The Tautological Conceit of Joseph Kosuths Five Words in White Neon Identify It as What Kind of Art

Joseph Kosuth was one of the originators of Conceptual art in the mid-1960s, which became a major move that thrived into the 1970s and remains influential. He pioneered the use of words in place of visual imagery of any kind and explored the human relationship between ideas and the images and words used to convey them. His series of One and 3 installations (1965), in which he assembled an object, a photograph of that object, and an enlarged photographic copy of the dictionary definition of it, explored these relationships directly. His enlarged photostats of lexicon definitions in his serial Fine art as Idea as Idea (1966-68) eliminated objects and images completely in club to focus on significant conveyed purely with language. Since the 1970s, he has fabricated numerous site-specific installations that continue to explore how we experience, comprehend, and respond to linguistic communication.

1965

One and Three Chairs

This piece of work is the first and most famous example of Kosuth'due south series of 1 and Three installations, in which he assembled an object, a photograph of that object, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the object. It questions what actually constitutes a chair in our thinking: is it the solid object we run across and utilise or is it the word "chair" that we use to place it and communicate it to others? Furthermore, information technology confronts us with how we use words to explain and define visible, tangible, ordinary things, how words represent, describe, or signify things, and how this often becomes more complex when the thing is simple, fundamental, or intangible. Thus, it explores how language plays an integral part in conveying meaning and identity. It makes us more aware of why and how words become the verbal and written equivalents for commonplace tangible, solid things and objects.

Kosuth continued this exact formula in subsequent works, employing a shovel, hammer, lamp, and even a photograph itself (including a photograph of the photograph and definition of "photograph"). This is one of the first Conceptual works of art that was intended to eliminate any sense of authorship or individual expression and creativity.

Chair, photograph of same chair (to scale), enlarged printed definition of the word "chair" - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1965

V Words in Orange Neon

Five Words in Orangish Neon is among the many language-based works Kosuth made using neon lights and a transformer, all of which were inspired past Wittgenstein's explorations of tautologies. In logic and linguistics, as established largely by Wittgenstein, a tautology is a argument of fundamental fact or truth which is unchangeable and irreversible, even if rephrased in any manner possible. The meaning of the phrase is equated with how the words are visualized. In this example, they are shown with orange neon tubes shaped to form the words of the phrase. Kosuth plays with linguistic and verbal literalness by giving us a visual equivalent in the neon messages to what the text reads regardless of its grade. As with his other Conceptual works of the 1960s, the idea is considered more important and fundamental than the visual or artful content or expression of an artwork. Information technology was a radical reconsideration of the importance of the visual in visual art.

Neon and transformer - Private Collection

1966-68

Titled (Fine art as Idea equally Thought) The Word "Definition"

After commencement his Ane and Three series, Kosuth wanted to further remove images and objects from his language-based Conceptual fine art, and this led to his Art every bit Idea every bit Idea series. In these works, he produced enlarged photostats of definitions of words that look like they came from dictionaries, which he then mounted on walls like to how paintings, drawings, or photographs would be exhibited. He makes the viewer aware of the multiple identities and types of existence that these various things accept, as solid objects and tangible things, equally mechanical reproductions that are chop-chop fabricated and mass-produced, and as exact, written, and intangible equivalents. This challenges us to retrieve of how we would define or explain unproblematic, ordinary things that we run across and use in our daily lives.

Mounted photographic enlargement of the dictionary definition of "definition" - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1991

Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is an ancient artifact that has been on display at the British Museum since 1802 and is considered by historians and anthropologists to exist essential to understanding the language of ancient Egypt. Since it presents virtually the same text, a decree issued past Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy V in 196 BCE, in Aboriginal Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic script, and Aboriginal Greek, it is a historical artifact that shows how three different languages limited the aforementioned message. Thus, it was perfectly suited to Kosuth's interest in the equivalents amongst languages and between things every bit well as in the ways language is used to place, explain, and describe objects. The Rosetta Stone is a historical precedent to Kosuth'due south work, such as his 1 and Iii series, since the aforementioned argument is presented three times in the Egyptian artifact and the same thing is presented as words, an object, and a photographic reproduction in the artist'south series. In the late 1980s, Kosuth began fabricating, with the assist of many assistants, a giant re-create of the face of the Rosetta Stone placed flat on the sidewalk as a public installation in the town of Figeac right most the home of Jean-François Champollion, an Egyptologist who was involved with the original translation.

Stone tablet - Identify des ecritures, Figeac, France

1993

Double Reading #3, from the series Double Reading: An Allegory of Limits

In 1993, Kosuth created Double Reading, a series of nigh twenty silkscreen prints on laminated glass that were illuminated from behind with neon lights. In each of these works, a cartoon from a newspaper or magazine with dialogue and captions is juxtaposed with a quote from a famous philosopher, theologian, pol, and and so on. Some of these works use cartoons with lots of text and long quotes while others are quite cursory. In this piece of work, a cartoon of a human in a big office filled with rectangular article of furniture, lighting, windows, and doors uses his intercom to ask his secretarial assistant to bring him a "round object." This cartoon is accompanied by a short quote from St. Augustine: "Dogmas are fences around the mystery." The viewer is encouraged to contemplate the state of affairs illustrated humorously in the illustration by comparison it to the more serious and rather theoretical text from an before and different fourth dimension in history and culture. The multiple, circuitous, and variable meanings of the profound quote are made noticeable in ways that are quite gradual and subtle. In this instance, St. Augustine's quote could mean that religious dogma provides the ways for understanding life and the Divine or information technology could be suggesting the control and constraint of thinking. If it is the latter, is this ambivalence or contradiction intended by St. Augustine, has it been accidently created by him, or is information technology a determination that Kosuth has reached and is attempting to demonstrate for the viewer?

Silkscreen on laminated drinking glass with neon light backside - Museum of Contemporary Fine art, Los Angeles

2004

Á Propos

Kosuth's neon works have typically employed but unmarried words or brusque tautological phrases that could be viewed in their entirety at a glance. Á Propos, however, is a work in the Jewish Museum's 2004 installation of 86 quotations of diverse lengths from dozens of philosophers. Kosuth uses longer texts for this neon installation and highlights many of his near important intellectual and philosophical influences. The quotations were arranged in horizontal and vertical patterns that have little rhyme or reason with regard to their placement but are designed as a compilation of multiple philosophical perspectives. This text by Claude Levi-Strauss reads "Marx'southward and Freud's combined lesson: they have taught us that man has meaning only on the condition that he view himself as meaningful." The central goal of the entire installation was to demonstrate how philosophy is very much about dialogues and arguments among philosophers from different eras and places. This is an important example of Kosuth's involvement in literature, philosophy, history, and in the exploration of of import writings that facilitate our agreement of and connection to the ideas of important historical figures and movements.

Frosted glass, vinyl letter, neon, and transformers - The Jewish Museum, New York

Biography of Joseph Kosuth

Early Life and Study

Joseph Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1945. He studied at the Toledo Museum School of Design starting at the very early age of ten and continued there until 1962, during which time he studied with the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. He enrolled at the Cleveland Plant of Art in 1963 and studied drawing and painting there for a twelvemonth. Afterward traveling abroad for a year, he moved to New York City in 1965 and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where he studied painting until 1967. By this time, he was already questioning the usefulness of imagery in conveying meanings and ideas and was exploring the uses of linguistic communication.

Early on Career

In 1965, at but xx years old, Kosuth started to create a number of works that would effectively help get-go the Conceptual art movement and most fully realize his thinking most art equally pure idea and pregnant. These included his One and Three serial of installations and his First Investigations, which were subtitled Fine art as Thought every bit Idea. The championship for the serial was inspired by Ad Reinhardt'south annotate in 1958 that "fine art is art as fine art and everything else is everything else." Kosuth'south reductive presentation of words has been compared to Reinhardt'south reductive, geometric abstract painting. Kosuth has said that Reinhardt'due south paintings and theories were important to him, that his paintings were a "totalizing force" that were not "empty" geometry simply "full" of pregnant and feeling, and that Reinhardt's ideas on the moral and social importance of art also influenced him. The two artists knew one another and corresponded. Reinhardt submitted a copy of Julia R. de Woods'south Short History of Art to Kosuth's 1967 exhibition "Fifteen People Submit Their Favorite Book." In 1967, he established the New York City exhibition space he called "The Museum of Normal Fine art."

By the 1970s, as people were saving his Photostats - quick photographic copies of text - as souvenirs and thus "objectifying" and "fetishizing" them, Kosuth published these artworks as advertisements in magazines to further undermine their object-like value. In the late-1960s, he also started to brand installations with words applied to various objects or surfaces, shaped with neon light tubes. These words usually created short, simple statements that were quite straightforward and self-evident.

Kosuth'southward early on Conceptual works were apace appreciated for their innovation, and they secured him a teaching position at the School of Visual Arts in 1967. In 1969, he published his seminal "Fine art after Philosophy," a three-part essay published in Studio International, in which he explained how Marcel Duchamp was crucial for altering the direction of modernist fine art from radical visual developments to radical ideas and meanings expressed with ordinary, not-artistic materials and asserted that visual art could be adapted for investigations of meaning in language. In 1969 he became the American editor for the Conceptual group Art & Language, which was based in Great United kingdom, and continued with this group until 1976, until differences amidst its contributors over what was to exist published and how some of the artists, including Kosuth, were becoming well-known independently of the group led him to depart. This exercise of research and contemplation has led Kosuth to refer to many of his works since the mid-1960s as "investigations," and and then he has loosely labeled many works as, for example, his "Offset," "Tertiary," and "Sixth" Investigations, in add-on to their other titles, which are ofttimes more widely used and better known.

First in 1971 Kosuth enrolled in classes at the New School for Social Research in New York, studying philosophy and anthropology. He institute the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly his philosophy of language, quite informative and applicable to his own work. This influence can be found in Kosuth's experiments with words, probing the nature of significant, language knowledge, and the relationship between language and art, all of which have been constant concerns in his oeuvre. Wittgenstein's tautological statements on reality and non-reality in words and images, as explicated in his 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, are particularly relevant to Kosuth's piece of work.

Later on Career

Kosuth has connected to write and edit for numerous alternative publications throughout his career, espousing a stringent philosophy of the separation of art and aesthetics, often citing Duchamp'southward readymades as the ground for his thinking. In recent years Kosuth has received a number of commissions for large-scale public installations at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Louvre in Paris, and the Norman Foster-renovated Bundestag building in Berlin. He was on the kinesthesia of the School of Visual Arts in New York Metropolis from 1967 to 1985. Since then he has been a visiting professor at various institutions, including the Staatliche Akademie der Bildende Kunste in Stuttgart, Yale Academy, Pratt Institute, and Oxford University. Today Kosuth splits his time between New York and Rome.

The Legacy of Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth became one of the pioneers of Conceptual art at a remarkably immature historic period, creating his most important works and writings while still in his 20s. Kosuth's work is also office of a pregnant change in art during the 1960s, which helped to establish the now-accepted practice of creating fine art that does not incorporate images or traditional media for painting and sculpture, just which relies primarily on presenting words direct, without any other context. This characterizes the piece of work of many socially aware artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, the Guerilla Girls, and Glenn Ligon. Kosuth has organized events and installations involving other artists, including his Museum of Normal Art, "Fifteen People Submit Their Favorite Volume" (1967), and his 1989 project wherein he got artists to donate works inspired by Freudian theories to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/kosuth-joseph/

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