VAM galleries including this work:
The Speed Art Museum | What’s the Point? || VAM Home

The figure in Barbara Kruger’s Think Like Us is undergoing some sort of medical procedure: Her eye is being injected with a substance while she lies passively still, just as we daily absorb the plethora of images generated by television, movies, and more. This work is displayed alongside Kruger’s Talk Like Us, which thrusts itself—and its tongue—into the viewer’s space, insisting on conformity. The loud colors in these images amplify their demand for the sacrifice of individual ideas and values. When the mind is empty and the sense of self is displaced, Kruger seems to be saying, the media will take over and our self-image will merge with whatever is onscreen or in print.

About the Artist

Barbara Kruger is a contemporary feminist artist who combines glossy stock advertising photography with bold, catchy slogans to produce shocking “photomontages” that mock and undermine the methods used by advertisers to sell products. Her early career as a graphic designer for the fashion magazine Mademoiselle directly influenced her artistic aesthetic.

Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. After attending Syracuse University and the School of Visual Arts and studying art and design with Diane Arbus at Parson’s School of Design in New York, she obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. As her career in advertising developed, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned. In addition to museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has been seen at a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and other public places as well as on billboards, bus cards, and posters. She has taught at the California Institute of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.

Though Kruger was not a Pop artist, her work embraces the 1960s Pop Art practice of using images from popular culture, such as comic books and other commercial source material, as a way to combine the traditionally “low” art form of graphic design with the lofty ideals of “high” art. In terms of style and political message, Kruger’s work is reminiscent of 1930s political photomontages by German artist John Heartfield, whose work Have No Fear—He’s a Vegetarian showed Adolf Hitler as a butcher preparing to carve up a rooster, which is a symbol of France. Kruger displays a similar level of intensity in her critique of the power of the media industry to dominate our lives by telling us what to buy and whom to believe.

Classroom Ideas

Discussion: Discuss how photography, television, and other mass media can inform and affect our everyday lives. How do these images make you feel? Is there meaning in photographic images without using words? Do the images themselves tell their own story? How?

Activities: Analyze an advertisement. Begin by designing your own advertisement: Find and cut out an image that interests you from a magazine or newspaper. Determine what sort of message you want your advertisement to have for the viewer. Then cut out corresponding text. Glue the image and text on a blank sheet of paper in a manner that best fits your desired effect or message.

Next, find the same text you used on your original advertisement in different magazines. Cut it out and paste it down on a separate sheet of paper without using an image. Examine both advertisements you have created. Describe the advertisement using an image. What is it? Why is it interesting? Compare and contrast it to the other advertisement made up only of words. Do both advertisements convey the same meaning? Are they equally persuasive? How do the words and the images magnify each other and their overall impact?

Think about a television commercial you have seen recently. What was it trying to sell? Describe the scene and imagery. Describe the commercial to the class and tell why it was interesting. Discuss whether it would make viewers want to buy the product.

Links

Additional information and classroom ideas for this work are available on the Speed Art Museum’s Four Contemporary Women Artists page.
[www.speedmuseum.org/contemporary.html]

See more works by Barbara Kruger at the University of Kentucky Art Museum.
[www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/luce/contemporary/Images/images/pages/Kruger_jpg.htm]

Read more about Barbara Kruger at the PBS art:21 web site.
[www.pbs.org/art21/artists/kruger/]

The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a major exhibition of Kruger’s work in 2000.
[www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa667.htm]

Read an article about Barbara Kruger and see more images of her work at the Monash University web site.
[www.arts.monash.edu.au/visarts/globe/issue4/bkrutxt.html]