| Artist: | Joseph Kosuth |
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|---|---|---|
| Title: | Art as Idea as Idea: Painting | |
| Date: | 1966 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Conceptual Art | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | ||
| Subject: the definition of "painting" as part of the "Art as Idea as Idea" series; clearly Kosuth's photo-stat of a dictionary definition of the word "painting" defies the traditional notion of paintings as objects; eliminates any material representation or personal touch so the art will exist purely as an idea in the mind Style: impersonal photostat of dictionary definition; preference of idea over execution, concept over percept; Kosuth claimed the words themselves have no aesthetic significance except as clothing of the idea; included an Information Room in his installations; it contained 2 large tables with books, mostly linguistic philosophic paperbacks; visitors were invited to sit down and share in the artist's reading. He uses no paint for this "painting" 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. | ||
