Barbara Kruger: The Context of Text

To be iconic and symbolic are two distinct but interrelated conditions. A sign (like a word) is connected to the thing it signifies (its meaning), but a word becomes iconic if there’s a particular resonance between the sign itself and its meaning. Whereas, a symbol emerges when a connection between a sign and the meaning are based on a conventional reciprocal dynamic (this applies to the use of most words). To make a word iconic, to enlarge it beyond its communicative function, is provoked by deploying it beyond its communicative possibilities into an action. A movement. A choice. A protest. 

Depending on who you are and where you come from, the age at which you start protesting varies. I grew up in Tokyo, Japan, where there aren’t too many protests, but there are lots of communal gatherings that take the shape of collective organizing. I started attending them in public parks when I was 13, 14 years old, and when I moved to Los Angeles, I started going to protests in support of tenants rights when I was 16, 17. Speaking at city hall, making pins to support the campaigns of underfunded politicians, walking down the streets with signs in hand, meeting strangers, strangers becoming comrades—all in pursuit of a larger goal, and with the accessories associated with its search.

In certain places, like Argentina where I live now, protesting is almost a ritual that people practice on certain days, like going to church on Christmas or vacationing near the beach on a holiday weekend. They’re always very well-organized. The unions come together, there’s a schedule, different organizations are assigned positions on certain streets, there’s a formation for each; people sell water bottles, cotton candy, snacks, flags… in any case, Argentinians are good at protesting. They’re also good at prioritizing coming together in the streets even on a day that isn’t allocated for it. Within the span of a day or two, Argentinians will find a way to organize, then gather in order to advocate for what they believe in—it’s a part of their body politic. 

In the places where I grew up, it was much less organized. I don’t think the history of protest is as strong in either the United States or Japan, at least not as a ritualized mechanism through which people assert their point of view, gather as a community, and mark a moment in time.

In the United States, it seems as if coalitions come together in moments of intense political strife to contest a certain narrative and to show in a visual manner (from photographs that are shared after the protest) the opinion of people that otherwise might be disregarded by the mainstream media. For a long time now, I’ve had a slightly cynical perspective about the function of protests in the United States. Not necessarily that they aren’t worth participating in—I actually adore going to them. My favorite part about protests is how I feel when I’m inside of them. A sensation, I guess, that’s most similar to how I feel when I’m standing in front of a vast ocean by myself: small, insignificant, part of an ecosystem. I find the irrelevance of my being in comparison with the vastness of the universe particularly comforting. But I never really believed that protests themselves were powerful enough to change public opinion in the United States—until only recently.

Before I moved to Argentina, I participated in protests less to bring attention to something as much as I was selfishly in pursuit of being around other like-minded people who felt the same way as I did, that something in the world was wrong. Those who spent time on creating costumes for the march or making signs seemed strange to me—why not just move forward to the part of protesting that’s about gathering, being together, in the same place? I didn’t value the practice of making the action symbolic at the same time as I was participating in it. When taking to the streets with other people, we get to signify that there’s something in the world that we feel is unjust and is essential to resist, especially when confronted with the possible loss of a tenet of our belief systems. 

What does a sign have to add, in comparison with the sounds of a crowd?

Barbara Kruger and Her Body of Work

I knew about Barbara Kruger’s work, but I didn’t realize I did. Some of her work is in Buenos Aires, publicly visible in the neighborhood of Puerto Madero. Some of it is in the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles. I didn’t really have a strong sense of her until Saskia, the publisher of A Women’s Thing, sent me the press release for her new exhibition at Guggenheim Bilbao. Perusing the press release and after reading some articles that came up when I looked her up online, I quickly learned that as an artist, she’s most famous for her collages, for being plagiarized by the company Supreme, for her posters for magazines and editorials like “my body is a battleground” that she made during the abortion rights movement in the second half of the 20th century–and, for her large installations of text.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945, she enrolled briefly in Syracuse University before transferring to Parsons School of Design in New York City. She spent many years working in graphic design for Condé Nast Publications, after she was promoted to head designer at the age of twenty-two. Though her personal art practice initially involved painting and weaving, she shifted to making photo and text collages in 1979. She often repurposed found images from magazines and juxtaposed them with phrases printed in Futura Bold or Helvetica Extra Bold typeface. The writing was often framed by black, white, or red text bars. In addition to her now longstanding text-image practice, she’s also created audio and video works, curated exhibitions, written criticism, and developed installation projects in the form of public interventions.

I confess that my cynicism about the use of signs, of the effectiveness of broad-strokes messaging in the form of pithy phrases, flared up again when I saw her work. Not because I didn’t necessarily agree with her perspective. I do. Most of what she’s articulating through text in space, I agree with or am intrigued by: “CLASS WAR,” “I shop therefore I am,” “Not stupid enough,” “YOU ARE SEEING AND BEING SEEN,” and “I am therefore I hate.” All of them, I’ve also seen, on signs in protests. They certainly call attention to the tension of what it means to be a body in the world, and what is happening to a body when reading text that expresses an idea that it might find confrontational, affirming, or both. But the fact that statements using eye-catching fonts would somehow be art, and that they would provoke a multidimensional experience upon witnessing them… I felt strange about it. 

The Relationship Between Art and Its Observer

Kruger often features pronouns in her work: “you,” “my,” “we,” calling into question her relationship as an artist with the viewer of her work—both of whom are participating in the corporate art market (her as an artist, and the viewer) by interacting with her art. Is viewing an act of consumption? Does consumption necessitate nourishment? Does nourishment always feel good? These are the sorts of questions that linger after witnessing her work, which she increasingly is focused on describing as material but also a form of architecture that necessitates its own spatial reconfiguration. When entering one of her exhibitions, the text surrounds the viewer from all sides, creating a world composed entirely of words. Text, and the ways in which it is used in our everyday lives, certainly makes the world material, legible, concrete. But her work calls into question the ways in which that text might in of itself be oppressive and limit the ways in which we conceive of interacting both with our material as well as digital environments. 

In Kruger’s interview with Osman Can Yerebakan in BOMB Magazine, she says, “So-called direct address has frequently been an operative in my work. It sort of cuts through the grease. But it also raises questions of subject and object positions and relations, accusation, acceptance, and denial. And hopefully might work to further dissolve the powers and determinations of binaries.”

Direct address is a form of artistic communication that explicitly calls into question the reciprocal interplay between artist and audience, art and museum, public and private. But it’s also an optimistic position for a work of art to take, as it implies that the speaker believes an audience is listening to their words. 

Are we listening? 

Am I?

The Relationship Between Art and Its Critic

As Kruger mentions in her BOMB interview, the thesis statement of her work is: “In the broadest sense, I try to make work about how we are to one another: work that engages our adorations, contempt, pleasures, and punishments.” I think in these times, reflecting on whether I perceive the texts she creates as slightly ironic, slightly hyperbolic, slightly cliché—is a boring critique to make. A month or so ago, maybe I did find it boring, but I don’t right now. Context evolves, shifts, moves from one second to another and to me, what she is creating feels necessary, in 2025. To look at these statements of her beliefs, how she turns language’s symbolism into iconography—it’s nourishing. Her commitment to opening up people’s perspectives, to include everyone as part of what it means to be human, is worth celebrating and displaying within every museum.

I’m not a curator. It’s not my position to include or exclude certain artists from exhibitions. But as Guggenheim Bilbao showcases their exhibit on Barbara Kruger, I’m reflecting on the fact that there is something really principled about artists brazenly articulating their political positions at this moment of intense polarization. Museums that support these artists also deserve a fair amount of credit.

Maybe the viewer, the observer, the critic, is unreliable precisely for this reason. Kruger’s work was the same today as it was last month, as it was ten years ago. But the relevance attributed to it completely shifts depending on the context of a particular sociocultural moment. A symbol can turn iconic depending on the given circumstances of a particular historical moment. At least, how much it resonates with me can. But that contradiction—that space between me and the world, and by extension, a word and its resonance within its public utterance—is exactly what she calls into question. Kruger’s body of work challenges us on our preconceived notions of what it means to be human at the exact moment when we witness her work. 

It’s up to us to choose whether or not we answer her. 

A sign is a declaration, much like the sounds of a crowd.

Featured image: Barbara Kruger. The Milk of Dreams – 59th International Art Exhibition, Installation view, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, April 23– November 27, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Timo Ohler.