Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965)
Born	January 31, 1945 (1945-01-31) Toledo, Ohio
Nationality	American
Field	Conceptual art
Training	School of Visual Arts, New York City

Joseph Kosuth (born January 31, 1945), is an American conceptual artist.

A giant copy of the Rosetta stone, by Joseph Kosuth in Figeac, France, the birthplace of Jean-François Champollion

Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.

Early life and career

Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art. He spent the following year in Paris and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa. He moved to New York in 1965 and attended the School of Visual Arts there until 1967. From 1971 he studied anthropology and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York.

Work

Kosuth's art generally strives to explore the nature of art, focusing on ideas at the fringe of art rather than on producing art per se. Thus his art is very self-referential, and a typical tautological statement is this:

"The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art."

In 1965 Kosuth began making word pieces in neon and his first conceptual work Leaning Glass, consisting of an object, a photograph of it and dictionary definitions of the words denoting it. In 1966 Kosuth also embarked upon a series of works entitled Art as Idea as Idea, involving texts, through which he probed the condition of art. The works in this series took the form of photostat reproductions of dictionary definitions of words such as “water,” “meaning,” and “idea.” Accompanying these photographic images are certificates of documentation and ownership (not for display) indicating that the works can be made and remade for exhibition purposes.

One of his most famous works is One and Three Chairs, a visual expression of Plato's concept of The Forms. The piece features a physical chair, a photograph of that chair, and the text of a dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph is a representation of the actual chair situated on the floor, in the foreground of the work of art. The definition, posted on the same wall as the photograph, delineates in words the concept of what a chair is, in its various incarnations. In this and other, similar works, Five Words in Blue Neon and Glass One and Three, Kosuth forwards tautological statements, where the works literally are what they say they are.

Since 1992 Kosuth has also begun working on various permanent public commissions. In 2001, Kosuth was commissioned to design an installation for the newly renovated Bundestag. In 2003, Kosuth created three installations in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, employing text, archival material, and objects from the museum’s collection to comment on the politics and philosophy behind museum collections. In 2009, Kosuth’s exhibition entitled ‘ni apparence ni illusion’, an installation work throughout the 12th century walls of the Louvre Palace, opened at the Musée du Louvre in Paris and will become a permanent work in October 2012. In 2011, celebrating the work of Charles Darwin, Kosuth created a commission in the library where Darwin was inspired to pursue his evolutionary theory. His work on the façade of the Council of State of the Netherlands will be inaugurated in October 2011 and he is currently working on a permanent work for the four towers of the façade of the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, expected to be completed in 2012.

Curator

In 1969, Kosuth organized an exhibition of his work, Fifteen Locations, which took place simultaneously at fifteen museums and galleries worldwide; he also participated in the seminal exhibition of Conceptual art at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery, New York, that same year. In 1990 Kosuth organized an exhibition entitled "A Play of the Unmentionable" focusing on issues of censorship and using works from the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Lecturer

Kosuth has taught widely, as a guest lecturer and as a member of faculties at the School of Visual Arts, New York City; Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg; and the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste, Stuttgart. Currently Professor at Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice, Italy, Kosuth has functioned as visiting professor and guest lecturer at various universities and institutions for nearly forty years, some of which include: Yale University, Cornell University, New York University, Duke University, UCLA, Cal Arts, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Royal Academy, Copenhagen, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, University of Rome, Berlin Kunstakademie, Royal College of Art, London, Glasgow School of Art, The Hayward Gallery, London, The Sorbonne, Paris, The Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. His students have included, among others, Michel Majerus

Writings

Kosuth became the American editor of the Art & Language journal in 1969. He later was coeditor of The Fox magazine in 1975–76 and art editor of Marxist Perspectives in 1977–78. In addition, he has written several books on the nature of art and artists, including Artist as Anthropologist. In his essay "Art after Philosophy" (1969), he argued that art is the continuation of philosophy, which he saw at an end. He was unable to define art in so far as such a definition would destroy his private self referential definition of art. Like the Situationists, he rejected formalism as an exercise in aesthetics, with its function to be aesthetic. Formalism, he said, limits the possibilities for art with minimal creative effort put forth by the formalist. Further, since concept is overlooked by the formalist, "Formalist criticism is no more than an analysis of the physical attributes of particular objects which happen to exist in a morphological context". He further argues that the "change from 'appearance' to 'conception' (which begins with Duchamp's first unassisted readymade) was the beginning of 'modern art' and the beginning of 'conceptual art'." Kosuth explains that works of conceptual art are analytic propositions. They are linguistic in character because they express definitions of art. This makes them tautological. In this vein is another of his well-known pieces: In Figeac, Lot, France, on the "Place des écritures" (writings place) is a giant copy of the Rosetta stone.

Exhibitions

In 1969 Kosuth held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. In 1973, the Kunstmuseum Luzern presented a major retrospective of his art that traveled in Europe. In 1981, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld organized another major Kosuth retrospective. He was invited to exhibit at documentas V, VI, VII and IX (1972, 1978, 1982, 1992) and the Biennale di Venezia in 1976, 1993 and 1999.

Recognition

Kosuth was awarded a Cassandra Foundation Grant in 1968, at the age of 23, as the choice of Marcel Duchamp one week before he died. In 1993, he received the Menzione d’Onore at the Venice Biennale and was named Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1999, in honour of his work, the French government issued a 3.00-franc postage stamp in Figeac. In 2001, he received the Laurea Honoris Causa doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna. In 2003, Kosuth was awarded the Austrian Republic’s highest honour for accomplishments in science and culture, the Decoration of Honour in Gold.

References and notes

• Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, MIT Press, 1999, pxl. ISBN 0262511177
• Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After, Collected Writings, 1966-1990. Ed. by G. Guercio, foreword by Jean-François Lyotard, MIT Press, 1991 (ISBN 0-262-11157-8 /ISBN 978-0-262-11157-7)
• Dreher, Thomas: Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976, Thesis Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich 1991/Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 70ff. (One and Three Chairs, 1965), 167 (Xerox Book, 1968), 169ff. (The Second Investigation, since 1968), 281-294 (The Tenth Investigation, Proposition One, 1974); ISBN 3-631-43215-1 (in German)

See also

• One and Three Chairs - one of Kosuth's most well known pieces

Links

Joseph Kosuth is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London

External links

• Thomas Dreher: Joseph Kosuth - "Zero & Not" 1985-86