Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist born in Jan 20, 1945, many of her work is black and white photographs with a caption added to it. In many of her captions she includes the words of “I”, “you”, “your”, “they”, and “we”, which addresses and points out to the viewer who the caption is aimed at. Kruger was often grouped with other feminist postmodern artists such as Cindy Sherman and Sherry Levine. In her work Kruger uses the help of mass communication and advertising to explore gender and identity.

Barbara Kruger uses harsh and aggressive captions to put across the idea of consumerism and feminism. In one of her work in 1981 she used the caption of “your comfort is my silence”, showing that women are in silence for men’s comfort which means that women live for men, this shows the feminist approach as men and women are not equal and that women are forced into silence not being able to have a say.

Kruger wanted to illuminate the viewers with her aggressive captions and to put across messages about the problems and difficulties in the society.

I believe that Barbara kruger also uses sarcasm and a bit of humour in her work as the caption used in the above image, “money can buy you love”, is the opposite of what is said actually said as a saying, “money cant buy you happiness”, she uses this technique to catch viewers attention and get them to think what is actually is seen to be right and normal.

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