We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard, Barbara Kruger

Exhibition Label:
"Sum of the Parts: Recent Works on Paper," Jun-2001, Stephen Goddard
The series We Will No Longer be Seen and Not Heard is from a significant period of Kruger’s production in the mid-1980s when she developed her signature works in a mass-media style. These works incorporate texts that clearly subvert the simple product endorsement we anticipate and supplant it with a political, usually feminist, statement. Kruger is very clear about her choice to use image and text when she says, “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become.”

The majority of us who do not know how to sign, do not at first know how to read these prints-but the fact that seemingly bland advertisement clips have been spliced with a secret language alerts us to the possibility that these are in some way subversive. When we find the texts and run them together: We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard, we are encouraged to consider that this or similar meanings espousing cultural change have been there, latent, in every magazine or newspaper advertisement.