Work
Kosuth's art generally strives to explore the nature of art rather than producing what is traditionally called "art". Kosuth's works are frequently self-referential. Kosuth remarked in 1969:
- "The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art."
Kosuth's works frequently reference Sigmund Freud's psycho-analysis and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language.
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. 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. A collaboration with independent filmmaker Marion Cajori, Sept. 11, 1972 was a Minimalist portrait of sunlight in Cajori's studio.
In the early 1970s, concerned with his "ethnocentricity as a white, male artist," Kosuth enrolled in the New School to study anthropology. He visted the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific, made famous in studies by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and the Huallaga Indians in the Peruvian Amazon.
Hung on walls painted his signature dark gray, Kosuth's later, large photomontages trace a kind of artistic and intellectual autobiography. Each consists of a photograph of one of the artist's own older works or installations, overlaid in top and bottom corners by two passages of philosophical prose quoted from intellectuals identified only by initials (they include Jacques Derrida, Martin Buber and Julia Kristeva).
Read more about this topic: Joseph Kosuth
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Women have entered the work force . . . partly to express their feelings of self-worth . . . partly because today many families would not survive without two incomes, partly because they are not at all sure their marriages will last. The day of the husband as permanent meal-ticket is over, a fact most women recognize, however they feel about “women’s liberation.””
—Robert Neelly Bellah (20th century)
“Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called “swamping” it, and they who do the work are called “swampers.” I now perceived the fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coöperated with art here.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)