VAM galleries including this work:
The Speed Art Museum | What’s in a Name? || VAM Home

Barbara Kruger uses the visual language of advertising art to expose how the mass media influence culture and values. Her work pairs photographs found in newspapers and magazines with provocative texts. Sometimes the text comments on what is happening in the image. At other times, the text undercuts the image, revealing both the power and the deceit inherent in the idea being portrayed. This work and Untitled (Think Like Us) are separate works displayed together, offering commentary on the numbing effects of our media-saturated society and the dangers of conformity.

In Talk Like Us, the disturbing image of a presumably male face with an outstretched tongue serves as the background for two text boxes. The title of the artwork refers to the white text, which functions as a kind of “sign” commanding the viewer to speak the same as an unknown entity or group. Perhaps Kruger wants us to consider what authority or whose voice the “us” represents beneath the polished surface of commercial images. Kruger thus presents language and words themselves as potential images to be understood as art—and therefore as visual elements to be dissected as well.

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: What do you think Kruger is saying with this work? Who are the “us” and “you” she refers to? Would the meaning be different if the work said “Talk Like Them”? How does pairing this work with Think Like Us affect its meaning? Why is this art? Is advertising (from which Kruger pulls many of her images) art?

Activities: Bring in a variety of advertisements from magazines and newspapers and discuss how the images and text relate. How do they attempt to persuade? Is there an underlying cultural message or value being communicated? Think of new text for this image that comments on its cultural impact.

Count the number of advertisements or persuasive communications you encounter in a day. Does the total surprise you? What impact do you think they have on you?

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]