Barbara Kruger's Postmodern Theory

Superior Essays
Since the beginning of the 20thcentury, it has been deliberated that the works of Marx have shaped and sculpted many aspects of art through to the postmodern era. Barbara Kruger is one of many postmodernists, who’s practice demonstrates the issues of the social and economic powers of the 1980s, by applying her work to all echelons of society. Through the theories of many postmodern critiques, the original Marxist views have been retrospectively accepted however re-worked within the master narrative in order for it to be translated and updated to the current day. This allows the philosophies to be appropriately re-applied to postmodernists, which can therefore be applied to various works such as Kruger’s.

Kruger is one of many postmodernists
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This originates from an era in which the American economy had been caused to experience a range of widespread tax cuts, decreased social spending, increased military spending, and the deregulation of domestic markets. Her silkscreen print, ‘I shop therefore I am’ (1987), is a prime example of Marxist’s ideologies with the technical use of commodity. Among the composition, a bold, direct and concise caption is placed across the surface of an established photograph. The foregrounded, declarative text is seen to be held by the background image of the hand, which is of a greyscale configuration and provides a vast contrast to the red border. Marx envisioned that one of the principal tasks of every idealist philosophy is to bring out the specific features of the various spiritual and cultural domains. In Kruger’s postmodernist approach, she constructed a series of works in which there resembled a demand of political responses through consumer culture, resulting in the power of the image to be embedded in the signs and icons, reflecting culture, media and advertisement. The silkscreen was ultimately adopted ironically by the mall generation as their intonation abruptly after it was produced, however, Kruger supplies the resistance. Similar to Foucault, Kruger’s power is "diffused, decentralized, and, in consequence, anonymous” (Linker,1991: 27). To reinforce this point, Kate Linker summarizes the connection of Kruger’s attention to be directed similarly to Foucault’s, focusing on the control and the positioning of social form: ‘a control that is instrumental to society 's aim of producing normalized subjects that can be inserted into its ideological, social and economic orders.’

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