This series, initiated in 2011, focuses on contrast and contradictions. This is especially the case with language, which powerfully shapes and directs our existence. Language is envisaged in Brüggemann’s practice as a fluid medium whose objects, structure and ideology are continually being contested and altered. The artist brings together Joseph Kosuth’s series ‘Art as Idea as Idea’ (1966-) and Richard Prince’s ‘Joke Paintings’ (1985-). Each work combines a single Kosuth definition with a Prince joke, maintaining the precise scale and composition of each original work. Kosuth and Prince have both appropriated and repositioned language through existing tropes: one referencing philosophy, or high culture, the other humour, or popular culture. The artist’s intention is to relinquish all formal decisions to his sources. These references are not used as quotations, rather, Brüggemann appropriates them in a literal, wholesale fashion, as a kind of physical and intellectual material, which is not refashioned but remains the same. Brüggemann’s provocation brings together conceptual strategies and pop sensibilities as an irrefutable confrontation of logic and irony, resulting in the space of the unsayable, which is abstraction.
