Despite of storm Nemo, I braved bells and whistles to reach the MoMA this weekend.
This sweet aventure brought me in front of Barbara Kruger’s work. Barbara Kruger is a famous American collage artist born in 1945. But more particularly in front of her shopping bag made for Germany in 1990. A shopping bag with one of Barbara’s design, dated before 1980’s, printed on it. The piece of art is called «I shop therefore I am», it is photolithograph on paper.
Words she uses has indeed an immediate impact on the viewers and refer to mass consumption and to the cult of the individual in society. Let’s see how this piece of design is organized.
She takes images from mass media and pastes words over them, in Futura Bold. She uses advertising techniques for her designs. When I look at the piece the color red pops out right away. Therefore, the red triangle is the main element of the design. The photography used as the background shows a man’s hand which is holding the red triangle. The photography is blurry therefore accentuated the triangle and the type on it. The hand’s index is the most visible finger of the hand, this finger points us the first «I» of the text, which make my eye look at this point of the image before everywhere else. Moreover, the fact that the word «therefore» is placed in the center of the triangle and is in a more little type size than the other words, make us read the sentence with doing a pause after «I shop». So, it accentuates the second «I». Having both of the «I» in relief refers to the individual, and metaphors the fact that the individual is considered as the most important entity.
In my opinion, the shopping is efficient because the message is clear, the design catches the viewers’s attention and most of all, the concept plays with the russian dolls idea. We are putting a loud message denouncing a form of society on its own emblem.
Isn’t striking enough ?
This to Then 
it’s hard not to love a Barbara Kruger. I had never seen this on a bag before i too caught it roaming through the MoMA.
She indeed takes images from (or in this case possibly creates images that seem appropriated) other media, but what makes this successful? What advertising techniques, as you say, does she use? That’s always the blurb consensus on Kruger, but I have actually found much of her graphic language to come from pulp magazines and tabloids than the world of advertising.
I like how you start to talk about the relation between the photo of the hand and the red shape with type, starting with the top finger and all. But before you even get there what is happening in this construction? These two elements (photo of hand, and red shape with type) are held in dynamic tension. The separation caused in space vs flatness and greyscale vs color is counteracted together by the conceit of that hand holding the red flat shape like a card. This connects the type to the image, creates the tension between the flatness of the color and type and the depth of the photo (add to that the two simple levels created by the sizes of type).