The partyline was :  pay no attention to mortality. It’s a piece of pessimistic individualistic humanist self-indulgence. Which, of course, it is, in one sense. But now as the hardliners age implacable turns a placable cheek, as if the confrontation with personal extinction had finally leveled the playing field.  In Barbara Kruger’s video installation, “The Globe Shrinks,” the politics are, blessedly, “hunkered down in the phenomenal world,” to borrow William Boyd’s memorable phrase.  Although there was, when first unleashed on the world, a certain poetic obliqueness to some of the language in Kruger’s early and most famous graphic works–it took a little while to figure out who the “you” was and at first it was possible to actually mistake the intimacy of her direct address for that of a lover, the text for a kind of post-breakup billet-doux– there is a new ambiguity here that often makes this work profoundly moving.

All the old outrage–so pithy and on target–is still present.  From time to time, as we sit in the dark, a disembodied voice threatens and badgers us. We are admonished to “Believe it” or “Shame it” or “Own it “or “Doubt it.” Kruger has always deployed her conscience like a pair of six shooters and come in superego guns ablazing. It was dirty work but somebody had to do it. But at one point –remember the room-sized perspectival floor text, its vanishing point aimed like a lethal weapon, the viewer almost flattened by the velocity of the thermodynamic words–at one point the calmly aphoristic accusation turned into a harangue.  Now Kruger seems to have regained an essential critical distance:  with the channeling of aggression into stand-up comedy routines punctuating the video, hectoring in the form of heckling is actually an option for the audience, not just the artist. One feels grateful for this offer to share power.  In addition to the sublimation of comedy, the new work gains from the fact that there are many voices, not just one. For instance, one segment involves a female interviewer finally losing her temper with a male artist, self-protectively vacillating and slimily, yes, ambiguous about his work.  Sort of the artist as lounge lizard. His body language is arrogantly relaxed–seated, leaning back–while she leans tensely forward.  He says his art is about gullibility, susceptibility to sentiment, but changes his story constantly, mercury under her interrogating thumb. Finally, infuriated, she tells him to watch the reality TV he disdains so much because it is more brutal and funnier than his work.  It’s easy to identify this angry woman with Kruger, but the sheer multiplicity of personalities offered here should be enough to forestall that mistake.  And Kruger is helped enormously by the very conventions of the art video (her perfect medium it now seems), helped by the simultaneity of the multiple channel format–however cringingly familiar it has become. In fact, there is variety in tone as well–from the aforementioned comedic through the elegiac. Finally, the well-recognized Oedipal identification of the viewer with any huge looming face on the screen emotively attaches Kruger’s audience to her rather than, as in the past, forcing them to choose sides.

The comedy is not really, and not meant to be, all that funny.  Rather it is as if Kruger is simply pointing to the use of schtick as a way both to raise consciousness and to reinforce stereotypes.  And it has to do with rhythm–the staccato of the standard light bulb jokes with fill-in-the-blanks subjects–how many jewish mothers does it take, how many freudians, etc. –or the long, long buildup to the put down, as in the one about the religious suicide lengthily persuaded he is not different from his would-be rescuer until, after a seemingly endless list of their compatibility, they discover that although, Christian, Episcopalian, and otherwise on the same side of the fence, they part company over an obscure sectarian dispute of a particular year.  “Die you infidel” is the punchline.  Repetition is part of rhythm, of course.  Amongst longer segments, there is the bombardment of flashingly brief texts and images.  Because the temporal capacity of video can in fact keep the repetition brief and because it is now part of the expected contemporary video repertoire, Kruger’s new work is defended against monotonous reiteration, a charge to which some of the older work was vulnerable.  (It’s fascinating to see that old bogey, “subliminal advertising,” finally finding a home in art;  surely in the commercial world there is no longer any use for it as no one needs to be fooled into  buying today–now we line up for the privilege of being first to purchase.) There are still some painfully obvious contrasts set up in “The Globe Shrinks,” but there are also those amazingly beautiful elegiac scenes.  On opposing walls, a young man and an older man, apparently looking each into his own mirror (which is the camera, therefore the face of the viewer) perform identical grooming rituals, such as shaving, combing their hair.  The before and after aspect of this pairing–the physical decline, the cosmetic losses and thinings of hair and ego and the unsightly thickenings of paunch and pouch, have an undeniable pathos that is only underscored by the anguish of the matured subject, openly crying as his younger self literally disappears.  And when on one screen the eyes of an apparently blind woman suddenly snap open in perfectly timed response to the appearance of an electric fan on the screen opposite, it is like a corpse suddenly coming alive, the blowing fan the breath of life.  It is a startling, extremely effective moment, unlike anything else Kruger has ever done.  George Bernard Shaw observed, “Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm; live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality.”  In “The Globe Shrinks,” Kruger has achieved a new charm–in the old sense of “glamour,” of casting a spell–while preserving her old allegiance to the necessarily brutal facts.

Ephraim Birnbaum