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Joseph Kosuth | press | p. 1

“Light Motif,”WallpaperMarch 2016

Joseph Kosuth | selected press


Gopnik, Blake“At Sean Kelly, Joseph Kosuth Pioneers Conceptualism,”Artnet NewsDecember 18, 2015

THE DAILY PIC (#1457): I’m always amazed at how Joseph Kosuth managed to start making full-blown conceptual art when the mainstream art world was still obsessing over the colors and shapes, textures and lines of Greenbergian abstraction. This piece, called “Five Fives (for Donald Judd)” is from 1965, and it’s the earliest work in the survey of Kosuth’s “signage” works that is now entering its final days at Sean Kelly gallery in New York. Kosuth’s 1965 piece isn’t miles from the formalism that was the order of the day when it was made; it’s right up against it, giving it a sharp elbow in the ribs. After all, it is about color and shape and space - it just insists that there can also be ideas behind the look of things. The piece, you could say, turns a mathematical sequence into one of the “specific objects” that Donald Judd, its dedicatee, identified as the next big thing in advanced

art. Another, more personal, reason I like Kosuth: My hero Andy Warhol recognized the value of his difficult art before most people did, in another refutation of the idea that Warhol was some kind of “accidental genius”, or even a straight-ahead fool who struck it lucky in his own work. Kosuth returned the favor by recognizing Warhol’s importance at just the moment when some Important People in the art world were dismissing him. Kosuth was one of the first people to spot the “fifteen minutes of fame” line as getting at something central in Warhol - even if in fact Andy may not even have coined the phrase. (©2015 Joseph Kosuth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Jason Wyche, New York, courtesy Sean Kelly, New York).


Battaglia, Andy“Joseph Kosuth’s Art of Bright Ideas,”The Wall Street JournalDecember 16, 2015

For artist Joseph Kosuth, neon isn’t a means for glitzy spectacle; for him, it is a serious instrument for conveying deep philosophical ideas. He can’t help it, however, if spectacular sights arise from a long career’s worth of ri-gorous thinking.One such sight is the luminous exhibi-tion at Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea, where 40 neon works spanning five decades glow with thoughts about art and the nature of thought itself.Some spell out quotations from Sig-mund Freud and philosopher Ludwig

Wittgenstein, while others play brainy games with words and numbers. Still others nod to an unlikely intellectual source: the comic-strip characters Calvin and Hobbes.All reflect the probing and playful work of Mr. Kosuth, who helped pioneer the movement known as conceptual art beginning in the mid-1960s. Some of his early touchstone works are on view in the big retro-spective, which closes after Saturday, while others can be seen in a smal-ler show uptown at Castelli Gallery,

running until Feb. 19. Those works charted a course that led Mr. Kosuth to the conclusion that, in art, ideas are more important than objects.“If you begin with the presumption that artists work with meaning, not with forms and colors, you get a who-le other approach for seeing art,” said Mr. Kosuth, 70 years old. “The idea was to get rid of the aura around the work of art. It’s a burden, and we don’t need it.”The concept that an artist’s ideas are more important than his or her ca-

Artist Joseph Kosuth at Sean Kelly Gallery for his show “Agnosia, an Illuminated Ontology.”

Photo: Andrew Lambersonfor The Wall Street Journal

| p. 18Joseph Kosuth | press

pacity for creating physical objects is largely attributed to artist Marcel Duchamp, who famously “signed” a urinal in 1917 and submitted it for an exhibit, one of many “readymade” offerings that he deemed works of art. Mr. Kosuth, an ardent follower, also has an installation on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which mixes his work with several by Du-champ.Mr. Kosuth, who splits his time between New York and London, has worked with many physical ma-terials—photographs, repurposed items such as chairs, large panes of glass and simple declarativestatements on Xeroxed paper. But neon became the medium for which he is best known.His initial goal was to subvert ne-on’s luminescent effect. “I wanted something that was experienced as public signage, as advertising,” Mr. Kosuth said, “and to transform it with another use.” So he used it to convey concepts then new to art, culled from fields such as philosophy and lingui-stics.Some works play slyly with langua-ge, such as “Neon Electrical Light English Glass Letters Pink Eight,” a

self-reflexive work on view at Castelli with eight words spelling out the title in pink neon.Another piece, in the Sean Kelly show, spells out Wittgenstein’s di-ctum “In mathematics process and result are equivalent”-reflecting the kind of endless questioning and an-swering Mr. Kosuth thinks art should engage in.One of his most famous non-neon works, “One and Three Chairs” from 1965, asks the question of what con-stitutes a chair by displaying a chair, a photo of the chair and a printout of the definition of the word “chair” to-gether.Since the artist considers ideas his ultimate art product—he cares more about the essence of a chair than any specific chair-a typical piece of his is sold as a certificate that, more than the material object, counts as the ar-twork itself.Mr. Kosuth, who splits his time between New York and London, has worked with many physical mate-rials-photographs, repurposed items such as chairs, large panes of glass and simple declarative statements on Xeroxed paper. But neon became the medium for which he is best known.His initial goal was to subvert ne-

on’s luminescent effect. “I wanted something that was experienced as public signage, as advertising,” Mr. Kosuth said, “and to transform it with another use.” So he used it to convey concepts then new to art, culled from fields such as philosophy and lingui-stics.Some works play slyly with langua-ge, such as “Neon Electrical Light English Glass Letters Pink Eight,” a self-reflexive work on view at Castelli with eight words spelling out the title in pink neon.Another piece, in the Sean Kelly show, spells out Wittgenstein’s di-ctum “In mathematics process and result are equivalent”-reflecting the kind of endless questioning and an-swering Mr. Kosuth thinks art should engage in.One of his most famous non-neon works, “One and Three Chairs” from 1965, asks the question of what con-stitutes a chair by displaying a chair, a photo of the chair and a printout of the definition of the word “chair” to-gether.Since the artist considers ideas his ultimate art product-he cares more about the essence of a chair than any specific chair-a typical piece of his is




sold as a certificate that, more than the material object, counts as the ar-twork itself.“I’ve been trying to explain this to pe-ople for 20 years,” said Sean Kelly, whose gallery is selling theideas in Mr. Kosuth’s show for pri-ces ranging between $40,000 and $500,000. “It was very hard to get across to people who felt they were spending a lot of money and not get-ting something for it. That’s not the case.”The owner can make copies for di-splay, normally with the aid of the ar-tist’s studio, but the value of the work is in the paper authorizing it.“The form of presentation is never signed,” Mr. Kosuth said. “You can’t sign a neon.”Walking through the Chelsea show, the artist paused to consider several works, including one that combined a “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon with a thought by Martin Heidegger. “It’s brilliant-it gets close to philosophy,” he said of the comic strip.Mr. Kosuth also remarked on a sur-prise byproduct of his art: the sym-phony of neon tubes buzzing and whirring all around.

“It’s a little like going to an aquarium,” he said. “It’s the sound of thinking.”Joseph Kosuth in front of his piece ‘1,2,3,4’ at Sean Kelly Gallery.

Photo: Andrew Lambersonfor The Wall Street Journal



Joseph Kosuth’s art on displayat Sean Kelly Galleryin Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood

Photo: Andrew Lamberson for The Wall Street Journal


Johnson, Ken“Joseph Kosuth Show at Sean Kelly Gallery,”The New York TimesNovember 26, 2015

“Agnosia, an Illuminated Ontology,” an installation by Joseph Kosuth, ga-thers works from 1965 to 2015 at the Sean Kelly Gallery. Credit 2015 Jo-seph Kosuth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Jason Wyche, via Sean Kelly, New York.The 1950s and ’60s were peak years for “the linguistic turn,” a philosophi-cal movement that looked to the analysis of language for solutions to traditional puzzles about consciou-sness and reality. Few artists were more profoundly affected by that trend than Joseph Kosuth, a pio-neer of ’60s-style Conceptualism. “Agnosia, an Illuminated Ontology,” a visually exciting and conceptually bookish installation designed by Mr.

Kosuth, gathers together more than 40 works from 1965 to 2015 that fe-ature electrically illuminated words, phrases and sentences. (Agnosia is an inability to make sense of sensory information, a condition usually cau-sed by brain damage.) One of the earliest pieces, produced by Mr. Kosuth in 1965 at the tender age of 20, “Five Fives (to Donald Judd)”, consists of the words for the numbers 1 through 25 spelled in blue neon lights in five rows, five words a row. Some later works present quo-tations, rendered in mechanical fonts, by luminaries like the Marquis de Sade, Freud and Wittgenstein. In others, neon tubing imitates the scrawl of handwritten notes. Bran-

ching diagrams represent etymolo-gies of words like “water” and “light.”A piece quoting Heidegger perhaps best sums up Mr. Kosuth’s per-spective: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Tho-se who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.” Those who favor nonverbal imagery in art may demur, but you don’t have to take sides to enjoy Mr. Kosuth’s philosophically provocative erudition and his inventive ways with lights.


Ebony, David“David Ebony’s Top 10 New York Gallery Shows for November,”Artnet NewsNovember 24, 2015

Installation view, Joseph Kosuth,“Agnosia, an Illuminated Ontology,” 2015Photo: Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery

David Ebony’s Top 10 New York Gallery Shows for November

1. Joseph Kosuth at Sean Kelly, through December 19. Among the most cerebral of artists, conceptualist maestro Joseph Ko-suth is best known for austere instal-lations using appropriated images and texts referencing philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory, often incorporating glowing neon let-tering. In this stunning show, “Agno-sia, an Illuminated Ontology,” the New York- and London-based artist

covers all the walls, and even the cei-ling with vibrant and colorful neon pieces that he created over a period of more than fifty years.As an encapsulated retrospective, the show is a bit overwhelming at first. The gallery, however, provi-des a hand-out map to help viewers navigate the dense and intense in-stallation, with commentary about each work. Among the exhibition’s highlights are several early efforts of the 1960s, such as Five Fives (to Donald Judd) (1965), a minimalist composition consisting of five rows

of numbers-from five to 25-spelled out in glowing cobalt neon. The 2009 Paradox of Content series is more baroque in feel, with swirling graphics and cursive lettering in orange neon channeling the works of Nietzsche and Darwin.


Prentnieks, Anne“Joseph Kosuth,”Art ForumNovember 2015

Prone to immersive installations over the course of his influential career as a pioneer of Conceptualism, Joseph Kosuth presents more than forty of his text- and light-based works from the past fifty years in the jam-packed exhibition “Agnosia, an Illuminated Ontology.” Words, phrases, dia-grams, and pictures creep and crawl along the walls and ceiling beams, with their guts-electric cords and darkened stems of neon-on full view. It is a retinal overload that simultane-ously blurs and distills the cacophony of meanings within each work.Some examples of the chaos, organi-zed neither by chronology nor theme: Five Colors, Five Adjectives, 1965-li-

terally, the word “adjective” in five languages and five different colors-is a cerebral and comically deadpan take on adjectival inference. Stacked above it is À Propos (Réflecteur de Réflecteur), #83, 2004, a line of italic serif text that snakes up the wall, tur-ning at sharp ninety-degree corners. Double Reading #20, 1993, depicts Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, lamenting the banality of TV before shushing Hobbes for interrupting a deodorant commercial. And other works, such as Texts (Waiting for) for Nothing, Samuel Beckett, in Play, 2011, work from the series “The Pa-radox of Content,” 2009, and A Con-ditioning of Consciousness, 1988,

quote or reference Freud, Beckett, and Darwin.Kosuth’s pairings of high-minded content with common materials have a hypersaturating, destabilizing effect that eliminates hierarchies of information. It’s just like our over-con-nected, faux-democratic, super-digi-tal culture today: a virtual ambush of information through which meaning is eventually, hopefully, distilled.

View of “Joseph Kosuth” 2015


Johnson, Ken“The Thing and theThing-in-Itself”The New York TimesJanuary 8, 2015

This spare, thought-provoking exhi-bition’s title derives from a distinction posited by Immanuel Kant. That is, a thing can be known by a human being only from his or her unique perspecti-ve. What the thing is, in and of itself, independent of any perceiver’s view of it, isn’t fully knowable. Organized by the art historian Robert Hobbs, the exhibition presents seven things, which he introduces as “works that pit people’s sight and insight against the limits of what they are able to com-prehend.”The show’s earliest piece is a found object by Marcel Duchamp from 1916: an iron comb and the box it fits into. Most recent is a 1968 sculptu-re by Robert Smithson consisting of an aluminum bin filled with pieces of broken concrete. A 1936 piece

by René Magritte depicts a man stu-dying an egg while painting a picture of a flying bird. From 1954, there’s an all-black painting by Ad Reinhardt. The text on a small pink piece of pa-per certifying that someone named Hans Hartman Paulsen “is to be con-sidered as an authentic work of art” was produced by Piero Manzoni in 1961. “Material Described” (1965), by Joseph Kosuth, has a word pain-ted on each of four sheets of glass: “glass,” “words,” “material” and “de-scribed.”Yoko Ono’s “Sky TV” (1966) is a vin-tage television playing a real-time vi-deo feed of the sky.None of these things will be incom-prehensible to people familiar with modern art. Outside any human fra-me of reference, however, things like

an egg, concrete rubble, the sky, the color black and a person remain at least partly unfathomable.

“Material Described” (1965)by Joseph Kosuthin “The Thing and the Thing-in-Itself”.Credit Joseph Kosuth/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Lance Brewer/Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York


Charlesworth, JJ.“Joseph Kosuth:Hot, Bright, and Requiring Lotsof Explanation”Artnet NewsDecember 16, 2014

Installation view. Joseph Kosuth’s“Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed” at Spruth Magers London.Photo: © Kris Emmersoncourtesy Sprüth Magers



Grey-painted walls decked with neon script like Christmas lights or a science museum exhibit for kids, the gallery hums with hot reds, greens, yellows, blues and stark whites. Stuffy with the heat from the neons and their transformer units, Joseph Kosuth’s show “Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed“ is assembled from works ranging across the old American conceptualist’s career, from 1965 to 2011, their shared property being that that they’re all made of neon.It’s an extreme abbreviation of an artist’s work, condensed and compacted in this fairground form, especially an artist who casts such a long shadow over the history of contemporary art, for his role in the turn to “conceptual art” in the mid-1960s. “Concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language,” wrote avant-gardist Henry Flynt in the early ‘60s, and Kosuth’s neons here are nothing else (apart from the incursion of one or two diagrams and a couple of philosophically inclined cartoons on back-illuminated Perspex, one of them a brilliant Calvin and Hobbes strip). Kosuth’s early roots were in analytical philosophy, and his neons fiddle with that legacy: it’s language

that considers the nature of language as it describes the world-as it makes meaning and creates objects. So the earliest here, Five Fives (to Donald Judd ), from 1965, is five rows of five words, of the numbers one through to 25 which stack up like bricks in an unfinished wall. Like the nearby phrase “An Object Self-Defined” (Self-Defined Object [green], 1966), or the four colored words of Four Colours Four Words (1966) it’s a test of the relationship of a thing to an idea to a word. These texts short-circuit the question of how visual art relates to how we speak about it, dating from a period when modern art had gotten stuck with a certain idea of what modern art should look like, and how it should be talked about.Those early works are succinct and uncompromising in how they give shape to the philosophical perplexities of form and idea-everything you need to know or think about is contained right there in front of you, where visual or physical forms merge with their own descriptions. But maybe there’s only so many times you can pull off such magic tricks as an artist-later works are more elliptical, happy to digress into erudite

backstory and quotation, often from the history of philosophy, science and literature, and from those great thinkers for whom language and speech was a core preoccupation-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett. So, over by the entrance is a neon which scales up all the typographical corrections that Freud made to the galley proof of the first page of his book on fetishism, bright blue squiggles surrounding a framed reproduction of the page (Fetishism Corrected, 1988). Round in the next room, L.W.’s Last Word (cobalt blue) (1990) is an arcing slash of neon scribbles of the German word sprache, (speak ), crossed through, which, according to the little wall notes, was Wittgenstein’s last written word before he died.To look at these means, inevitably, having to think one’s way into these huge intellectual vistas, which is perhaps why the walls are scattered with little wall texts by Kosuth, solemnly explaining the thinking behind various works.Kosuth’s wall texts are curious things-surreptitiously reaffirming the artist’s place in art history, making little value



judgments (“Fetishism Corrected, 1988) is one of the most important of the later Freud works,” explains one text matter-of-factly), and in a broader sense attempting to control and regulate the way in which we might begin to get something out of the work. They’re like curators’ texts in a world where curators don’t exist, and in an odd way they show up one of the great tensions to have come out of conceptualism: you often have to take the artist’s word for it, since the work offers little more than a huge arrow pointing elsewhere; while the function of critics and curators has been dismissed, or incorporated into the whole of the artist’s activity.As one little text panel declares, “Joseph Kosuth’s point of view since the beginning of his work in the 1960s is that artists work with meaning, not simply with forms and colors.” But what’s most vivid about “Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed .” is precisely the cheerful excess of forms and colors, since the meanings Kosuth is working with are in many ways deferred, and require you to have a discussion about some subject outside of the work to reassemble them. They work like advertising

signage for big ideas, slogans for an artist’s undoubtedly profound intellectual engagement with the thought of his era. But as a critic, or as any viewer to this hot, bright exhibition lighting up a grey London winter day, are we here to discuss other people’s ideas, or the artist’s art? Or can’t we tell the difference any more? It’s a tough call, and Kosuth is always a hard sell.“Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed.” runs at Sprüth Magers London through February 14, 2015.


Jacques, Adam.Joseph Kosuth & James Lavelle:“He’s incredibly sensitive.We’re both emotional people”The IndependentNovember 30, 2014

The musican and the artist met at the Venice Biennale but didn’t quite hit it off at first...

James Lavelle, 40

As co-founder of the electronic-mu-sic label Mo’Wax, Lavelle (right in

picture) helped shape 1990s dance music, while with his trip-hop out-fit Unkle, he has worked with guest vocalists including Richard Ashcroft and Thom Yorke. He has also provi-ded soundtracks for films including ‘Sexy Beast’. He lives in London.

I met Joseph at the Metropole Hotel at 2am during the last Venice Bienna-le. It had been a long, strange first day there for me, with no time to chill out. I was sat in the foyer waiting for so-meone, and feeling pissed off, when I saw a guy sitting in front with a hat



on, similar to my own Borsalino, which I was wearing. He was looking at me while talking to a lady with a lot of New York bravado, when he turned to me and said, “Who are you?” I wasn’t in the mood, so I was like, “I got to go.” Later, my friend, a curator, said, do you know who that was? That’s Jose-ph Kosuth!”I met him properly the next day, on a water taxi, going to a party I was DJing at. After the party, I remember a mad ride home with a bunch of artists, including Joseph. When you meet someone in that environment and spend an intense period of time with them, you can get close. And through a five-day period, along with [the ar-tist] Gavin Turk and [the sculptor] Fio-na Banner, we rocked Venice.He set up a studio in London, and we started talking about working to-gether. He’s a text-based artist, and we’d talk about how to translate those words into music. He jokes about how he gave his words to [Velvet Under-ground’s] John Cale.He’s nearly my father’s age but I’m fa-scinated by this childlike person with a constant lust for life. He tells great stories filled with energy; he has mad tales about hanging out with famous

artists and musicians such as Bob Marley and Mick Jagger.On one level I think he’s very tough and self-assured. He’ll say to me, “I’ve got this work going up, the biggest in Paris – it’s the only neon you will see from the Eiffel Tower.” And you think, wow, he’s so confident. But I felt an insecurity in him when he entered my world, working on this lyric project to-gether.He’s also incredibly sensitive. He got pissed off with me recently over Melt-down. We were chatting, andthe next minute, he was like, “You di-dn’t invite me to your show. You didn’t call!” I was like, sorry, let’s get dinner and work it out. We’re both emotional people.We’ve spent most of our time around each other socially, experiencing this weird, nocturnal world filled with a fa-scinating mix of people from all walks of life.I frequently go to his openings and he comes to see some of the mad things I’ve done, such as when I was DJing to 4,500 people, playing acid house - he was right at the front, fa-scinated.

Joseph Kosuth, 69

A pioneer of conceptual art, the Ame-

rican’s 1965 work ‘One and Three Chairs’ explored the nature of his industry. But Kosuth is perhaps best known for his neon word sculptures, which can be seen in collections around the world, including in New York’s Moma and the Louvre in Paris. He lives in New York and London.

I don’t particularly like men - I prefer

the company of women. Other men remind me of aspects of my character that I’m not that happy about. And when I first met James, during the Ve-nice Biennale last year, we didn’t like each other at all.I was in a bad mood; I was in five shows and having problems with the group-show venues. But mutual friends kept throwing us together. I have fragmented memories through the alcohol haze of us getting over our initial, unenthusiastic, take on each other.The Biennale is like a professio-nal convention, curators, collectors and artists all networking, and I was exhausted from the conversations about work, so it was a pleasure to talk to someone with whom nothing was at stake.I see him as the riverboat gambler out



of an old western type: his style is kind of slow, he speaks with this poker-fa-ce style, while I’m much more the exu-berant Yank.Back in London, where I’m now ba-sed, we have lunch a lot; we keep thin-king about doing a project together that plays to both our interests. We’ve not quite found it yet, but it’s been fun to expand my brain a bit by thinking in terms other than my normal work.James’s [trip-hop group] Unkle is very respected - which I really got to understand when I introduced my daughter Noema to him over dinner. She’s 21 and goes to a lot of concerts, and was really excited to meet him.I’m probably too serious in my work - but not on occasions when I’m drin-king, so it’s a different side of my per-sonality that James engages with. I’ve been to his DJ events at the Groucho Club - I have a lifetime membership there, as that neon in the bar is mine - and we go on evenings out, too.I was with him earlier this year when he was invited to curate [the Southbank music arts festival] Melt-down. He immediately invited me to apply my own capacities to that con-text, but he never followed up, which was a little disappointing. I saw him

DJ at Meltdown, and I was impressed at how an audience responds to him; seeing him work with the crowd, and his engagement with it, has been an eye-opener.As an artist, my activity is really about the process, which can be forgotten when the market reduces it to an expensive commodity. The intere-sting thing about working with music is that the audience can experience the artist as they deal with their ideas; contrasting his practice with mine has been inspiring.Joseph Kosuth’s first UK retrospecti-ve, ‘Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed’, is at Sprüth Magers, London W1, until 14 February. An exhibition of Mo’Wax’s ‘urban archaeology’ archi-ve, Build and Destroy, is at the Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, until 5 January.


Dahan, Alexis“Joseph Kosuth on the art market,”purple fashion magazineMarch 2014JOSEPH KOSUTH

on the art market

photos and interview by ALEXIS DAHAN

ALEXIS DAHAN - In 1965 you were in your 20s, making work that is now widely recognized as the beginning of Conceptual art. Today, the term is everywhere, and the practice seems to be generalized.What was your motivation from the start?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - My initial work, among other things, was a critique of the institutionalized status of art as only painting and sculpture. I think it had its effect on the practice of art, opening it up to questioning and then accepting such questioning as an important part of the art-making process. To a degree it means that Conceptual art itself has become institutionalized, yes, but as that is nonprescriptive and creatively open, it has had a very positive effect and moved us beyond the cage that late Modernism, à la Greenberg, had en-visioned for us.

ALEXIS DAHAN - How were you so enlightened on art history at such a young age?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - In 1965, I was only 20, as you point out, and this level of seriousness was a result of

the fact that I began my work and my engagement with art when I was very young. I went to museum schools and had a private tutor, all of this starting from the age of nine. So, by the time I reached 20, I had been quite serious about it for a while. This, along with the fact that I had an early, and prob-ably advanced for my age, interest in both philosophy and literature, also formed me as an artist. Altogether, at that early age, I simply felt I didn’t believe in painting anymore, but I still believed in art. What this meant, of course, was that I didn’t believe in what was the Modernist conception of art. This led me a couple of years later to put a notice on the wall at my second show at Leo Castelli, in 1971, that my work was “post-Modern,” probably the first use of that term, although I meant it in a literal sense, I knew of no activity going on under that name. I simply had to find an-other way to work besides making paintings. The result was that I used whatever cultural influences I had from outside of art, such as literature, in the sense that it was outside of the history of the visual arts.


Dahan, Alexis“Joseph Kosuth on the art market,”purple fashion magazineMarch 2014

ALEXIS DAHAN - Why call it “Con-ceptual” art?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - The nature of my work as well as the ideas behind it meant I had a struggle to make it be understood and accepted as art. This is part of that dialectical pro-cess between the artist and the world that every artist, if they’re doing new work, must do, I would imagine. And I somehow managed, but I had to give it a special name.

ALEXIS DAHAN - But the term al-ready existed?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Of course, the term had been around. They applied the term “conceptual painting” to some painters in the early ’60s, like Larry Poons, but my work made such a term oxymoronic. Even Sol Lewitt used the term, and he meant some-thing else by it, too, although he was far closer.

ALEXIS DAHAN - And he was talking about it two years later.

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Yes. Still, that hasn’t stopped the confusion that sometimes credits him for some sort of leadership in the history of

Conceptual art. Sol was a great artist in all the right ways, but what he did was something else. I think his work was an important step that made my work’s acceptance possible, as well as the work of some others. But Sol was a Modernist. He was more of a bridge than a break.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Was there an ac-tual Conceptual art movement?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - I think it is clear that it was because of my work and writing and my organizing of such work by others in exhibitions that this perception of something like a move-ment came about. But that term is it-self Modernist, so it’s probably misap-plied. But, anyway, that’s the historical record, however you look at it. This will all get cleared up later, I presume, and clearly not by me right now! ALEXIS DAHAN - What has become of Conceptual art today?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - It’s interesting, I had the realization at some point much later, decades later, that now young artists could still make Con-ceptual art, by which I speak of idea-based work that is not mediadefined, but no longer needs a special term

for it; they could just call it art. And that was when I more fully realized the effect of what I had started - that it had an impact.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Has the ambition of your early discoveries - “art as idea as idea,” work as language and pure concept - been fulfilled or is it still in progress?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Well, first Con-ceptual art is an approach, an attitude, which makes it a different way toward how art itself is conceived at its basis. This was what I felt was needed. I felt the risk was that the abstract color painting of late Modernism was es-sentially just decorative and would never be able to resist the market; it was devoid of having any critical com-ponent. This, for me, would lead art in the direction of being just expensive neckties for over the sofa. So, as I was saying, the difference with Concep-tual art begins at the beginning of the making process itself. One thinks of these things as being fulfilled by go-ing in a linear direction, but that isn’t the nature of how culture works.It’s much more spiral. And so the ar-chitectonic model of one brick after the other doesn’t really apply itself to



culture.It must be a spiral, because it must see itself as it proceeds. There has to be an element of self-reflexivity to it.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Why is that?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Because the work we’re doing, no matter how rig-orous it is as an intellectual project, still must be completed in the world and made of elements from the world. It gets transformed, and it must locate itself by taking from popular culture, insofar as popular culture forms all of our consciousness. There must be a connection there. And so it’s never as simple as what you like to imagine, particularly when you’re young and you’re beginning to work.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Do you think your work has changed?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - I feel my work transforms itself. But it’s also con-sistent. I’ve always felt my work is still building on things I began 45 years ago, in terms of looking at how we make meaning. But the world changes, and my work responds to those changes, so now it manages to be about far more than what I was thinking about then. This an import-ant strength that Conceptual art has, which painting or other kinds of more formalist and media-defined works do not. Such work can really be seen as rather stuck and dated. And so the work I’m speaking of transforms itself, but with consistency. But it’s a consis-tency that is not defined in terms of formal elements, but in terms of ideas that reflect the world we make it in.

ALEXIS DAHAN - What transforma-

tion do you think the world is under-going?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - One of the biggest changes that is happening is the pernicious aspect of corporate culture, in which everything is under pressure to be reduced to a digital component, which means that prices, being numbers, easily replace real value, and the works are thus under siege for their meaning to be the meaning found in the market. This is a meaning having little to do with all the reasons we thought, for centuries, we were making meaning in culture in those ways valuable to humans. It’s all digitally distributed and reduced essentially to power relations, eco-nomic and otherwise. It’s a continuing big problem. Generations of young artists and art historians are being



formed in this culture.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Are you talking about the evolution of art history?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - We’ve always had art history, and it was a histo-ry of who did what, when, and what was influenced — part of the history of ideas. And then 10, 15 years ago, maybe more, but I think about 15 in its current exaggerated form, there came a new art history competing with the classic one, and this is the history of the art market.

ALEXIS DAHAN - How does this other art history differ from the pre-vious one?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - In this histo-ry, value is not established by ideas, but by how expensive work is. It is as dumb as a kind of cultural lottery tick-

et. We know the names of those art-ists selling now for millions but really have no clue as to why. We know that it has nothing to do with art history as we have known it.These works are often derivative and don’t in fact qualify as important ac-cording to the classic terms of art his-torical activity, and so you have a lot of new people with lots of money com-ing into the art world who don’t both-er to really be educated about art, and they only see what’s expensive, and they can be seen as part of that limited circle who can afford to buy such work by having the right thing to have on their walls right now. And so what this has done is to really trash, to some degree, the moral authority that art historically has had.Cultural authority has been replaced by financial authority. It’s “worth”



millions; what else do you need to know? It’s a kind of dangerous and unhealthy situation.

ALEXIS DAHAN - How does that af-fect the value of your own work?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Well, the two art histories are in competition, and yet they’re obviously happening simul-taneously. This all began years ago. I was always fascinated about the pric-es of Duchamp, who was so clearly important, to both the Modernist part of the century as well as what fol-lowed, yet the prices of Picasso and the prices of Duchamp have never even been close. Once it became clearer that Duchamp was more and more important, and his effect on the practice of art in the last half of the 20th century was understood, we’ve assessed his work differently. And so by now we see he was a more im-portant artist than Picasso. But the market has never reflected that for a moment.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Do you own work by these artists?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Duchamp. I was able to trade a work of mine from the ’60s for In Advance of the Broken Arm,

the snow shovel by Duchamp, and I received two other smaller works of his along with it.This was in the ‘80s.

ALEXIS DAHAN - How did that hap-pen?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Basically be-cause I was young and trendy, rela-tively, anyway more young and trendy than Duchamp was. At the time my work was selling for more than Du-champ, which I thought was terrible and unjust, frankly. Of course, in the end, I’m happy to have the work. And finally Duchamp’s prices are a little more correct, shall we say.

ALEXIS DAHAN - What about Pi-casso?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - A dealer of mine from Switzerland said, “Joseph, you don’t really understand, you know, if you or I wanted a Picasso, we’d want an early analytic Cubist painting, right? Because that’s what we think are the most important Pi-cassos. Well, that isn’t what the art market thinks. Because the people with really lots of money, they want a Picasso, but they don’t know art. So they want it to look like art, so they

want the Blue Period, they want to own figurative Picassos, they don’t want achromatic still lifes, they want the ones that they and their friends can recognize as art, so although they’re not historically more valuable, they ended up having a market value that’s far greater due to market de-sire.” So that idea of value in fact ends up educating and shaping percep-tions over the years. That’s a little bit the problem.

ALEXIS DAHAN - When you go to art fairs around the world, all you see in the last few years is wordbased art. It’s everywhere.

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Everywhere, but much of it is conservative. I also see neons everywhere. I honestly don’t know what this means for my work, but I still have to pay attention.

ALEXIS DAHAN - So do you think the art market wants art that looks like Conceptual art?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - It’s interesting, certainly they have it easier than I did, but derivative work is still derivative work. It means something quite dif-ferent than mine did at the beginning. It’s all quite far from the origins of an



art movement. But this makes my point really about how dumb, literally, the art market is.All that is necessary is to get in the hot zone of market desire, and then once there anything, whether art that is historically important or not, can go for millions. Is this what we want to think about? No. But the point is that we are forced to understand how the inflated price shapes experience, perceptions, and meanings. So I have to follow it and care about it to some degree.

ALEXIS DAHAN - How do you see the evolution of art as language to-day?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Well, past the surface, someone has to stop and ask what makes work important.By and large, the art critical establish-ment is either silent or making a living from the recent market meltup.Part of the problem is that there has been a kind of morphing of the con-cept of style into the market reality of branding. And, so, as a result, there’s a lot of confusion about works. And a hot new brand, i.e., the work by a trendy young artist, for circles that have more money than education

and intellectual engagement, is enough.

ALEXIS DAHAN - What kind of new contemporary art interests you?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - As I’ve often said, I don’t think that artists work with forms and colors; we work with meaning. So all these things that af-fect meaning are a legitimate con-cern of mine. I have to know about them, I have to think about them, I have to take them into account on some level and try to understand how it affects the experience of the work and our definition of art in general.

ALEXIS DAHAN -A lot of philos-ophers have identified our modern society as one of images. We are ex-posed to the spectacle of things as opposed to the things themselves. Has that overabundance of images affected your work in any way?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - I’ve worked with images, linguistically, and it was never simply a question for me of using words, it was a question of un-derstanding the linguistic play in the construction of meaning in art, which is not the same thing. So there are artists, still staying in Conceptual art,

who really use words like objects and as a result I think one can obviously see their work as very much Modern-ist. And the expectations implied by the work and the concerns of it are very much Modernist ones. So one artist’s line of text on the wall does not have the same kind of meaning as an artwork that another artist’s line of text on the wall has. So much of the Conceptual art of my generation is still stylistic branding in the Modernist mode. But these things are not sim-ple. The more nuanced and complex we see them, the more we learn from them.

ALEXIS DAHAN - How do you think art can have an impact on society and politics?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Many ways. The question’s a bit general.

ALEXIS DAHAN - One of your up-coming big projects is exhibiting a quote by Michel Foucault on top of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. What is the critical meaning of this?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - Foucault, I thought, was for me the right refer-ence. And that text in particular is the right text. So it’s a very simple work,



but I think appropriate for the build-ing, which was based on the idea of four open books. It’s on the interior, you notice, not on the exterior, and I think that it’s a reference to what happens in the building as a library, a reference to the interior experience of reading a book. Yet, of course, it’s a public work. Each letter will be 2.6 meters high. It’s been pointed out that the half of Paris that cannot see the Eiffel Tower will see this work. It will create some kind of play on the Paris skyline. We will see.

ALEXIS DAHAN - You also covered a building with the different origins of the word “water” in Venice. Is this a way to speak to a broader audience?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - No, it’s just pulling people into an engagement and, in my case, the context always is part of the work. So the engagement is in relationship to art that is in the world, be it our inherited world or the present world - or a relationship be-tween the two. I have always worked with the language of where the work is being shown. I try to have it have some level of meaning accessible to the local people who are not special-ists. I speak of people who are seeing

the work on their way to work. Acces-sible in different ways. Not all works do that, but I try to often and where I can, when the work goes in the di-rection that permits it. It was so in the case of the work in Venice. It was in three languages: Armenian because that was the island of the Armenian repository during their diaspora, and it was founded by an Armenian reli-gious order. Also it was in Italian be-cause we were on Italian soil and that was a necessary thing to do for the part of the Biennale audience that was Italian, and for the local people working and living in that area. And it was in English, because the artist is English-speaking, but also for the international community, so it would have access. So I worked with all three. The installation was about wa-ter, which was relevant to the context, being Venice, and it dealt with the et-ymology of the three languages, the connections between English, Arme-nian, and Italian in relation to the word “water.” So there are lots of different levels on which it really was site-spe-cific to the maximum degree possi-ble. In the case of the Bibliothèque Nationale, it’s Paris. And I think one of the great things about Paris is its cul-

tural history. It’s one of the last places where philosophy has had a real cul-tural life, shall we say.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Public work seems to be a privileged place for you.

JOSEPH KOSUTH - I don’t know if that’s true. All the kinds of work I do are important to me, providing dif-ferent things. Filling the interiors of buildings really is one kind of activity. People have a habit of experiencing artworks in the interior space of ar-chitecture in ways that are too like our habituated experience of paint-ing or sculpture — or shall we say, of things on the wall and things on the floor. I did my work with the Brooklyn Museum, working with the collection, and that sort of set the model. Many artists have done it since, based on that model, apparently, more or less.

ALEXIS DAHAN - Did you think of doing the same with the Louvre com-mission?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - So, of course, there were expectations that at the Louvre I would do the same thing, but I saw no reason to follow the people that followed me, so I wanted to deal



with the accumulation of the world’s cultural history that the Louvre rep-resents. I was not invited to work on the façade of the Louvre, so the other thing was to go to the 12th-century walls of the original Louvre palace, which was a kind of interior highway of the city of the Louvre, which was almost never used for exhibitions, or very rarely, and not in a very signifi-cant way. So my curator said I could work where I wanted, and I said I wanted to work there, because then I could respond to the totality of the Louvre. That, by the way, is going up in the next month or two, permanently.

ALEXIS DAHAN - In some ways, public work cannot fall in the catego-ry of that secondary art history you were talking about earlier. Maybe

when a work is public, it is able to re-sist the market?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - It does because it can’t float in the art market. It’s very anchored to a place, committed and part of its context. That was part of my intention with my neon work from the ’60s. I’ve always insisted that they must be drilled into the wall and mounted there. It’s almost more sym-bolic than actual, but if you put it on a board and it floats around, it’s much more like a traditional artwork, and I wanted to have commitment and engagement with the architecture. A lot of my work has had that, because I don’t like the idea that it floats freely to acquire the meaning the market will give it.



ALEXIS DAHAN - What can artists do to resist the market-based sec-ondary art history?

JOSEPH KOSUTH - I think that, for me, now that I’m an older presence in the art world, my role is to raise con-sciousness in the younger artists, to remind them that they have to watch out, that the market will dictate the meaning of their work if they don’t fight for their meaning. This is what I learned from artists like Ad Rein-hardt, who understood that art is not the spiritual side of business. Howev-er, it is becoming that. And I think that it’s a great loss for culture if we let the market end up giving meaning to the work and allowing the most promi-nent artists to be misperceived as the world’s greatest artists just because they command the highest prices, with no other criterion taken into ac-count. That is a loss for everybody, as much, if not more, for the artist as for anyone else.END


“Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Joseph Kosuth”The Brooklyn RailJanuary 16, 2014

Felix Gonzalez-Torres:I wanted to ask you about [your work in comparison to that of] Ad Reinhar-dt. Sometimes it seems like two diffe-rent styles of subject matter. Well, in a sense, you put them side-by- side. It has almost a kind of formal quality. They are very similar. They’re both, in their own area, extremely radical in terms of the artist and the artistic practice. Completely radical. You know, Reinhardt as a “painter” at that specific time in history, not only in art history but in that particular cul-tural moment. And with your work in the late ’60s, which was a time in which America was going through a complete upheaval, a complete shift in morality and economics, and the Vietnam War was going on, suddenly

you had an art work that people could not even depend on as something to hang on the wall.The work you were doing in 1968 refuses to look like art. Culture was changing so much; it was in such a state of upheaval, that one could not even count on the vital artistic drive to produce easily recognizable art work. You were dealing with a resemblance on the wall, which even today doesn’t feel comfortable with the label of art.

Joseph Kosuth:You see the passage of those works within a history of the middle of this century. Perhaps it’s about that period of transition from the original ideas of modernism that were formed throu-gh to where we are. Reinhardt went

through it, he was that passage, and the work really was a development of a voice of art as it was understood at that time, and in some ways, it could even look conservative. But what’s interesting is that he took that “pas-sage” with such severity and such single-mindedness that finally when you get to his important work, the black paintings, there is this incredi-ble totalizing force. And by being so full, they appear to many as being empty, which is one of the delicious paradoxes of Reinhardt. And for me, as I’ve said, when you get to that “emptiness,” the fullness of it is clear in all the other aspects of Reinhardt’s signifying activity. In those cartoons, in his teaching, in all the panel discus-sions that he participated in, in those

Ad Reinhardt Paintings, The Jewish Museum.New York, catalogue signed by the artist



incredible slide shows, in his writing. I mean, all that history makes one rea-lize the important responsibility of the artist, the moral agency of the artist. And this, for me, was important and taught me much as a young artist. Ar-tists have a special responsibility. Our activity must make a difference. As Reinhardt said, “art is not the spiritual side of business.” This is central to a shift from the artist being a decora-tor concerned with forms and colors to being a cultural activist concerned with meaning. Reinhardt’s total signi-fying activity was my source to iden-tify the need for this shift. There’s a difference between what artists do, and there has to be that kind of moral agency behind the activity of the ar-tist. Without it being simply moralistic, however, at the same time. We have to, as a practice, mean something. This is always a political act.

FGT: Art is like an antenna of what’s going on in culture, what’s really going on and what’s going to come out of it. After those years of conceptual art that demanded so much from the viewer, so much of a participation, so much of an intellectual involve-ment, we had a return in the ’80s to

the expensive home decorations, you know? Big paintings to fill those now empty office spaces downtown. That was a very scary time for me, becau-se I saw this as a very ahistoric artistic practice. It was not like Reinhardt’s painting in which there’s an intel-lectual demand on the viewer about accepting and engaging this painting that’s just black on black. And you even need a few minutes to see that the blacks in the painting are different. It’s very different to what was reque-sted from the viewer with those huge paintings with a lot of splattered color and tacky figures doing something in the East Village, gentrifying this nei-ghborhood and doing paintings late at night.

JK: Reinhardt did “empty” paintings, but the difference is what else he did. Unlike Ryman, he didn’t passively let the critics create the meaning of his work. Reinhardt was radical.

FGT: Reinhardt is a very specific voice, a very special voice. Very uni-que, and in a way, very effective. The book you have of Reinhardt’s, when he showed at the Jewish Museum, I was very impressed by the biography, how he mixed historical events with

his life. I’ve never seen that so thorou-ghly done. That touches me because I believe social, political and historical issues should be part of the “studio,” the same way that these issues shape who we are.

JK: I remember standing at the ope-ning, looking at that and thinking, what a brilliant thing to do. It was con-sidered a very, you know, wild thing to do at the time. I remember everyone was thinking, how come he’s bringing all this stuff into his biography?

FGT: The last 30 years, with psycho-analysis and Marxist analysis and fe-minism more than anything else, stu-dying how subjectivity functions, this division between private and public becomes very questionable.

JK: You’ve dealt with that so well in your work.

FGT: Some of the works I’ve been doing for the last few years have been portraits in which I asked a person to give me a list of events in their lives, private events, and then mix those up with public events, more or less relating the public to these so- called private events. At this point in history, how can we talk about private events?



Or private moments? When we have television and phones inside our ho-mes, when our bodies have been le-gislated by the state? We can perhaps only talk about private property. It was very revealing for me to see how Reinhardt included the independen-ce of India in his biography. Because such things affect who we are in pri-vate- our most private practices and desires are ruled by, affected by the public, by history.

JK: What I was referring to was how the younger neo formalist critics are distorting well, really missing the point. They look at Reinhardt’s black paintings and they don’t realize that the biography you’re talking about is as much about Reinhardt as those black paintings. You can’t separate the two. The man who had that as his biography in his retrospective in 1966 is the same man who made the black paintings. The problem with the cri-tics I’m referring to is that they don’t see the total signifying production as one large work. They look only at those nominate “art works” because that’s what the market recognizes as the production. They’re still leaning on the market to provide the meaning for the activity. But we, as artists, un-

derstand that its on large process, that you can’t somehow prioritize specific, given forms in that way. They inform each other.


Vogel, Carol“On a Mission to Loosen UpThe Louvre”The New York TimesOctober 11, 2009



The Louvre is building a new wing, its most radical addition since I. M. Pei’s 1989 glass pyramid, above.IN a subterranean space far below the swarms of tourists crowding the Louvre’s famed pyramid are remnan-ts of a medieval fortress. Here, along a 12th-century sandstone passage, the American artist Joseph Kosuth is about to suspend 15 sentences in giant white neon tubing. The show, “Neither Appearance Nor Illusion,” which opens this month, is a first for the 64-year-old Mr. Kosuth. “You only get to do something at the Louvre once in a lifetime,” he said, explai-ning that he picked the museum’s catacombs rather than a conventio-nal gallery because “it’s a place I’ve always loved, it gets a lot of traffic and has never been used for contempo-rary art before.”Neither has the 16th-century Salle des Bronzes, which will soon be fa-mous not just for its magnificent col-lection of ancient bronzes but for its ceiling, which is about to painted by another celebrated figure of Ameri-can art: Cy Twombly.“I’m really not doing something new,” Henri Loyrette, the Louvre’s director, said as he was sprinting through the

museum’s galleries one recent mor-ning. “I’m trying to revive a tradition.”Mr. Loyrette - who arrived at the Lou-vre in 2001 after 18 years at the Mu-sée d’Orsay- was referring to 1953, when Georges Braque decorated the ceiling in an ornate gallery that was once Henri II’s antechamber. Since then the Louvre has been primarily focused on burnishing the reputation of dead artists, not promoting new ones, especially if they’re American.But there seems to be an infusion of many things American at the Louvre these days.In addition to seeing site-specific installations by high-profile contem-porary artists, one might also hear American writers like Toni Morrison or see performances by the chore-ographer and dancer Bill T. Jones. Memberships conferring extra privi-leges, long a standard option at Ame-rican museums, started here in 2006. Mr. Loyrette also ushered in free ad-mission on Friday nights to anyone under 26. (To make Americans feel even closer to home, a McDonald’s restaurant and McCafé are planned to open near the Louvre next month.) Mr. Loyrette has also been charging about the world in what many might

call an American manner - drum-ming up donations from Cincinnati to Hong Kong, as well as trading on the Louvre’s brand and collection to raise cash from Atlanta to Abu Dhabi.Not surprisingly, his approach has not been popular with everyone. Critics seem to view the idea of branding the Louvre as both crass and unneces-sary, and are particularly dismissive of Mr. Loyrette’s outreach abroad. Supporters believe that he is merely doing what any museum director has to do these days to make the institution a financially stable place. For Mr. Loyrette’s part, he said he is simply, “making the museum more modern.” Regardless of his methods and motives, what does seem clear is that Mr. Loyrette, with major plans for expansion, satellite franchises and new partnerships that would have been unheard of even a decade ago, is overseeing the most drastic rethin-king of the Louvre’s place and purpo-se in at least 20 years (It was 1989 when I. M. Pei finished the then-con-troversial glass pyramid for the mu-seum’s entrance courtyard).On a private tour given over the sum-mer, Mr. Loyrette, lanky, 57, and spry in a dark suit, seemed unencumbe-



red by the weight of the world’s most august and treasured art collection. Instead he seemed preoccupied with the details, spouting facts and figures as he dashed through the seemingly endless halls and galleries. “If you want to see everything you must walk 14 kilometers,” he announced - more than eight miles. Then: “Forty percent of our visitors are under the age of 26.” And on a more worrisome note: “80 percent of the people only want to see the Mona Lisa.” Much of what he has been trying to do at the museum has been to fuse those numbers so that they arenot working at cross purposes: to push the visitors - especially young ones - past the Mona Lisa to explore the miles of largely unexplored artworks beyond it.Looking at yet another set of num-

bers, it is hard to argue with his resul-ts. Since he arrived a little over eight years ago, attendance at the museum is up 67 percent, with 8.5 million visi-tors recorded in 2008 and 10 million expected by 2014 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art has nearly 5 million visitors, and the British Museum 5.9 million).At the same time he has created an endowment, which right now stands at nearly $175 million, largely to compensate for gradual decrease in contributions from the French go-vernment; in 2008 it covered only 47 percent of the museum’s $315 million costs, down from 60 percent in 2001.Not that Mr. Loyrette hasn’t had some help. His predecessor, Pierre Rosenberg, had started clearing out many of the institution’s cobwebs -

The $67 million wing that will housethe Louvre’s Islamic art collection



introducing corporate financing (a relatively new phenomenon for Fren-ch museums), hiring a fund-raising staff (also novel) and supervising an ambitious exhibition schedule - in the years before Mr. Loyrette arrived.While there is a long and ingrained history of philanthropy in America, not so in France, where until recently it was assumed that the government was responsible for the country’s mu-seums.Mr. Loyrette received some help on this front too. In 2003 a new tax was introduced permitting individuals to deduct 66 percent of the value of any artwork given to cultural institutions and allowing corporations to deduct 60 percent to 90 percent if the work is deemed an historic treasure. The change quickly netted the Louvre 130 Italian Renaissance drawings from the Carrefour retail group - the value of which, Mr. Loyrette said, exceeded the museum’s annual ac-quisitions budget. More recently the insurance company AXA donated a 17th-century painting by the Le Nain brothers to the museum, and Pierre Bergé gave the Louvre a Goya por-trait in memory of Yves Saint Laurent, his partner, who died last year.

Outside of France Mr. Loyrette has embarked on multiple partnerships with the intention of raising both cash and the museum’s profile. Some, like next year’s planned exhibition devo-ted to the German sculptor Franz Xa-ver Messerschmidt at the tiny Neue Galerie in Manhattan, seem relatively benign. Others have many worried that he is diluting the Louvre brand at best and cheapening it at worst.In 2004 he struck a three-year agre-ement with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta that includes seven tempo-rary exhibitions from the Louvre’s col-lection in exchange for a $6.4 million donation earmarked for the refurbi-shment of the Louvre’s 18th-century French furniture galleries.

More controversially, he made a deal two years ago with Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to create the Louvre Abu Dhabi - a 260,000 squa-re-foot museum designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and expected to open in 2013 on Saa-diyat Island, off the city’s coast. In an arrangement that echoes the Solo-mon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s deal with the city of Bilbao, Spain, Abu Dhabi will pay the Louvre $572.1 million for the use of the Louvre’s name and give the French museu-ms another $786.5 million for loans, exhibitions and management advice.Mr. Loyrette said that the funds will enable him to establish the first-ever endowment for a French museum and pay for special projects that the government will not, but critics were not appeased. “One can only be shocked by the commercial and pro-motional use of masterpieces of our national heritage,” wrote a group of leading art historians in the newspa-per Le Monde in 2007. Similar outra-ge has been expressed over a plan to build a satellite branch of the Louvre in Lens, an economically depressed mining town northwest of Paris. His critics say a museum there is unne-A model of Jean Nouvel’s design

for the Louvre Abu Dhabi.


Vogel, Carol“On a Mission to Loosen Up The Louvre”The New York TimesOctober 11, 2009

cessary; there are already two pro-vincial museums nearby, one in Lille, another in Arras, both with art from the Louvre. Mr. Loyrette defends the project. “For people living in Lens there is nothing to see,” he said. In addition to rotating exhibitions from the Louvre’s col-lection it will also be a laboratory for contemporary art with galleries big enough to showcase large-scale in-stallations.Others say both praise and criticism of Mr. Loyrette is misplaced, as he is merely carrying out projects initia-ted by the French government, whi-ch has always overseen the running of the museums. Marc Fumaroli, an art historian who is president of the Friends of the Louvre in Paris, poin-ted out that although Mr. Loyrette is very powerful, he is also “a functio-nary of the state.”“The deal with Abu Dhabi was con-ceived by the government,” Mr. Fu-maroli added. “Lens was too.”But Mr. Loyrette’s biggest challenge might be the Louvre itself. If attendan-ce increases at the rate it has been, in five years 10 million visitors a year will be crowding through an entrance de-signed for less than half that number.

Already there is an exasperating and potentially discouraging crush at the Pei-designed pyramid as visitors vie to get in. Indeed, being told about the line outside the museum was the only thing that made Mr. Loyrette bristle. He said he had asked Mr. Pei’s office to reconfigure the interior space to make it more visitor friendly.Another troubling reality is that the vast majority of those millions of pe-ople come to see only one - or three - pieces of art. “Everyone wants to see the same three things: the Mona Lisa; the Venus de Milo and the Winged Vi-ctory,” he moaned.To make people more aware of the rest of the Louvre’s offerings, he re-cently released a new audio guide highlighting other works of art. To the same end he is also making sure that contemporary art continues to be subtly installed throughout the museum. His first commission was a painting and two sculptures by the German artist Anselm Kiefer that can be found in a stairwell linking the Egyptian and Mesopotamian anti-quities. He recently asked the French artist François Morellet to create stai-ned-glass windows for a Second Em-pire staircase.

A painting by the German artist Anselm Kiefer



One of the museum’s biggest shor-tcomings, he realizes, is the lack of American art. “It’s a scandal,” Mr. Loyrette said.“We’re supposed to be a universal museum, yet we only have three American paintings in our collection. So besides showing Mr. Kosuth and commissioning Mr. Twombly’s cei-ling, the museum has set up an En-glish language version of its online database, and soon it is expected to announce the expansion of a com-prehensive online catalog of works created by American artists in French public collections.But his most noticeable contribution will likely be the $67 million wing to house the Louvre’s world-class col-lection of Islamic art, something no other Louvre director has tried to do, and the most radical architectural ad-dition since Pei’s glass pyramid. “It was not even a department when I arrived,” said Mr. Loyrette. “We did not want to make this a separate mu-seum because Islamic art is so artisti-cally and politically important. It’s so closely linked with all of Western art.”At 8:30 one summer morning, Mr. Loyrette could be found briefing some of the project’s backers. In ad-

dition to the Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a grandson of King Abdul Aziz, Saudi Arabia’s founder, who has donated $20 million towards its construction (the largest gift ever made by an individual in France.), the French government has pled-ged $28.5 million, while Total, the oil company, has agreed to put up $4.8 million. The rest is coming from other French companies including Lafarge, the world’s largest cement maker.The Italian architect Mario Bellini and the French architect Rudy Ricciotti have designed a translucent undula-ting roof fashioned from small glass disks, which will sit in the center of the Visconti courtyard, a majestic, neo-Classical space in the middle of the Louvre’s south wing.Inside, the two-story wing will house a good portion of the Louvre’s col-lection of about 10,000 objects from the Islamic collection, roughly four ti-mes its current space, which has only room to show some 1,300 works.Mr. Loyrette, a trained art historian, appears as comfortable discussing Anselm Keiffer’s paintings as he does the oldest known celestial globe. He decided to join the museum world because he “didn’t want to become a

teacher,” he said.Growing up in Paris, he recalls playing in the Tuileries as a child. “I can’t re-member a time when I wasn’t going to the Louvre,” he said. His mother, an Egyptologist, worked there; his fa-ther is a lawyer.He never forgets that the Louvre was originally a palace before it was transformed into a museum in 1793. And he treats it as if it were his home. “I spend every Sunday here,” Mr. Loyrette said. “I don’t have the time during the week.” Each visit he in-spects a different set of galleries, lo-oking at the installations, taking note of things he thinks should be chan-ged, making sure nothing is out of place.“I figure it takes me a month to get through the whole museum,” he said and paused before adding, “Cezanne once said, ‘The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.’ It’s exactly like that for me too.”


Meade, Fionn“Joseph Kosuth”ArtforumFebruary 2009

“Don’t Just Stand There-Read!” de-clares the headline of a 1970 review in the New York Times bemoaning “the cultural nihilism of Conceptual Art” in spite of its ability to keep “sco-ring points . . . [in] an art scene poiso-ned by the market mentality.”Penned by then-staff writer Peter Schjeldahl, the ambivalent article regarding “a movement which de-mands so much from its audience in return for so little” was writ large in a light box as part of Joseph Ko-suth’s Information Room (Special Investigation), a 1970 installation re-created within this exhibition.

The reading room is made up of two long wooden tables piled high with paperbacks from Kosuth’s library at the time-texts dealing with linguistic philosophy, structural anthropolo-gy, and psychoanalytic theory-along with stacks of New York newspapers with such hard-hitting headlines as “US Deaths 165 in Week as Enemy Takes Post Near Phnom Phen, Then is Repulsed,” and “World Inflation Spreads Despite Steps to Curb It.” Though ostentatious in its heavy inti-mations of reading prowess (keep in mind Walter Benjamin’s salvo when unpacking his library that even the

most erudite collections include large swaths that go unread), Information Room is significant as a prototype for discursive installation formats that have since become customary.That Schjeldahl’s review is of two concurrent group exhibitions from that summer-“Information” at the Museum of Modern Art and “Con-ceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” at the New York Cultural Center- and singles out Kosuth, featured in both, as the “most didactic practitioner and passionate theoretician” of “Con-ceptual Art,” was made all the more conspicuous by a vitrine of archival

Joseph Kosuth, Informative Rooms (Special Investigation), 1970/2008mixed media, dimensione variabile


Meade, Fionn“Joseph Kosuth”ArtforumFebruary 2009

documents revealing that the ar-tist ghost-curated the latter show. Such proteanism was common for Kosuth at the time: He cofounded, with Christine Kozlov, and organized signifi cant exhibitions for the East Village’s Lannis Gallery (renamed the Museum of Normal Art soon after its 1967 founding) and adopted the pseudonym Arthur R. Rose, under which he wrote reviews and inter-viewed artists, including himself. Ko-suth’s burgeoning impresario status is difficult to miss here. Two photo-graphs underscore his Warholesque posturing: In one, he wears sunglas-ses and reads at one of the “infor-mation” tables; in the other, he sits cross-legged on perhaps his most well-known work, One and Three Chairs, 1965.The engrossing installation preceded a concise selection of early works evincing Kosuth’s contention that “a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art.” Kosuth had spun a working definition of art as “Idea as Idea” off of Ad Reinhardt’s notorious tautological quip, “Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else,” and his early efforts (many of

them conceived in 1965 at the age of twenty) are austere in appearance, clever in reference, and audacious in positioning. One and Three Sho-vels [Ety.-Hist.], 1965, for example, espouses a deconstruction of aesthe-tic signification through a sequential, triptych format for presenting repre-sentation-a photograph of the object, the object itself, and a photographic reproduction of the definition of the object-while also directly referring to the first work Duchamp declared a readymade (though he later desi-gnated earlier pieces as such): En avance du bras cassé (In Advance of the Broken Arm), 1915, a snow sho-vel inscribed with a poetic fragment. Three Adjectives Described, 1965, further illustrated Kosuth’s intention to replace the critical notion of com-modity-as-artwork with that of text-as-artwork, the piece spelling out the word adjective in red, blue, and green neon lights. An irony, however, is that Kosuth’s ultimate signature re-duction, reproducing dictionary defi-nitions-a strategy represented here by Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), 1966, a work in which Kosuth quotes etymo-logical entries for the words red, blue, yellow, orange, and purple in white

on black photostats-proved the least interesting maneuver in an otherwise alluring show.


Hobbs, Robert“Joseph Kosuth’s Early Work”October 24, 2008

‘There is no world when there is no mirror’ is an absurdity. But all our relations, as exact as theymay be, are of descriptions of man, not of the world: these are the laws of that supreme opticsbeyond which we cannot possibly go. It is neither appearance nor illusion, but a cipher in whichsomething unknown is written - quite readable to us, made, in fact, for us: our human positiontowards things. This is how things are hidden from us. Friedrich Nietzsche

A Selection of Early Works from the 1960s by Joseph Kosuth



With such pieces as ‘Glass Words Material Described’ and his One and Three series, Joseph Kosuth initiated the new artistic category, concep-tual art. He conceived (or thought through)1 these and other conceptu-al pieces in the fall of 1965 and had a few of them fabricated at that time, even though he was beginning his first year at New York’s School of Vi-sual Arts (SVA) and was working with limited funds. Representing an inten-sification of Marcel Duchamp’s well-known preference for epistemology over ontology and a recognition of the profound importance of his notes, Kosuth’s extraordinary advance came two years before Sol Lewitt’s famous “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” was published in Artforum in June 1967, and three years before Lawrence Weiner started his widely recognized conceptually based practice.Moreover, Kosuth’s innovation antic-ipates by three years the thoughtful tactics of the British group, Art & Lan-guage.Kosuth’s contribution is not only re-markable for its new approach to artistic thinking, resulting in the de-motion of form to referential status, but it is also astonishing when one

realizes that he developed this radi-cally new approach when he was only 20 years old. His letter of application to SVA, which has only recently been retrieved from the school’s files, in-dicates his thoughts about making conceptually based work even before he was enrolled there.2 In the first paragraph of this application, Kosuth explains why he has chosen to make art rather than write:

There are several things that I have become involved with, and it is im-perative that I devote my time to an attempt at working towards particular goals and answers. If I were a writer, that is to say possessing the ability to [construct] en masse thinkable planes through words, I could then realize it in that way.If I were more of an intellectual, I would just read and think. But things being the way they are, I accept that reasoning which tells me that I have “talent.”With it as a tool, I am able to visualize and, again, realize with [it] that which occurs graphically and evaluate the result.

Kosuth admits finding the process of“working with my hands. . . stimulat-

ing.” But he emphatically avers, “My main interest actually is Philosophy,” and notes, “As a result Aesthetics is more appealing to me than, say, Painting Technique.” After comment-ing that artists should be categorized according to their commitment to “a mental activity [rather than] a physical one,” and after putting down “those who possess trained motor muscles,” Kosuth provides a completely original rereading of Clement Greenberg’s formalist approach when he cites this critic’s statement, “concept alone re-veals good art,” as a reason for a new philosophically based art.3 Kosuth then points out that in the future “sig-nificant art will be made by artists who have eliminated limitations,” enabling them to “work with their eyes wide open.” He concludes with the follow-ing summary of modern painting and his challenge to it:

In the past seven decades we have taken the thing: broken it down, laughed at it, broken it up, spent the past ten years just looking at the paint, re-looked at it and laughed again, and now we are just trying to look. Anyway, by now we should be to a point beyond this front picket fence. I for one am anxious to begin.


Hobbs, Robert“Joseph Kosuth’s Early Work” October 24, 2008

Kosuth’s intention to go beyond “the front picket fence” that has preclud-ed artists from coming to terms with art is consistent with the June 1965 letter of recommendation written on his behalf by Roger T. Barr, Director of College Art Study Abroad, who commended Kosuth for learning to work with “optical” art during his time in Paris, even though it was not his preferred métier. In Barr’s rec-ommendation the term “optical” in-dicates that Kosuth was participating in an ongoing discussion concerning the relative merits of visual art and more philosophic work. Barr men-tions that Kosuth finally accepted the constraints of the program in Par-is and made “some very promising paintings, and a few ‘optical,’ painted sculptures.”Since Kosuth was beginning to es-tablish the foundations of his phil-osophic art even as he continued to make paintings and sculptures, it should not be surprising that he kept on doing the same as a student at SVA where he received excellent grades in these subjects and was even honored in the spring of 1966 with his class’s first prize in painting. Even though he was making more

conventional work for his classes, the receipts for materials purchased with funds from his SVA scholarship and submitted to the school in accor-dance with its rules include lettering and spray paint, which were crucial for developing his conceptual work.Recognizing Kosuth’s central role in spearheading conceptual art, SVA made him a faculty member when he was only 22 years old. Because the development of this new stilis-ti approach is so extraordinary and because Kosuth’s reevaluation of art’s basic components have not yet been adequately understood, this es-say will reconsider his three earliest groups of work, including his glass pieces, One and Three series, and The First Investigation ‘Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)’, informally known as Definitions—a term Kosuth himself uses. As it looks at these a means for breaking through formalist art’s closed system by setting within it a lit-eral element capable of undermining the coercive tactics of formalist aes-theticization.Beginning in 1965, Kosuth started to break through the closed system of post-World War II formalist art, when he leaned sheets of glass—either the

same dimensions as Reinhardt’s 60-inch square black paintings or small-er—and contrasted them with a label certifying the overall work as art. As Kosuth has pointed out:

I liked glass because it had no color to speak of, except for the color it re-flected from its environment. There was always the problem of form though.So I tried presenting it in different con-ditions – smashed, ground, stacked, and this led me in another direction. The first use of language began with this work. With the first glass piece it was the label, which took on a great importance.That piece was just a five-foot sheet of glass which leaned against the wall, and next to it was a label with the title....I succeed in avoiding composi-tion, and I had succeeded in making a work of art, which was neither a sculpture (on the floor) nor a painting (on the wall).10

Using glass, which was then cus-tomarily employed to sheath framed works of art, as a major element in such works as ‘GlassWordsMateri-al Described’—the other part being the proverbial museum wall label—



Kosuth enacted a structural shift of enormous import, since it first broke up the presumed unity of traditional works of art into the two components of object and label before reorienting them so that one would mirror the other, thus establishing an internal dialectic.This subtle play on museum presen-tation created a situation in which the work of art is able to remark on itself, or, as Kosuth noted, “a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art.”11 Instead of looking for a way to underscore art’s autonomy as Rein-hardt did through the Negative The-ology of his black paintings, Kosuth found a means to manifest art’s con-tingency through an internalized di-alogue in which one part of the work is forced into a dialogic relationship with the other. In addition, the glass comprising part of this work takes on an additional structural resonance, since it literalizes and dryly parodies the presumed transparency of art’s content at the same time that it gives a nod to Duchamp’s famous Great Glass.In this type of work, Kosuth’s art is poised on an ontological and episte-

mological divide crucial to both this piece and his future work. His ear-ly work remains balanced between these two alternatives because he respects formal art’s text as the ide-al context and subject matter for his pieces. Text in this situation is the structuralist reference to both the work of art and the assumed proto-cols for approaching it – a situation that Kosuth literalizes so that his ob-jects reiterate and reveal some of the customary rules binding them into an art discourse. In this way they remain open to the larger and certainly more contingent epistemological text that has come to be identified with con-ceptual art. The artist is also keenly aware of the paramount impact that any text, considered in the structural-ist sense, has on a work of art. As he explained much later, “Only a state of deep denial could keep an artist from avoiding the fact that seeing isn’t as simple as looking: the text the view-er brings to a work organizes what is seen.”12

Although it is tempting to view Ko-suth’s ‘GlassWordsMaterial De-scribed’ as a premier example of structuralist art since it was made at a time when this theoretical approach

was widely endorsed, his piece is actually a very early example of post-structuralism since its presen-tation demonstrates an appreciation of the breaks and gaps in the then accepted discrete parameters rati-fying it as art. Rather than searching in art for a unity analogous to that of many structuralists in the mid-twen-tieth century, including Claude Lévi-Strauss and, at times, Roland Bar-thes, Kosuth looked for ways his work could reflect on the limitations of its given text in terms of its structural make up and subject.An excellent example of Kosuth’s ability to pry art loose from the text encumbering and directing it in order to reveal its protocols as both subject matter and structuring principle is the ongoing dialectics distinguishing his Definitions. To Kosuth’s contem-poraries who do not recall seeing Definitions or other works by him until 1967, the artist has pointed out that working drawings for pieces and other such notations during this early period usually outpaced by months and even years his ability to fund their fabrication. For this reason the work’s origin is dated at its first conception and Kosuth considers the terminus



post quem for the Definitions to be 1966. Similar to his early glass pieces the Definitions are comprised of two separate parts; however, one com-ponent, the work’s certificate, is pri-vate, while the Photostatic re produc-tion of the dictionary definition, which documents the idea giving rise to the certificate, is public.Because the Definitions’ Photostats are graphic and appealing, the overall bipartite structure of this series has far too often been overlooked, and only recently have big auction hous-es been requiring owners to produce the work’s rarely seen component, its certificate, which Kosuth has de-scribed in the following manner:

Ownership of the work is established by the production instructions, which double as a certificate. This is signed, but as a deed of ownership, not as a work of art. Thus, I’ve made it clear that these certificates are never to be exhibited, and they rarely are. The art itself, which is neither the props with which the idea is communicated, nor the signed certificate, is only the idea in and of the work.13

We might think of these certificates as a type of assisted readymade

on the order of Duchamp’s Tzanck Check, with the proviso that they sig-nal a different epistemological shift that makes them a simulacrum of an artistic function and the genera-tive stage rather than art itself. Un-der no circumstances, the artist has cautioned us, should these artifacts be construed as art. While the certif-icates represent a potential pact or agreement with a collector and point to the source of the artist’s concept in a literal cutout dictionary defini-tion, they are the physical evidence of initial cognition, not the act itself. In addition to refusing to think about the certificates as art and relegating them to the status of placeholders for his ideas, Kosuth notes, “I have always considered the Photostat the work’s form of presentation (or media); but I never wanted anyone to think that I was presenting a Photostat as a work of art.”14

The public and visual aspects of Ko-suth’s Definitions are his Photostats, which are square in format like Ad Reinhardt’s later black paintings but a foot smaller in both dimensions since that was the largest square-size for-mat he could make with the Photo-static paper then available. The Rein-

hardt connection is wonderfully iron-ic, since the black paintings were in-tended to be the last vanguard works that could be made before the onset of an academic vanguard— a situa-tion that more closely approximates the preferred work and approach of most conceptual artists, including Kosuth. Referred to as “props” by Kosuth in the above quotation, the Photostats are both copies of dictio-nary definitions and also inversions of them. Kosuth regarded these exhibi-tion components as models:

It is not by mere chance that all of the works done by me included in this exhibit are labeled “model.” All I make are models. The actual works of art are ideas. Rather than “ideal” the models are a visual approximation of a particolar art object I have in mind.15

Dependent on the overriding text encumbering and enunciating them, the Photostat’s status as art is dou-bly contingent since the artist views them also as placeholders for art but not art itself.In Kosuth’s less than idealist view, art hinges on both the generative con-cept and the specific artistic context ratifying it as art—not on the certifi-



cates documenting the forms in the former and the Photostat’s function in catalyzing the latter.Since Photostatic copies in the 1960s were a well-established form of high-resolution copy, which had been developed decades before the advent of Xerox, they represent a highly mechanical as well as an old-fashioned way of working. This well-established technique dating back to the second decade of the twentieth century, with its connota-tions of fustiness, may be a reason why it appealed to the quasi-mini-malist and future earth artist Robert Smithson and to Kosuth, who both chose to present some of their work as Photostats during the period of 1966-68 when they were frequently discussing art with one another at ei-ther the Castelli Gallery or the Dwan Gallery where they would hang out. The two men favored Photostats mainly for their dialectical capabili-ties. As Nancy Holt, Smithson’s wid-ow, recalled, “Bob often made Pho-tostats because he wanted to see the negative of an image. He felt he could not predict the result in advance and was frequently surprised with the re-sults.”16

Far more than formalist exercises, Photostatic reversals were crucial to both Smithson’s and Kosuth’s work at the time and constitute a record of their ongoing conversation about art as a mode of dialectic thinking—a view that proved crucial to Smithson’s Site/Nonsite works of 1968.17 In ad-dition to its antiquated modernist connotations, the Photostat provides a negative of an image that makes it inherently dialectical and useful for both Kosuth and Smithson.By utilizing Photostats in their work, both artists are able to set up ongoing conversations with the missing posi-tive components giving rise to them and to imply multiple points of view and various ways of orienting oneself conceptually to the image at hand.Seeing a Definition negatively as a Photostat and conceptualizing it pos-itively as the dictionary cut out, there-by doubling it by making it an inverse mirrored image of its source, has a source in A. J. Ayer’s term “definition” in his Language, Truth, and Logic,18 which attracted Kosuth’s attention early in his career. Underscoring the basic tenets of logical positivism in this book, Ayer identifies a “defini-tion” as the translation of one state-

ment into a comparable one.Since Ayer is careful to distinguish his more far-ranging approach to definitions from those found in dic-tionaries, Kosuth’s employment of dictionary sources in his Definitions can be taken as his ostensible subject matter as well as a means of thema-tizing the overarching structure of his works. And his Photostats can be considered as equivalent statements, acting in accord with Ayer’s approach. The Definitions (or The First Investi-gation) first focused on the semantics of such qualities as the colors blue, orange, green, purple, red, and yellow in ‘Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)’ before Kosuth considered formulating the-oretical descriptions of abstractions like Meaning, Text, and Word. In this way the Definitions call attention to art’s overall abstract character by re-lying on Ayer’s concept of definitions as statements of equivalency. As one moves beyond Kosuth’s explicit works in this series to more implic-it and definitely structural ones that focus on art’s way of functioning, one can appreciate the type of equivalent statements articulated by the Defini-tion’s bipartite structure that joins the assisted readymade of the certificate



with the Photostats (Kosuth’s exhi-bition copies), which are at once ex-tensions and critiques of Reinhardt’s black paintings and inverse repro-ductions of dictionary definitions.In the Definitions Kosuth isolates and hypostatizes art’s traditional genera-tive and executive functions in terms of the two basic components of cer-tificate and model or exhibition copy.Now that we can see how Kosuth has broken up the traditional work of art and reconfigured it in terms of components that reify aspects of its text and context, we might ask why this process should be considered conceptual art. My response is that Kosuth has found a way to turn for-malism back on itself in these works, so it becomes conscious of itself; in other words, it is able to move in and out of the art system, as well as the text that constitutes it. This ability to break out of an encumbering frame is akin to artificial intelligence, which computer scientists have defined as the capacity of a program to step outside itself in order to critique itself. Seen in relation to conceptual art, we might say that Kosuth has created a purposefully convoluted system in his Definitions, similar to a Möbius

strip, whereby a work of art is able to fold back on itself and become self-aware. While Kosuth’s tactical approach to art usesformalism as its raw material, the result is definitely not formalist.This redeployment of formalism, so that it is forced to become in the Defi-nitions a self-realization of the social and cultural modus operandi framing it, enables us to revisit some of Ko-suth’s earliest work and analyze it in terms of the circumstantial evidence my analysis proposes.Approaching Kosuth’s work as a text substantiates the argument that such a piece as ‘One and Three Shovels [Ety.-Hist.]’, (1965), comes before the more complex Definitions of c. 1966 - 1968, with their internal and external dialectics. This difference is evidenced by the fact that ‘One and Three Shovels’ is much more straightforward in its tripartite organi-zation than the internal dialectic and consequent inversion of the Defini-tions. Instead of setting up polarities between subject and object, private and public spheres, and generative and executive phases of creativity that are hypostatized in the form of the Definitions’ certificate and model,

‘One and Three Shovels’ is predicat-ed on ostensible formal and onto-logical differences between image, object, and linguistic text. This and other works in this series represent Kosuth’s rethinking and extension of Duchamp’s readymade in terms of its different physical manifestations of object, image, and text. Structur-ally the different physical manifesta-tions of the shovel all exist on parallel planes of presentation, making them more straightforward statements of equivalency.Moreover, unlike the Definitions, the viewer’s apprehension of them is more empirical and comparative, even though both groups are defi-nitely epistemological in their intent.In addition to straddling ontologi-cal and epistemological categories, Kosuth’s Definitions overlap stylis-tic and analytic conceptual modes. Compelling visually, the exhibited components of the Definitions re-call viewers’ habitual attentiveness to painting’s sure graphic pleasure at the same time that they mine this formalist apprehension in order to redirect it. In 1988 Kosuth defined this process “made-ready,” an inver-sion of Duchamp’s readymade, and



described this new categorical des-ignation as a “constructive appropria-tion.”19 His “madeready” employment of formalism as an empty category that can be productively rethought in terms of a dialectical proposition serves as one important component of his Definitions; the other is the as-sisted readymade that takes the form of certificates incorporating actual dictionary definitions.From this discussion of Kosuth’s re-markably analytical and epistemo-logical early work, we can conclude that in his conceptual art, formalist ideas are emptied of traditional con-tent and ontological surety, so that the impoverished forms manifesting them are doubly destitute.Thus Kosuth’s conceptual work re-veals itself to be not only a critique of formalist thought but also its apothe-osis into blank subject matter.

1Thinking in conceptual art needs to be consid-ered praxis like painting, sculpting, and print-making.2On October 8, 2007, Kosuth provided written permission for SVA to release Xerox copies of his personnel files, which include materials from 1965-1990. These Xeroxes included Kosuth’s very revealing application statement that surprised even him with its prescience about his overall goals for his art. The follow-ing statements are taken from this application. SVA Personnel File.3This rereading of Greenberg to achieve dis-tinctly new ends that are out of sync with this critic’s object-oriented and conservative ap-proach was part of a generational rethinking of this critic’s work. Minimalists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris were using Green-berg’s emphasis on immanent causation in which the art object is reduced to its medium and mode of articulation as a basis for reduc-ing their sculptures to inert objects, so that they could define the absolute and necessary limits for this type of art.4Roger T. Barr, Recommendation for Joseph Kosuth, June 22, 1965. SVA Personnel File.5Dore Ashton, “Kosuth: The Facts,” Studio In-ternational 179 (February 1970): 44.6Ad Reinhardt, “25 Lines of Words on Art State-ment,” It Is (New York) Spring 1958 in Barbara Rose, ed., Art as Art: The Selected Writings of

Ad Reinhardt, The Documents of 20th Century Art (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 53.7Ibid. The italics are mine, not Reinhardt’s, even though he often employed them for this term.8Joseph Kosuth, “Intention(s),” Art Bulletin 78 (September 1996): 409.9Ad Reinhardt “Art-as-Art Dogma, Part 5” in Ad Reinhardt, “Reinhardt Paints a Picture,” Art News 64 (March 1965): 40.10Joseph Kosuth, Conversation with Jeanne Siegel, April 7, 1970, Broadcast on WBAI-FM, Gabriele Guercio, ed., Joseph Kosuth: Art Af-ter Philosophy and After, Collected Writings, 1966-1990 (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 1993), p. 49.11Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy” in Jo-seph Kosuth: Art After Philosophy and After, p. 19.12Joseph Kosuth, “Intention(s),” Art Bulletin, p. 408.13Ibid., p. 407, fn. 2.14Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy: Part 3,” Studio International 178 (December 1969): 212.15Joseph Kosuth, “Notes on Conceptual Art and Models” (1967) in Joseph Kosuth: Art After Philosophy and After, p. 3.



16Nancy Holt, Telephone Interview with Author, April 29, 2004.17Ibid. It is worth noting that Smithson obtained through a trade with Kosuth a 1968 Definition entitled “Entropy,” which was made expressly for him and is inscribed so on the back.18A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover Publications, 1936, rpt. 1964).19Joseph Kosuth, “No Exit,” Artforum 26 (March 1988): 113.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at a symposium on conceptual art at the Cour-tauld Institute, University of London, in 2004.

The author gratefully acknowledges the generous help and consideration from the following individuals:Joseph KosuthSean Kelly, Sean Kelly GalleryCécile Panzieri, Executive Director, Sean Kelly GalleryMaureen Bray, Director, Sean Kelly GallerySanna Marander, Director, Joseph Kosuth StudioFiona Biggiero, Executive Editor, Joseph Ko-suth PublicationsCindy Smith, Archivist, Joseph Kosuth Studio, NYCAiley Nash, Archival Researcher, Joseph Ko-suth Studio, NYCMichael Corris, Artist and Art HistorianJean Crutchfield, Independent Curator


Moreno, Gene“Joseph Kosuth”Contemporary 212008, p. 60-63