Words In Pictures

The connection and combination of image and language has long existed.Visual art works may present "poetic" aesthetic characteristics,or integrate painting and text resources in creative forms.With the rise and development of the modernist art movement,artists call and integrate various media elements.As pure formal elements,languages are basically presented in works relying on newspapers,books,posters and other creative materials containing words.In the 1960 s,language became an important carrier of conceptual artists' artistic creation.Barbara Kruger is an American contemporary artist known for her photographic collages.In the form of creation,she gives full play to the appropriation and collage techniques that modern art has started.Usually,she juxtaposes pictures in mainstream print media with bold,provocative and satirical language texts,superimposed on bar text boxes with black,white or deep red background.Her works are composed of two major elements: image and language.Language is not only the key element of composition,but also refers to the title of the work with its bright and strong visual color and criticism.In the construction of meaning,the text dispels the integrity of the image,and the image also dispels the clarity of the meaning of the text.Kruger uses personal pronouns and direct negotiations to imply and confuse the audience,and conveys her social critical consciousness with the powerful tension formed by overlapping images and language.Kruger extracts images from the mainstream print media and directly use buzzwords in a large number of works to simulate the expression of mass media,so as to form a visual effect similar to advertising.At the same time,she also broke through the traditional frame and the limitation of the art exhibition space,through all kinds of life goods and various places to get effective communication like advertisements,not only to set up artist "brand" uniqueness of the individual,but also through language irony to reveal that the image of mass media consumption symbol build cultural meaning of falsity,and reflect the consumer society subject who under the vector control has been "alienation",even being defined in living conditions.Kruger also breaks the narrative which media works with the repeated orders and warnings of personal pronouns,pointing out the absence of communication objects and reality under Baudrillard's so-called "surreal" society,triggering the audience's sense of identity anxiety under the flood of consumer culture and reflecting on their own identity crisis.As a female artist,Kruger shows many associated with female body image in her creation.She use the female face,hand,and body images of the mass media and superpose bold and provocative words on the images to restore the material rendering of the female body by the mass media,and also show the cultural phenomenon of women‘s own property and the pursuit of the perfect model.Kruger question and criticize the association of female body and "consumer goods" behind the phenomenon of gender stereotypes,and point out that gender and body are constructive.It‘s because gender discourse construct and ossify a "natural" and "internal" gender essential attribute,and add this to the body,that therefore,women "body" is the battle field,object,and focus.Kruger appropriates and parodies the operation mechanism of medium and discourse,restoring them to subvert and deconstruct its legitimacy.Such "teaser" and critical strategy point to the vulnerability of the identity and challenges the power system.In an age of proliferating images and symbols,Kruger looks forward to providing a narrative space for an unstable,incomplete openness and diversity.