Are used

Does the highlighted "are used" in the following context mean "Kruger uses them"?

Context:

It is here that Kruger’s relationship to the early twentieth-century avantgarde becomes more apparent. Kruger has expressed frustration at having to deal with an ‘art subculture’ that had no understanding of the significance
of her experience in graphic design and that persisted in situating her in relation to the Constructivist strand of the historical avant-garde, of which she knew little in her formative years as an artist. However, her reading of
Benjamin was a formative influence, as she confirmed in an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve for Art in America in September 1997, admitting to being ‘blown away’ by both Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes.44 And, although Kruger denies a direct connection between her work and that of the Constructivists, a link nevertheless exists in the call for a socially relevant art and in the advocacy of popular forms of representation and the more active engagement of the ‘reader’ that are made in Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’. However, while approaches that originate in the practices of the early twentieth-century avant-garde are used to harness and expose the ‘class’ struggles of the late twentieth century, Kruger simultaneously uses them to provoke reflection upon the ideological role of language rather than to deliver ideology per se. In other words, it is this introduction of critical reflexivity that separates Kruger’s works from the works of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and ultimately renders them postmodern rather than modernist.