Joseph Kosuth

Week Nine:  Late 20^th Century Art

I decided to research Joseph Kosuth because I felt that his One and Three Chairs (1965) was intriguing.  Since he was born in 1945 he is still alive and may still be producing art (if he hasn’t retired).  I thought that this work was very intellectually appealing and wondered about the direction of his art in the decades after 1965, which lead me to Titled (Art As Idea As Idea) “Green” from 1997.  This work consists of a 48” square of print which sports the dictionary definition of the word “Green” mounted on cardboard. 

We can see a logical progression here- starting in 1965 Kosuth produced a series of triads, or sometimes other odd numbered groupings:  the object (chair, table, clock, etc.), a photograph of the object and a printed definition of the object.  He considered the idea or concept behind his art more important than the actual objects so this type of conceptual art could be set up in several different locations simultaneously using different chairs, etc.  The artist would send the gallery or other location a certificate of authenticity, confirming that they were using his idea, and a set of instructions about how to set up the installation.  It wasn’t necessary for the artist to go to the site of any installation unless he had a need to control the setting up process.  Kosuth also used newspaper clippings arranged on a board to investigate specific ideas in the Dada tradition and in a more surprising media he created his word ideas in neon.  The neon works show a Pop Art influence as Kosuth puts his work of ideas and concepts into the media of advertising and beer signs.  His work is often pared down to just a definition of a word or idea from a dictionary printed large and mounted.  After I read a bit about the artist I thought that he probably had used the idea of defining a color as a concept for one or more of his artworks and sure enough I found it in “Green”.   This makes the artist somewhat predictable to me- but also understandable.

Kosuth is trying to get away from actual paint and canvas and fabricating his own works- as was Duchamp in his time.  The idea of printing the definition of “green” is related to painting an actual canvas green but takes the concept much farther into abstraction.  When we look at One and Three Chairs the steps into this abstraction are shown- from the actual concrete object, to the photograph, and then to a series of words without a picture.    Of course, “green” has more meanings than simply the color- such as unripe, new, or in a more modern sense, environmentally aware- so we may actually find more meaning in the definition than in a green canvas.  Language has a lot of built-in ambiguity and contextual references of course so the artist is never going to be able to keep individuals from interpreting his work in their own way.   Kosuth also is flouting Greenberg by saying that the intent and meaning of art is more important than art that exists only as art and that art critics should not dictate what constitutes art.  All we have to do is to picture the idea of green in our own minds and see what comes up. 

Works Cited

http://library.artstor.org.ezp.lib.cwu.edu/library/printImage.jsp?imageur...

Kosuth, Joseph.  Intention(s).  Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 407-412.

Kotz, Liz.  Language Between Performance and Photography.  October 111 (2005): 3-22.

Zevi, Adachiara.  Joseph Kosuth: the Context is the Stuff of Art.  L’Architectura 45 (1999):382-384.