Joseph Kosuth
Encyclopedia
Joseph Kosuth is an American
conceptual art
ist.
Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.
. 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.
, 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:
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.
, 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.
, 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
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
.
, 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 documenta
s V, VI, VII and IX (1972, 1978, 1982, 1992) and the Biennale di Venezia in 1976, 1993 and 1999.
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.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
ist.
Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.
Early life and career
Kosuth was born in Toledo, OhioToledo, Ohio
Toledo is the fourth most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Lucas County. Toledo is in northwest Ohio, on the western end of Lake Erie, and borders the State of Michigan...
. 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
Cleveland Institute of Art
The Cleveland Institute of Art is a private college of art and design located in University Circle, Cleveland, Ohio. It was founded in 1882 as the Western Reserve School of Design for Women. From 1891 until 1948 it was named Cleveland School of Art. During the Great Depression the school...
. 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
School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...
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 artArt
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
, 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
One and Three Chairs
One and Three Chairs, 1965, is a work by Joseph Kosuth. An example of conceptual art, the piece consists of a chair, a photograph of this chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair"...
, a visual expression of Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
'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
Bundestag
The Bundestag is a federal legislative body in Germany. In practice Germany is governed by a bicameral legislature, of which the Bundestag serves as the lower house and the Bundesrat the upper house. The Bundestag is established by the German Basic Law of 1949, as the successor to the earlier...
. In 2003, Kosuth created three installations in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or Fenway Court, as the museum was known during Isabella Stewart Gardner's lifetime, is a museum in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, located within walking distance of the Museum of Fine Arts and near the Back Bay Fens...
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
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, 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 GallerySeth Siegelaub
Seth Siegelaub is an American-born art dealer, curator, author and researcher. He is best known for his innovative promotion of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 70s., but has also been a political researcher and publisher, textile history bibliographer and collector, and a researcher...
, 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 fur Bildende Kunste, Hamburg; and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildende Kunste, Stuttgart. Currently Professor at Istituto Universitario di ArchitetturaUniversity Iuav of Venice
Iuav University of Venice is a university located in Venice, northern Italy. It was founded in 1926 and is organized in 3 faculties....
, 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
Michel Majerus
Michel Majerus was a Luxemburgian artist whose work combined painting with digital media.His work was featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Europe and North America, most notably the "Pop Reloaded" exhibition in Los Angeles....
Writings
Kosuth became the American editor of the Art & LanguageArt & Language
Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...
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
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, 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
Formalism (art)
In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...
as an exercise in aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
, 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
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
'." 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
Figeac
Figeac is a commune in the Lot department in south-western France.Figeac is a sub-prefecture of the department.-History:Figeac is on the via Podiensis, a major hiking medieval pilgrimage trail which is part of the Way of St. James...
, Lot
Lot (département)
Lot is a department in the southwest of France named after the Lot River.- History :Lot is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790. It was created from part of the province of Languedoc. In 1808, some of the original southeastern cantons were...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, on the "Place des écritures" (writings place) is a giant copy of the Rosetta stone
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek...
.
Exhibitions
In 1969 Kosuth held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli GalleryLeo Castelli
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades...
, New York. In 1973, the Kunstmuseum Luzern presented a major retrospective of his art that traveled in Europe. In 1981, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart is an art gallery and art museum in Stuttgart, Germany, opened in 1843. In 1984 the opening of the Neue Staatsgalerie designed by James Stirling transformed the once provincial gallery into one of Europe's leading museums.-Alte Staatsgalerie:Originally, the classicist...
and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld
Kunsthalle Bielefeld
The Kunsthalle Bielefeld is a modern art museum in Bielefeld, Germany. It was designed by Philip Johnson in 1968, and paid for by the businessman and art patron Rudolf August Oetker.-Collection and exhibitions:...
organized another major Kosuth retrospective. He was invited to exhibit at documenta
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
s 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 DuchampMarcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
one week before he died. In 1993, he received the Menzione d’Onore at the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
and was named Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres is an Order of France, established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture, and confirmed as part of the Ordre national du Mérite by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963...
. 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
University of Bologna
The Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna is the oldest continually operating university in the world, the word 'universitas' being first used by this institution at its foundation. The true date of its founding is uncertain, but believed by most accounts to have been 1088...
. In 2003, Kosuth was awarded the Austrian Republic’s highest honour for accomplishments in science and culture, the Decoration of Honour in Gold.