Untitled (Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything)

We are living in a world Barbara Kruger predicted, criticised, and one she accidentally helped create. It is because of this that it’s easy to misread her critique and her skewering as endorsement. Her text-on-image works that started in the late 1970s were a radical attack on commercialism, a call to arms for women to open their eyes to a capitalist society trying to commodify themselves. For nearly 50 years, Kruger has been creating works that juxtapose archival imagery with her direct statements, commands to the viewer that remove the subtext from the advertising copy we are inundated with. She used the tactics of advertising and media industries, tactics designed steal time and arrest the viewer, to subvert the message of the medium. It is perhaps ironic then, that her italic, capitalised Futura font words have since adorned hundreds of thousands of t-shirts, skateboards and well-hyped products from the streetwear brand Supreme who co-opted Kruger’s signature style. Kruger has been commodified by a world she fought against, but her work still cuts through, more urgent than ever before.