And We Come Back To The Same Question, Joseph Kosuth at Sprüth Magers

Notes on Joseph Kosuth’s views on art, art-text as art, and tautologies. Through works that contrast objects with their definitions and visual representations, Kosuth plays on the dialectic between language and form.

Art After Philosophy: Reviewing Kosuth’s Theoretical Framework

This exhibition will be reviewed through the text written by Kosuth in 'Art After Philosophy and After, Collected Writings 1966-1990' . More artists should write such books.

One line is 'art is a tautology'. For Kosuth, conceptual art elongates beyond 'idea over form'. Its application is conditioned to the works that both question the nature of art and transgress its past nature. The tautology is produced as the artist actualises these logical propositions into physicality. For Kosuth, this reiteration of idea into form only occludes the foregrounding logic of the work.

As the eye lays on the piece, the viscous nature of retinal material inglobulates the concept and denies its metabolisation into clean thought; supposedly. Thence, for Kosuth, to see the work as it is, is to not see it at all.

If only for economy of logic: if thought is compromised by its materialisation, why is it that Kosuth allows it to seep inside the aesthetic realm rather than settling it in the more compact, discursive realm of humanities? And if the reduction of form aims for cognitive clarity, is its contraction into a more codified, perceptually-lither medium, a deepening of theoretical inquiry or simply a retreat from the aesthetic experience?

The role of writing in conceptual art practices

One point I was partial to was 'art as a total signifying activity', artwork that extends into the activities that produce its meaning, discussions, lectures, articles; art criticism as art. Kosuth likes the practices of Ad Reinhardt. "How to Look" by Reinhardt, for example, is an illustrated graphic book where copulating fish explicate the influence of identity politics upon the praxis of painting.

Auxiliary activities like these give the artist intellectual possession over the artwork. The dehiscence between the black square of Malevich and that of Reinhardt comes not in formal qualities but in text. The logical affordances granted to art absolved from the lucubrations of formalism are easier to verify inside anthologies such as formulated by Kosuth. This point ties into the rarity of a press release that is sufficiently specific to the artist as to deny its application to the other shows on its street.

Lastly, a chapter was dedicated to a fervent gush of psycho-mystical marxist musings, which some may like, but some may pass.

‘Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Doors’

Floor 1
Room 1

Three doors, one of which through you enter. Their format is as follows:

1.) a real door, which fulfils its 'door' function
2.) a life-sized photograph of that same door
3.) a dictionary definition of the word "door"

The wall is all glass so those in passing have a clear view of those looking at doors, and that can be pleasant, is one to enjoy being looked at while looking at doors.

This project extracts from a classic exercise practiced in art school, how far can one reduce reality to its barest form, the abstractisation the turns an apple into a circle, a field of wheat into a flat plane of beige. Whereas in art school, the reductive tool comes in the visual minimisation of form, Kosuth endeavoured to reformulate the practice by using language as the reductive tool upon form. One his experiments was to set a bucket of ice next to the dictionary definition of ice. One may argue that the inherent function of language already is that of reducing reality to signs.

The exercise was extended to other objects, a well-known piece being a chair, placed next to a full-scale photograph of a chair, next to the dictionary definition of a chair. The same template, which continues this series, has been applied to a door and the shadow of a light bulb at Sprüth Magers.

This exercise responds to the former tautological predicament. To escape visual stability, each piece in this series is altered by the site-based differences it accrues during installation. The visual component changes every time while the idea remains the only constant. Therefore, within this system, it can be said that Kosuth has used relations between i.) artworks and ii.) exhibitions as the reductive material against formalism. However, when the viewer looks at the door, two scenarios may yield:

One, the viewer is unaware of this relational system, and they find themselves standing in front of doors.

Two, they are aware, which makes the ideas clarifiable on a piece of paper, which renders the physical doors redundant.

In the first case, the formalism that was to be avoided takes precedence naturally through the primacy of visual perception, which defeats the purpose of the work. In the second case, the tautology actualises in the most embodied sense, which may be beautiful or futile. Beauty and futility are also tautological.

Joseph Kosuth 'Is it Sublime?'; on language paradoxes and shiny surfaces

Floor 1
Room 2

Upon two panes of material titled 'Is it Sublime?', a question seeks to loop the viewer into circular rhetoric.

The text written by Kosuth is as follows:

A predicate expression is heterological if and only if it doesn't apply to itself, autological if and only if it does. For example, 'is monosyllabic', 'is a French phrase' and, 'is three words long' are heterological, since they don't apply to themselves, whereas 'is polysyllabic', 'is an English phrase', and 'is four words long' are autological. Is 'is heterological' heterological? If it is heterological, it doesn't apply to itself and so it is not. If it is not, it does apply to itself, and so is heterological. In other words, it is if and only if it isn't.

Within Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, referenced by Kosuth, it was asserted that before attempting to answer a question, one must first ask whether the question itself holds logical validity, and so if 'is heterological' can even be heterological or autological.

Consider how certain predicates operate. When the predicate "is monosyllabic" is analysed, it invites inquiry into a quantifiable, phonetic attribute. Similarly, "Is three words long", foregrounds a numerical criterion, grounded in empirical measurement. Slightly different, "is French" gestures toward a linguistic or cultural categorisation, still reliant on identifiable semantic boundaries. In each case, the predicates contain within a property that can, more or less, be parsed through observable or countable features.

By contrast, the nature of abstract concepts, such as existentialism or love, renders them irreducible to the same discrete, empirical units, being instead conditioned by a framework of sentiment at most.

Hence, why it might be that the self-referential "is heterological" is neither heterological nor autological, but rather, that its nature denies its divisibility into components required to justify its heterological quality. The question may be as fallacious as asking if a painting on a wall is monosyllabic.

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The 'heterological' text is laid upon a surface that mirrors the viewer. This piece may hold their attention for longer, is their hair shiny that day.

Lastly, a wall of text, discussing language.

For you to see this (discourse) you must see beyond this (text/gallery); for you to see this (text/gallery) you must see through this (discourse).

One of the main ideas posited here is that if the tautological act of making art transcends idea into object, the act of reading reverses the process. Once the mind deciphers meaning by trespassing empty eyeing of signs in favour of convention, the sinuosity of an 's' ceases to account in its meaning. There is no return to the "pre-linguistic" state of pure visual innocence. Once a sign is read, it is no longer seen. To see is to not know, and to know is to no longer see. Whether this is a loss or not can only be answered by those who really like looking at letters.

As chance would have it, many viewers pass by these works, registering them only as a graphic field of text. The ones who eye them and move on, too lassitudinous to parse meaning, may have seen them best.

Floor 2

There is a stair and there are more works. The upstairs has big windows and light floods in.

At last, the ending is bathetic, upon a lighting tube lies the articulation: "There was nothing to it". This could be the exhibition's swan note of self-effacement, but then again, vanity is rarely not best mirrored in the tenderness of self-deprecation.

Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)