Kosuth belongs to a broadly international generation of
conceptual artists that began to emerge in the mid-1960s, stripping art of personal emotion, reducing it to nearly pure information or idea and greatly playing down the art object. Along with
Lawrence Weiner,
On Kawara,
Hanne Darboven and others, Kosuth gives special prominence to language. His art generally strives to explore the nature of
art rather than producing what is traditionally called "art". Kosuth's works are frequently
self-referential. He 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. 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. 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,
Four Colors Four Words 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. His seminal text
Art after Philosophy, written in 1968–69, had a major impact on the thinking about art at the time and has been seen since as a kind of "manifesto" of Conceptual art insofar as it provided the only theoretical framework for the practice at the time. (As a result, it has since been translated into 14 languages, and included in a score of anthologies.) It was, for the twenty-four year old Kosuth that wrote it, in fact more of a "agitprop" attack on Greenbergian formalism, what Kosuth saw as the last bastion of late, institutionalized modernism more than anything else. It also for him concluded at the time what he had learned from Wittgenstein - dosed with Walter Benjamin among others - as applied to that very transitional moment in art. In the early 1970s, concerned with his "ethnocentricity as a white, male artist", Kosuth enrolled in the
New School to study anthropology. He visited the
Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific (made famous in studies by the anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski), and the Huallaga Indians in the Peruvian Amazon.
Collaborations In 1992, Kosuth designed the album cover for
Fragments of a Rainy Season by
John Cale. Two years later, Kosuth collaborated with
Ilya Kabakov to produce
The Corridor of Two Banalities, shown at the
Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. This installation included 120 tables in a row to present text somewhat symptomatic of the cultures of which they both came from.
Commissions Since 1990 Kosuth has also begun working on various permanent public commissions. In the early 1990s, he designed a Government-sponsored monument to the Egyptologist
Jean Francois Champollion who deciphered the
Rosetta Stone in
Figeac; in Japan, he took on the curatorship of a show celebrating the Tokyo opening of
Barneys New York; and in Frankfurt, Germany, and in Columbus, Ohio, he conceived neon monuments to the German cultural historian
Walter Benjamin. After projects at public buildings such as the
Deutsche Bundesbank (1997), the
Parliament House, Stockholm (1998), and the
Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region (1999), Kosuth was commissioned to propose a work for the newly renovated
Bundestag in 2001, he designed a floor installation with texts by Ricarda Huch and Thomas Mann for the .
Lecturer Kosuth has taught widely, as a guest lecturer and as a member of faculties at the School of Visual Arts, New York City (1967–85);
Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (1988–90);
State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (1991–97); and the
Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (2001–06). Currently Professor at
Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice, 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;
Hayward Gallery, London;
Sorbonne, Paris; and the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. His students have included, among others,
Michel Majerus.
Writings Kosuth became the American editor of the
Art & Language 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. Art After Philosophy and After Collected Writings, 1966-1990 reveals between the lines a definition of "art" of which Joseph Kosuth meant to assure us. "Art is an analytical proposition of context, thought, and what we do that is intentionally designated by the artist by making the implicit nature of culture, of what happens to us, explicit - internalizing its 'explicitness' (making it again, 'implicit') and so on, for the purpose of understanding that is continually interacting and socio-historically located. These words, like actual works of art, are little more than historical curiosities, but the concept becomes a machine that makes the art beneficial, modest, rustic, contiguous, and humble." ==Exhibitions==