Barbara Kruger’s Usage of Visual Rhetoric to Encoding the Semiotic Message

Contemporary Combination of images and texts together is one of the approaches postmodern artists use to transfer the artistic message. Barbara Kruger, feminist conceptual artist, has created most of her collages with a combination of visual/literary signs. Her works have conveyed strong social messages about culture, power, identity and gender to a large audience. The main purpose of current article is to analyze a number of her collages based on their visual rhetoric, to formulate her method of encoding the semiotic message. This research is a case study in the field of visual semiotics, which has been done with a descriptiveanalytical approach. This article makes it clear that Kruger has deliberately used rhetorical tropes (especially the four main tropes, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) with the aim of encoding the artistic message. She uses this method to criticize issues such as blind idealism, patriarchy, feminine passivity, consumerism, commodification, and so on.