Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth is an American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and Venice, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including London, Ghent and Rome.
File:Place des ecritures Figeac.jpg|thumb|235px|A giant copy of the Rosetta stone, by Joseph Kosuth in Figeac, France, the birthplace of Jean-François Champollion
Early life and career
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth had an American mother and a Hungarian father from an old noble family.Joseph Kosuth 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 on a scholarship. 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 with Stanley Diamond and Bob Scholte at the New School for Social Research, New York.
At the School of Visual Arts he made a significant impact while technically a student, influencing fellow students as well as more traditional teachers there at the time such as Mel Bochner. As Kosuth's reputation grew, he was removed from the student body and given a position as a teacher, by Silas Rhodes the founder and President of the school, in 1967. This caused a near revolt of the faculty, as he had been a disruptive presence in the opinion of many of the instructors, several who had unhappily faced his questioning of basic presumptions. His elevation to a teacher was also a result of Kosuth's outside activities, which included the co-founding of the Museum of Normal Art along with proselytizing and organizing artists in a direction which was later identified as the conceptual art movement. Through his art, writing and organizing, he emphasized his interest in the dialectical process of idea formation in relation to language and context. He introduced the notion that art, as he put it, "was not a question of forms and colors but one of the production of meaning." His writing began a re-reading of modernism, initiating a major re-evaluation of the importance of Marcel Duchamp and signaling the shift into what we now identify, in art, as post-modernism. His analysis had a major impact on his practice as an artist and, soon after, on that of others. During this period he also maintained his academic interests. His position on the Faculty, Department of Fine Art, The School of Visual Arts, New York City continued until 1985. He since been Professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, 1988–90; and at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, 1991–1997. Currently he is Professor at the Kunstakademie Munich and at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Faculty of Design and Art, in Venice. He has been invited as a visiting professor and guest lecturer at various universities and institutions for nearly thirty 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; Ashmoleon 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.
Kosuth continued his work, writing, exhibiting and exhibition organizing and rapidly became acknowledged as one of the pioneers of Conceptual art and installation art; initiating language-based works as well as photo-based works and appropriation strategies since the beginning of his work in the mid-1960s. His activity has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art. Kosuth's nearly thirty-five year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and the Far East, including five Documenta and four Venice Biennale. His earliest work, the Protoinvestigations, were done when he was only twenty years old and as they are considered among the first works of the Conceptual art movement they are included in collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney, Centre Pompidou, The Tate Gallery, The Reina Sophia, Madrid, among many others, and constitute a youthful record in most of these major collections. Joseph Kosuth's career includes over 170 one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, twenty-two of them by the time he was twenty-five years old.
In 1989 Kosuth, along with Peter Pakesch, founded The Foundation for the Arts as part of The Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. He is the President of the foundation. The foundation was established on the 50th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's death, and is a society of artists engaged, through contributions by members, in forming a collection of contemporary art in honor of and in relevance to Sigmund Freud. The foundation's exhibition space is in the former offices of Anna Freud at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna.
Work
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:Kosuth's works frequently reference Sigmund Freud's psycho-analysis and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language.
His first conceptual work Leaning Glass, consisted 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 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. 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, and the Huallaga Indians in the Peruvian Amazon.
For Kosuth, his studies in cultural anthropology were a logical outgrowth that followed from his interest in the "anthropological" dimension of the later Wittgenstein. Indeed, it was the later Wittgenstein of the Investigation - which by accident he had read first - that led to works such as One and Three Chairs, not the Tractatus as is often assumed. His anthropological "field work" was organized by him only for the purpose of informing his practice as an artist. By the early 1970s, he had an internationally recognized career and was in his late 20s. He found that he was, as he put it, "a Eurocentric, white, male artist", and was increasingly culturally and politically uncomfortable with all that seemed naturally acceptable to his location. His study of cultural anthropology led him to decide to spend time within other cultures, deeply embedded in other world views. He spent time in the Peruvian Amazon with the Yagua Indians living deep into the Peruvian side of the Amazon basin. He also lived in an area of Australia some hundreds of kilometers north of Alice Springs with an Aboriginal tribe that, before they were re-located four years previously from an area farther north, had not known of the existence of white people. Later, he spent time in the Trobriand islands with the Aboriginal tribe that Malinowski had studied and wrote on. From Kosuth's point of view, "I knew I could, would, never enter into their cultural reality, but I wanted to experience the edge of my own." It was this experience and study which lead to his well-known text The Artist as Anthropologist in 1975.
Hung on walls, 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.