Considered one of the pioneers of conceptual and installation art in the 1960s, Joseph Kosuth has undertaken sustained investigations into the philosophy of language and the primacy of meaning that have taken the form of objects, installations, texts, publications and projects in public spaces. Working primarily in clearly-defined series, Kosuth believes that an artist’s medium is meaning, not simply form and color, and that meaning is generated as a surplus from the juxtaposition between two elements, for example the space between text and image, primarily enabled by his use of appropriation.
Read more
A recipient of critical acclaim from a young age, One and Three Chairs (1965) was produced when Kosuth was just 20 years old and exemplifies many of the attitudes that still permeate his practice. The work negates authorship, offering a disregard for conventional ways of presenting artistic creativity; it consists of a chair, a life-sized photograph of the same chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’. This formula was later applied to other objects, each questioning what constitutes the object – the object itself or the different ways that can be used to identify it and then explain and communicate this, and how each of these have their own registers and codes.
A medium that Kosuth has also been associated with from early on is neon. As a “readymade” form of public signage, neon had few prior references in fine art, therefore opening the material to new prescribed associations. As a medium of announcing a product or service, Kosuth appropriates it as a voice to say something else, taking advantage of the job of the neon sign to represent solely the written information it displays. The verbal replaces the pictorial, making language its content as description and image are collapsed into each other, a hierarchy he has also established in his own writings that became some of the key tenets of conceptual art. Rewritten in neon are both fragments of phrase or longer quotations from writers he finds influential, notably Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Freud and Beckett. Each he finds important due to a shared interest in certain themes, whether it is Beckett’s relationship to time or Wittgenstein’s view that art has something to teach us. The neons are also notable for their use of color; the majority of his work is achromatic and color is only used if it has a reason to be there. These works use the specified and limited range of neon colors simply as a means of providing visual difference, utilized not for decorative means.
The adoption of a “readymade” commercial technology is also evident in his Text/Context series of the late 1970s in which public billboards with self-authored philosophical texts mimic the visual language of advertising, again drawing attention to the context in which a work of art is received and how this constructs meaning. Indeed, site-specific installations of varying complexity and scale permeate his practice, often combining neon with other mediums such as vinyl text or other glass elements. In The Mind’s Image of Itself #3 (2011) the architecture of a gallery was mapped out with a line drawing annotated with both measurements and quotations, offering various voices and types of information in one space. With auxiliary meaning developing within specific physical and philosophical contexts of reception, Kosuth’s constant is the role of language.
