1986.14.3
Untitled
Artist
Barbara Kruger
(1945 - )
Title
Untitled
Creation Date
1985
Century
20th century
Dimensions
20 1/2 in. x 20 1/2 in. (52 cm. x 52 cm.)
Object Type
print
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
photolithograph and silkscreen on paper
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
1986.14.3
Barbara Kruger’s artistic interest in graphic design, feminism, and critical theory drive her investigations of advertising, which she understands as an expression of the capitalist ideology of consumption and desire. In the 1980s, Kruger was aligned with a group of artists known as the Pictures Generation, whose work often appropriated images from mass media. Here, Kruger re-photographed existing photographs, then cropped and scaled them for maximum rhetorical impact. The gridded squares recall the public display of television screens in shop windows, a dizzying spectacle of simultaneous media streams intended to convert the window-shopper to an actual shopper. Yet the text, which recalls the idiom that “children should be seen and not heard,” makes various linguistic substitutions that resist the controlling impulse of the original aphorism. The “we” here is a mystery—since the figures pictured are youthful-looking but of mixed ages and genders—and may allude generally to any group of people without power.
