Barbara Kruger

“Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.”

Barbara Kruger is an American feminist artist who worked conceptually, most of her work is using imagery from magazines and having them in black and white with aggressively directive text printed over them. This is appropriation and repurposing because as she takes the photographs from magazines and use as her own, she uses slogans over the top to put the image in a different context, usually referencing to feminism and consumerism.

This image is a famous one of Kruger’s work because the text is a slogan from when there used to be a gender battle and how women were wanting support for legal abortion so she used this image to support it, a year later she made it into a billboard and within 12 hours of it being up a group opposed to abortion covered the billboard next to this one with an image of an 8 week old foetus. This picture may symbolize the conflict they had showing it through half the face being in positive and the other half being negative, and she uses words like ‘you’ ‘I’ and ‘we’ to address power, identity and sexuality.

This is also a very popular image, Kruger’s images are not only just seen in museums but on billboards, walls, buildings, parks etc. This image is meant to show how women are pressure by both men and the media and feel the need to buy materialistic items to be viewed as a thing of value.

Here are a few more images where Barbara Kruger appropriated and put together images and text displaying feminism and consumerism, once you know her images are about these topics it starts to become a much more deeper body of work and not just about the appropriation. I think these are really interesting images and text pieces, they both complement each other to make a powerful statement and make people more aware especially at the time when they were created.