Joseph Kosuth (1945)

Joseph Kosuth, Toledo (Ohio), January 31, 1945 American artist and photographer, who is one of the most important representatives of the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s.

Kosuth studied at the Toledo School of Design between 1955 and 1962. He then attended the Art Institute in Cleveland between 1963-64. Between 1965 and 1967 he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York. During the nineties of the last century he lived and worked for several years in a huge 18th-century city palace in the Maagdestraat in Ghent, close to the Hoger St Lucas Institute, together with his wife, the American historian Cornelia Lauf.

In 1965 he presents his first conceptual work, One and three chairs. This work consists of a wooden chair, a photo of a chair and the 'dictionary chair'. Kosuth asks himself the following questions: Is a chair a chair? Is a photo of a chair also a chair? Is the definition of a chair a chair? Is the definition of a chair more chair than a real chair or a photo of it? Why should the definition of a chair be less chair than the chair itself? And so on.

Kosuth's considerations have a didactic quality and resemble Plato's theory of ideas. Plato, however, ignores the merit of the carpenter and considers the painter only an imitator of the real. Kosuth, on the other hand, leaves room for the chair of the furniture maker and the painter in addition to the abstract chair. In Kosuth's later work he focuses only on text.

Kosuth laid down his views on Art As Idea As Idea in a number of essays, published under the title Art after Philosophy (1969). This arose from his research in 1966-1967 First Investigations (subtitled Art As Idea As Idea). In it he gave dictionary definitions of the following words: water, meaning, idea, nothing, painting, silence, to paint and ultimate. These were sometimes also presented in other languages.

From 1968, Kosuth makes a series of works in which he investigates how the context influences the perception of the work. Kosuth's project to restore fragments of her own description to the world was spread around the world through advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and through pamphlets, posters, banners and posters. Kosuth uses a categorical description of the world as a means of investigating our thinking about art. The various media gave him the opportunity to escape the limitations of the traditional media and to avoid the gallery or museum.

Kosuth also used neon: Four Colors Four Words (1966) and The Polar Bear and the Tiger Cannot Fight (1994). In addition, he not only prints his photographed text, but also puts it on glass plate and on walls. In 2004 a retrospective of Kosuth's work was held in the Van Abbemuseum. In 2005 he had an exhibition in a castle in Italy.

In 2007 and 2008, Kosuth took part in the symposium series "Personal Structures: Time - Space - Existence", a project initiated by the Dutch artist Rene Rietmeyer.