It was 1965, and Joseph Kosuth was a 20-year-old undergraduate on the College of Visible Arts when he made the items that made his profession. Their premise was easy sufficient: He’d take an object, like a crate, a picket door, or a shovel, and both grasp it on or lean it towards a wall. To at least one aspect he’d place a life-size picture of that very same object, as put in in that place, and to the opposite, a dictionary definition, enlarged and printed on poster board.
Probably the most well-known iteration is “One and Three Chairs,” consisting of a chair, a photograph of a chair and the definition of “chair,” which the Museum of Fashionable Artwork acquired shortly after it was made. However “One and Three Mirrors” (1965), the model that seems in his present present, “Future Memory” at Sean Kelly Gallery, is even higher. It’s as contemporary now because the day it was made, and nicely value revisiting, each due to its broad affect on up to date artwork follow and since it gives such a transparent instance of the Conceptual method.
Just like the chairs, Kosuth’s mirrors increase elementary questions on artwork — is it an object, a picture or an concept? It’s straightforward sufficient to pose such questions, however realizing them in an paintings, with precise objects, provides them a particular urgency, as a result of they develop into sensible as an alternative of hypothetical. If you happen to’re standing in entrance of “One and Three Chairs,” it’s important to determine what you’re : Is it a chair, or a “chair”? Making the identical piece with a mirror, which displays you, your gaze and the gallery you’re standing in, solely provides to the classes being so thrillingly destabilized.
Together with current exhibits at Sprüth Magers in London and Almine Rech in Paris, and an upcoming exhibition at Lia Rumma in Naples, Italy, “Future Reminiscence” quantities to a form of deconstructed retrospective for Kosuth, who simply turned 80. It’s the primary gallery present he hasn’t designed himself as an general set up, and it features a work from practically each decade of his profession, from the Sixties to the current.
Seeing the entire arc laid out this fashion, it’s straightforward to acknowledge each the infinite promise and the inevitable pitfalls and dead-ends of his austere method. The fusion of the concrete and the summary in “One and Three Mirrors” feels as thrilling now because it should have been within the Sixties; if human museums nonetheless exist in a thousand years, I count on it should really feel the identical. His subsequent work, nonetheless, as a result of it makes an attempt to construct on primary questions that don’t actually have solutions, will get very slender; he’s primarily attempting to wrestle artwork right into a specialised department of philosophy. (This is kind of what he cops to in his 1969 paper “Art After Philosophy.”)
In a 1991 piece, he silk-screens a citation about whether or not any two issues can actually be “an identical” onto two contiguous items of aluminum. The piece works the identical method as “One and Three Chairs” — it presents a concrete instance of a philosophical query associated to artwork making for the viewer to ponder. The query itself simply doesn’t strike me as equally attention-grabbing. And a few items, as when he silk-screens quotations from Piet Mondrian’s writings onto reproductions of his work, or the Gertrude Stein line, “If you are able to do it, why do it,” onto a large clock, would frankly be higher as written descriptions. The one factor you get by really constructing them is one thing to promote.
Nonetheless, there’s one thing heroic about Kosuth’s lifelong devotion to the connection between concept and object, and there’s an argument to be made that his total trajectory is a efficiency piece in itself, one about time, mortality and the last word futility of mental arguments. As Kosuth himself places it, in white neon letters that quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “In arithmetic course of and outcome are equal.”
Joseph Kosuth
By means of April 18. Sean Kelly, 475 tenth Avenue, Manhattan; (212) 239-1181, skny.com.
