Synopses & Reviews
Joseph Kosuth's writings, like his installations, assert that art begins where mere physicality ends. The articles, statements, and interviews collected here, produced over a period of twenty-four years, range over philosophy of language, anthropology, Marxism, and linguistics to discover the common principles that inform representation while negotiating the endlessly complex debates about art over the last two decades.
Kosuth was one of the first to record the basic ideas and the role of ideas in the avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s. Rooted in Freud, Wittgenstein, and French theory, his work investigates the linguistic nature of art propositions and the role of social, institutional, psychological, and ethnological context. His writings, like his visual productions, are radical formulations of the meaning of art itself. As a whole, they present a new definition of an expanded role and responsibility for the artist.
Kosuth reevaluates the work of Marcel Duchamp and provides a theoretical agenda for institutional critique. He discusses the role of art in the future and its relationship to philosophy, attacks the return to painting of the late 1970s, and argues for the continued relevance of conceptualist ideas at times when other visual idioms have dominated the art world.
Synopsis
The articles, statements, and interviews collected here, produced over a period of twenty-four years, range over philosophy of language, anthropology, Marxism, and linguistics to discover the common principles that inform representation while negotiating the endlessly complex debates about art of the last two decades.
Synopsis
Gabriele Guercio is a doctoral candidate in art history at Yale University.
About the Author
Joseph Kosuth first received widespread notice at the Museum of Modem Art's "Information" exhibition and the Kunsthalle Bern's "When Attitudes Become Form" in the late 1960s. Today he is considered, along with Sol LeWitt, Edward Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, and a handful of other artists, a founder of what has become known as conceptual art. He is represented by Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and his work appears in the permanent collections of many major museums.Gabriele Guercio is an independent writer living in Milan. He has a doctorate in art history from Yale University and has lectured at the Universities of Rome and Naples. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery and a recepient of a J. P. Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. Editor of Art after Philosophy and After by Joseph Kosuth (MIT Press, 1991) and De Dominicis, Raccolta di scritti sull'opera e l'artista, he has written on modern and contemporary art as well as the history of art theory.