During her four-decades-long career, the conceptual artist Barbara Kruger has riffed on the words of Virginia Woolf, returning, time and again, to lines from “Mrs. Dalloway” or “To the Lighthouse.” And for her exhibition “Forever,” opening in Berlin this weekend, Kruger plucked a quotation from Woolf’s extended essay “A Room of One’s Own,” filling an entire gallery wall with: “You know that women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” (Kruger appended “you know that,” for the Woolf purists out there.)
“I read a number of her books many, many, many years ago, and ‘A Room of One’s Own’ is an important extended essay that I find very relevant to the conditions of certain women,” Kruger said of the feminist treatise, first published in 1929. “I mean, when I read Woolf, I’m very aware of both the expansiveness of her writing, but also the specificity of being a white woman of a particular class in England when she wrote this.” Kruger decided to render that quote, in particular, in her signature uppercase black-and-white lettering, “because I think that it’s both humorous and tragic, which is what the world can be read and felt as many days,” she said, “especially now, in these times that strangely feel beyond satire — it’s like the Onion writ large. It’s beyond ‘S.N.L.’” She also pulled a passage from George Orwell’s “1984” (and plastered it across the gallery’s floor) and contributed a lot of her own text, some in German.
“Forever” caps a busy summer for Kruger — it was just announced that she’ll collaborate with Performa for its November biennial — in a bustling political landscape. Still, her mandate remains the same: “I’m an artist who works with pictures and words, and tries to make meaning around things that engage me,” she said. As for the rest of us: “I think it’s important to be vigilant and understand how power is driven through culture. It’s nice to know who’s effing you when you’re being effed.”
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