Kevin J.H. Dettmar

Department of English
Clemson University
dkevin@clemson.edu

 

Barbara Kruger. Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. 251 pp. $19.95 (cloth), $10.95 (paper).

 

In some ways, Barbara Kruger’s photomontage texts–red-blocked captions slapped across black & white photographs which they ironically reinscribe, like ransom notes, holding those images and their ideology hostage–make an ideal starting point for an examination of the postmodern impulse in the contemporary arts. The desire for such a point of entry has been on my mind a lot lately as I prepare again to teach an interdisciplinary humanities course on postmodernism this fall, to a classroom of majors from all across campus. There’s nothing especially subtle or coy about Kruger’s verbo-visual texts, but their power is never in question, even for students majoring in Packaging Science, Ceramic Engineering, and Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management. I can always count on at least half of my students to vent undisguised hostility at Andy Warhol’s postmodern chameleon pose, or Kathy Acker’s post-feminist pornography with a (teensy-weensy but oh-so significant) difference; but Kruger is an artist with something urgent to say, and students have no problem figuring out where she stands vis-a-vis her texts. No cool memories here, no undecidable postmodern irony, no death of the author, no Sir: here’s art that speaks to the complexity of life in contemporary America in a powerful, and relatively straightforward, way. Call it sincerity; in the eyes of my students Kruger has rediscovered the importance of being earnest in an age of “anything goes,” and in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, John Cage’s chance operations, and Brian Eno’s oblique strategies, they’re mighty grateful for it.

 

Of course Kruger is a postmodern artist, being, along with Jenny Holzer, a major supplier of those po-mo slogans that grace so many t-shirts and trendy greeting cards: “Your gaze hits the side of my face,” “Your body is a battleground,” “I shop therefore I am.”¹ In fact, when Dag in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X complains that “the world has gotten too big–way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers,” he would seem to have Kruger squarely in mind.² But Kruger’s postmodern slogans have always been anti-sloganist, if not indeed anti- postmodernist, in tendency. She would agree with another Generation X character, Claire, who says that “it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments,” and that “either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”³

 

Remote Control, Kruger’s latest text, collects her occasional writings over the past fifteen years, the largest group having previously been published in Artforum; there are no visual images here, outside the rather striking one that graces the cover. Here we have Kruger the teller, rather than Kruger the show-and-teller; and if Kruger the show-and-teller sometimes inclines toward the didactic, Remote Control for long stretches is almost unbearably preachy. Kruger too much enjoys what Sacvan Berkovitch has called the American Jeremiad; and while her work in photo-montage almost of necessity strikes a balance between mimesis and diegesis, the essays in Remote Control never err on the side of giving the reader too much credit. Hence the paradox that one of our most scriptible visual artists turns out to be a resolutely lisible writer, and these turn out to be fundamentally modernist texts about postmodernism. Quelle drag.

 

At its worst, Kruger’s prose sounds like a ditto prepared for Postmodernism 101: “History has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice which cannot speak for itself. The ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none other than the historian. The keeper of the text. The teller of the story. The worker of mute mouths.”⁴ This text, published with Philomena Mariani in 1989, sounds as if Hayden White and Michel Foucault had never written: Kruger seems to think she has suddenly stumbled upon the notion that history is a narrative, and is as such subject to narrative laws. Few would today dispute such a claim; but that’s exactly why the strident tone of the essay rings slightly false. For whom does Kruger write? On the other hand, the enigmatic photomontage of the legs of standing and seated businessmen, in their suit pants and loafers, sprawled against the backdrop of a livingroom carpet (high-ball glass just visible in the foreground), which Kruger captions “You make history when you do business,” gets at the same idea, the same “truth,” much more elliptically and provocatively.⁵

 

If much, perhaps too much, of Remote Control consists of somewhat tendentious postmodern propaganda (and I’ll leave aside the question of whether postmodern propaganda is really possible), it is not without many shrewd and amusing moments. Kruger is at her best, I think, when talking about television (the section called “TV Guides”) and when theorizing about the postmodern, even if she rejects the term (“that vaporous buzzword, that zany genre with legs: post-modernism” [3]). Her analysis of the Jerry Lewis telethon, for instance, is absolutely, savagely on-target: “Perhaps Jerry Lewis is about a kind of abjection; a glistening knot of anger and petulance marinated in a soup of vindictive disingenuousness. (Write him for the recipe)” (66). When Kruger takes TV seriously, her observations are fascinating; like Cultural Studies avant la lettre, Kruger deigns to take low culture (The Care Bears, The Price is Right, The Home Shopping Club) on its own terms, and uses these texts to read the culture that both produces and consumes them. Perhaps this is the contemporary version of Colonel Kurtz’s Horror: looking into the heart of darkness and seeing Jerry Lewis there, the embodiment of “outrageous schticksterism, oozing with every show-biz cliche, every bad dream of what it might mean to be an ‘entertainer'” (67).

 

But unlike most proponents of the new Cultural Studies, Kruger doesn’t seem to “love to hate” Jerry, or Maddie Hayes and David Addison (Moonlighting), or Robin Leach (Life-styles of the Rich and Famous)–she just hates them. One begins to suspect that with Kruger, the game’s been fixed: low culture is allowed to play, but it’s never allowed to win. I’m tempted to say that Kruger’s a cultural critic in the way Allan Bloom was a cultural critic, but that’s not quite fair; after all, Kruger at least reads the texts of our culture, and reads them with great care and prodigious intelligence, before pronouncing them banal. But she is no more amused by these texts than Bloom was.

 

The reason for Kruger’s dyspepsia, it seems to me, is splashed across the cover: for though we (viewers) may think we wield the remote control, in fact, says Kruger, we are the ones controlled: “To those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off by the relentless seductions of remote control” (5). Sound familiar? At the heart of Kruger’s collection is the unvoiced assertion that television is the root of all contemporary American evil; TV is, to paraphrase Baudrillard, the evil demon of images. “We don’t have to think about anything once television lulls us to sleep,” Kruger drones, “and begins its dictations. Like a mad scientist of global proportions, it elects presidents, conducts diplomacy, and creates consensus: a consensus of demi-alert nappers caught halfway between the vigilance of consciousness and the fascinated numbness of stupor” (49).

 

Is it just me? I had thought the discourse about the American media, and about the reciprocal flow of ideology into and out of the TV tube, had progressed somewhat beyond this. Foucault, to take just the most prominent example, has rendered such a simplistic theory of power and hegemony entirely untenable for the contemporary culture critic. But Kruger’s hostility to popular culture is more than just a matter of an out-of-date or vulgar-Marxist theoretical apparatus. Her refusal of pop pleasures seems as willed and unrelenting, as theoretically unnecessary, as Theodor Adorno’s. In fact, I’ll bet even Adorno would have enjoyed Three’s Company more than Barbara Kruger does.

 

If there’s a thread that connects the writings collected in Remote Control, it’s the philosophy of social constructionism: the notion that our individual experiences are hemmed-in by the ubiquitous, often understated or implicit, narratives of our culture(s). This is a familiar theme in postmodern texts; one thinks, for instance, of Jack Gladney, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, who (believing he is about to die) wanders into his kids’ bedroom in the middle of the night to say his final goodbyes: “I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child’s warm grasp, feeling I’d wandered into a TV moment.”⁶ You think you’re feeling something, but suddenly realize that Vicks, or AT&T, or Coke, or the Carpenters have been there before you. You’re not saying your goodbyes, you’re quoting someone else’s. Quelle drag encore. In “Talk Normal,” Laurie Anderson meditates on the inconvenience of being robbed of her own identity by her media persona: “I turned the corner in Soho today and someone / Looked right at me and said: Oh No! / Another Laurie Anderson clone!”⁷ Laurie Anderson is accused of being a Laurie Anderson wannabe; DeLillo’s Jack Gladney confesses that he is “the false character that follows the name around.”⁸

 

What distinguishes DeLillo’s and Anderson’s treatment of this theme from Kruger’s, however–and, I would argue, renders if far more supple and subtle–is their realization that the simple recognition of the socially constructed nature of reality doesn’t automatically produce its transcendence. In Kruger, too often, it appears to; that we are thrall to images, to narratives, is for Kruger a sign of our postmodern, almost post-Reagan/Bush, condition, and she suggests that through consciousness raising we might attain to an illusion-free Reality. “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger writes in the collection’s opening essay. “The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie. In a society rife with purported information, we know that words have power, but usually when they don’t mean anything (as Peggy Noonan and Co. have so ably demonstrated)” (5). Though she was certainly good at it, Peggy Noonan hardly invented political rhetoric; “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger complains–but when was it? What are the good old days to which Kruger harks back? Plato didn’t believe that seeing was believing, and certainly put the notion of truth into crisis long before Nietzsche. “To put it bluntly,” Kruger continues, “no one’s home. We are literally absent from our own present. We are elsewhere, not in the real but in the represented” (5). Here Kruger sounds eerily like Habermas: everything was hunky dory before postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, descended upon us–the storm cloud of the late twentieth century; Kruger’s perverse twist on this all-too-well-known story is that, paradoxically, only postmodern art and theory can rescue us from the postmodern condition.

 

All of which 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 recent 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.” 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” (223). (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” (223). I hate to be so damn cynical, but doesn’t that sound a litle 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-Francois 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.⁹ 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” (9). 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” (231). 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 recits 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.

 

Notes

 

1. A great many of Kruger’s images are conveniently reproduced in Kate Linker’s Love For Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990).

 

2. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 5.

 

3. Generation X, 8.

 

4. Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 12. Subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.

 

5. Linker, Love For Sale, 68.

 

6. Don DeLillo, White Noise. (New York: Penguin, 1985), 244.

 

7. Laurie Anderson, “Talk Normal,” Home of the Brave (Warner Bros. 9 25400-2, 1986).

 

8. DeLillo, White Noise, 17.

 

9. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press), 1984.