PERHAPS WE’VE ALL had it, the Barbara Kruger moment. Maybe it was a postcard from a museum gift shop in your dorm room in the late 1980s, pinned to the wall above your stack of cassettes. “You are not yourself,” it read, accompanying an image of a woman’s fragmented reflection, the mirror shattered by a bullet or fist. Originally a signifier of cool, its message reverberated for years. Maybe, decades later, you cut one of her op-ed illustrations from the newspaper — “You Want It You Buy It You Forget It” — which spoke to your dawning suspicion that you had become just another cog in the capitalist machine. Many of us in New York had the MetroCards she designed in 2017, printed with questions that stung a little every time we used it, crossing into Manhattan on the Q train: “Who is healed? Who is housed? Who is silent? Who speaks?” Perhaps you even attended a Rage Against the Machine concert with Kruger’s stage backdrop — it was the 1996 “Evil Empire” tour — or owned one of her T-shirts, like my friend Ben, who, in high school, had the one with a vintage image depicting a housewifely figure holding a magnifying glass, her eye comically enlarged behind the lens. “It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it,” it read. “Barbara was right,” Ben told me. “I never did have to clean anything.”
Barbara was always right. (There’s a T-shirt for that, too: It reads “Barbara Kruger was right,” and was issued in 2018 in limited edition by the comedian Hasan Minhaj to mock the streetwear company Supreme, which pilfered its branding from Kruger.) In the 1980s, Kruger became famous for juxtaposing aphoristic declarations with found imagery culled from magazines and textbooks: In her 1981 “Untitled (Your Comfort Is My Silence),” an anonymous man in a fedora raises a finger to his lips in warning; her 1986 “Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero)” features a Norman Rockwell-esque illustration of a young girl cooing over a little boy’s bicep. The text, superimposed across the appropriated black-and-white pictures in her now-iconic white sans serif font (usually Futura Bold Oblique) in a red box, seemed to externalize things we’d long internalized, things like misogyny, consumerism and our relationship with authority and desire: Imagine Don Draper’s grasp of American psychopathology delivered with the pithy asperity of Emily Dickinson.