Untitled (Money Can't Buy Me)

Barbara Kruger’s broadly political collages, prints, and installations question societal power structures through images culled from the mass media. An experienced graphic designer from her tenure at the fashion magazine Mademoiselle, Kruger utilizes her knowledge of advertising techniques to highlight her antiauthoritarian concerns. This is made apparent with her skill at “hailing”, an important advertising method by which viewers are simultaneously beckoned and enraptured by the picture before them 1. By scanning and selecting images, gauging their rhetorical potential, and then readjusting their dimensions into an iconic compositional order, Kruger concentrates visual impact into a cohesively focused whole that she refers to as “vernacular signage.” Her manipulations of old newspaper, magazine, and movie poster images into probing photomontages follow a distinguished art historical tradition of socially conscious collages dating from the German Dadaists of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly those by Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield.

At a height of over ten feet, the vertical black-and-white triptych, Money can’t buy me looms over viewers with a confrontational energy reminiscent of early Soviet propaganda posters. Kruger believes paternalism and consumerism are detrimental to society, and boldly asserts an independence from these influences through the print’s slogan. The stern countenance of founding FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover looks on as an equally dour companion seems to have just fired a giant revolver and shattered a pane of glass, delivering a visual punch that meets the viewer one-on-one. The men’s scowls, the pistol, and the broken glass all symbolize repression and disdain for the kind of individual autonomy that Kruger embraces. Set into red frames dividing the picture plane into three sections, the image captivates with a fixating immediacy that leaves a lasting impression while provoking viewers to ponder their own relationships with authority.