‘I Shop Therefore I Am’- Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is a conceptual artist who has had several exhibitions in galleries such as; Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Whitney Museum in New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and the Tate Gallery in London. Kruger's words and pictures have been displayed in both galleries and public spaces. They have also been framed and unframed photographs, posters, postcards, t-shirts, electronic signboards, billboards and on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France. Kruger has created installations of video, film, audio and projection as well. Her work focuses on consistently about the kindnesses and brutalities of social life: about how we are to one another.

Her graphic work is mainly black and white photographs with overlaid captions set in white on a red poster. The phrases that she uses in her work are declarative, and she makes common use of pronouns such as; "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they". The combination of imagery and text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring pattern in Kruger's work. The text in her works of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). Kruger claims that she “works with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t." Her later re-photography uses a kind of appropriation as its own focus, pulling from the works of others and the words they depict to create her own. Her focus was to fuse broad cultural images as a whole and place them toward narrower signs of personal interpretation.

Kruger's piece, ‘I shop therefore I am’, focuses on the world as a consumer culture. For some people, shopping has turned into a lifestyle consuming at our leisure. Some feel that, the power of consumption is stopping us from finding true and sincere happiness; and that shopping often works as a substitute for something that we’re missing in life. Consumer culture has a strong power over the people. The focus is about what we buy and what we choose to invest in, the world we live in will be the result of these choices. I feel that this is the message that Barbara Kruger was trying to portray through her art.