| Artist: | Joseph Kosuth |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | One and Three Chairs | |
| Date: | 1965 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Conceptual Art | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | photograph, chair, printed text | |
| Subject: consists of a real folding chair, a photograph of it, and a dictionary definition; he is more concerned with problems of definition and communication than with a visual or formal object. Are they all the same chair? Is one more real than the other? What do these 3 different signifiers reference? The idea dominates over the object. Style: the installation affirms Kosuth's notion that the artist is not a craftsman, but a conceptual source. Rather than make things, the artist makes ideas. (Sol LeWitt: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.") Conceptual art prefers the idea over the execution, the concept over the percept. Theory becomes art; the artist becomes a philosopher. Context: part of the gradual "de-materialization of the object" (Lucy Lippard's term). In Minimalism the percept dominated over the object with an emphasis on the phenomenology of perception; in Conceptual art, the concept dominates over the percept with an emphasis on doing away with the object altogether, putting the focus on ideas rather than objects that quickly become commodities or collectibles; a radical purging of the material world; Kosuth felt by 1965 at the age of 20 that "organic and geometric shapes were used up." Move beyond visual-formal concerns; believed that abstraction was a philosophical lingusitic problem. Preference of the idea over the visual. "Being an artist now means to question the nature of art." Following out what Duchamp had started when he titled a urinal "Fountain" and put it in the art gallery; siting art in the mind. Following the philosopher Kant, Kosuth is probing two kinds of knowledge: the "phenomenal"--what appears real to the senses, regardless of whether its underlying existence is proved or its inner nature is understood (the word comes from the Greek form of the verb to appear)--and the "noumenal"--an object of purely intellectual intuition as opposed to an object of sensuous perception; the thing-in-itself, independent of sensuous or intellectual perception (comes from the Greek word to think, mind, concept, thought). Here Kosuth questions the limits of the phenomenal as he tries to direct us to the noumenal. | ||
