Zooropa CD.
How can we steer a middle path between the naive voluntarism suggested by U2′s “IT’S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHANGE IT” and a kind of philosophical quietism acceptable to almost no one? Kruger’s piece called “Repeat After Me”—a sort of twelve-step program for the treatment of modernist nostalgia—insists that we wrap our voices around a number of propaganda bites: “That ‘we’ are not right and ‘the enemy’ wrong. . . . That God is not on our side. . . . That TV and print journalists should begin to acknowledge and understand their ability to create consensus and make history.” (This must be at least the sixth time in the collection we’ve been reminded that TV makes history.) But then the symptomatic punchline, the culminating slogan: “empathy can change the world.” I hate to be so damn cynical, but doesn’t that sound a little like “Visualize World Peace”? Shouldn’t it go on a bumper sticker somewhere? Kruger’s work, like that of U2, can display all the trappings of postmodernist thought and then blithely ask us to place our hope in the most stale and familiar of liberal causes.
Kruger may have rebounded off the wall of postmodernity and ended up—like U2, like Baudrillard—a kind of neo-modernist, but at least she, has not settled into the comforts of cynicism. (Recall that our word “cynicism” is derived from the Greek word for dog; philosophy, taken in a certain direction, results in a despair which leads one to give up all hope and ambition and to lie in the street like a dog.) Indeed, to overcome cynicism Kruger seems prepared to credit the notion of postmodern voluntarism. And why not? Like Jean-François Lyotard, she believes that when the Great Narratives of enlightenment can no longer be believed, it is time for us to write smaller narratives of our own. That at least is how I would want to read the passage from Kruger’s essay “Quality” where she calls for “an esthetic of qualities rather than the singularity of quality. I think I could go for that esthetic. I think I could second that emotion.” Even the allusion to Smokey Robinson seems promising: popular culture employed lovingly for once rather than dismissively. “Shredded totalities,” Kruger writes toward the end of the volume, “go the way of highly classified documents which disappear and take their secrets with them. Maybe.” But nature abhors a vacuum, and an unnarrated cultural space cannot stay uninscribed for long. Power doesn’t lie simply in the hands of the evil Wizards of Madison Avenue, or the Rockefeller Center; we can’t but live in the realm of the represented, rather than the real, and we’re never at a loss for representations to whose magic we might become enthralled. Razing the totalizing, repressive grands reçits clears a space upon which we must rebuild quickly; we can build on it ourselves, or let someone else do it, but it won’t stay vacant for long, for someone’s sure to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.” Perhaps enough of the demolition is now accomplished that we might think about what we’d like to put up here.
