FORTY-EIGHT HOURS after I got off the phone with Barbara Kruger—we talked about her work, power, politics, social media, and TV—I was in Washington Square Park, watching her most famous image make its way through a throng of protesters. Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, appeared on a stricken teen’s T-shirt: a new purchase, it seemed, unfaded, the shoulder seams still creased. On another day, it might have registered as a cultural statement on a par with Nirvana’s X-eyed smiley face, but this was the sultry evening of June 24, the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Kruger’s design, which she printed and wheat-pasted around New York in 1989 to publicize the women’s march on Washington (organized in response to a spate of new laws restricting abortion), has retained its air of punk militance over the decades, the familiar cropped face of its vintage white Maybelline-type model still radiating sinister conformity and dystopian threat—an enduring counter to the forced-birthers’ transfixing mascot, the flash-lit fetus, resplendent with innocence, floating in its divine void. (A head-to-head matchup isn’t purely hypothetical: Shortly after the installation of a horizontal variation of Your body on a billboard in Columbus, Ohio, commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts in 1990, the adjacent space was plastered with just such a photo—of a fetus at eight weeks, its pregnant host unseen—accompanied by the entreaty to “vote pro-life” and a phone number.) On the battleground of symbols, the classic wire coat hanger, with its fallopian curves and macabre little hook, has soldiered on, too. It peppered the crowd that Friday, adorning handmade signs and buttons. But the pro-choice pictograph is now more emoji than alarm bell. It’s anachronistic, shorthand for a gruesome pre-Roe, pre-misfepristone/misoprostol reality, while Your body, with its half-solarized photo split into warring sides and trapped behind red bars, gestures to a still-dawning technological regime. Kruger’s retro-futurist agitprop evokes the terror of illegal abortion by picturing the gendered fate of bodily autonomy in an authoritarian surveillance state more broadly.