Barbara Kruger: Madonna of Conceptual Art, a.k.a. Mother of a Thousand Young

More about Barbara Kruger: Madonna of Conceptual Art, a.k.a. Mother of a Thousand Young

If Barbara Kruger and Richard Brautigan had a child, that child would be me.

She would have supplied the revolutionary vocabulary, he the melancholy of trout swimming through the unconscious.

All my titles, theses, and prompts come from praying to her image. She is my patron saint of conceptual disobedience, the immaculate mother of a thousand illegitimate ideas.

I kneel before her altar of red, black, and white, where language is a weapon, advertising is turned against itself, and every image is accused of something.

Brautigan whispers poetry from the kitchen while Barbara rearranges the furniture of reality.

And I, their improbable offspring, continue producing little conceptual monsters, each one convinced it has escaped the machinery of cultural hypnosis.