The Concept and The Theory of Art
Kosuth's thematization of semantic congruities and incongruities can be seen as a reflection of the problems which the relations between concept and presentation pose. Kosuth uses the related questions, "how meanings of signs are constituted" and "how signs refer to extra-lingual phenomena" as a fundament to discuss the relation between concept and presentation. Kosuth tries to identify or equate these philosophical problems with the theory of art. Kosuth changes the art practice from hand-made originals to notations with substitutable realizations, and tries to exemplify the relevance of this change for the theory of art.
In "Art after Philosophy," Kosuth provoked a confrontation with the formal criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Both exposed the concept of the art work as a non-substitutable instance realized by an artist who follows no other criteria than visual ones. They defined this concept as the core of modernism. In the sixties, Greenberg's and Fried's modernist doctrine dominated the American discussions on art; meanwhile, the artists Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Henry Flynt, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson and Joseph Kosuth wrote articles on art exemplifying a pluralistic anti- and post-modernist tendency which gained more influence at the end of the sixties. In 1968, Greenberg tried to disqualify the new tendencies as "'novelty' art": "The different mediums are exploding...when everybody is a revolutionary the revolution is over." Sam Hunter offered a more positive view in 1972: "The situation of open possibilities which confronted artists in the first years of the seventies allowed a variety of means and many fertile idea systems to coexist, reconciling through the poetic imagination apparent contradictions."
Read more about this topic: One And Three Chairs
Famous quotes containing the words concept, theory and/or art:
“Behind the concept of woman’s strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.””
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)