The series Text Pieces provide the underpinnings to the artist’s oeuvre, and the first such works date back to 1997 underlining his interest in language. Fixed directly to the wall, the graphic identity of these vinyl texts remains consistent through the use of the Arial bold typeface, though point sizes can vary depending on location.

The content and commentary provided by them Covers a wide area of aesthetic, cultural and philosophical concerns; they address the institutional context, discuss artworks as products, consider the contested ground of authorship, and examine emptiness and negation. The relationship between words and images is central to the legacy of conceptual art; it suggests a conflation between form and content, or between the artwork and the idea described by Joseph Kosuth as the central inquiry into the concept of ‘art’ that supposedly underpins the practice.

Moreover, Brüggemann’s often provocative statements are generally propositional since they ask the viewer to consider and take up a position. In this way, they are both temporal and collaborative. The texts are provisional observations to be completed by an engagement with the spectator. They then impress themselves as thoughts into the latter’s consciousness.

‘Thoughts’, as Brüggemann argues in one of the works, ‘are products’. Here, the notion of a conceptual product loosens the direct link between the author and object. It suggests that products are able to develop a more autonomous position allowing them to circulate with greater freedom in line with the tenets of market capitalism. The artist’s statements are thus at once unique and endlessly reproducible, as well as rapidly installed and removed, so as to be instantly responsive and flexible products. The works’ mutability links them to a dialectics of presence and absence so essential to the affect of the commodity.