The Kosuths at Bomb Magazine:
For more than six decades, Joseph Kosuth has been a defining figure in the development of conceptual art, challenging the relationship between art, language, and meaning and questioning the traditional role of the art object as well as the role of the artist. By shifting attention toward ideas, context as material, and the systems through which knowledge is constructed, Kosuth’s work disrupts the expectations of permanence we attach to art objects. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s contention that “meaning is use,” that words do not possess fixed meanings, is an abiding concern for Kosuth as he examines the function of art in the line of inquiry posed by Marcel Duchamp.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1945, Kosuth emerged as a key figure in the international conceptual art movement with early works such as One and Three Chairs, from 1965. The self-reflexivity of Kosuth’s gesture in this work reveals the complexity of what may at first seem like a simple alignment of the physical object, its deadpan photographic representation, and the dictionary definition of the word chair.
more here.
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