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- His work explores the role of meaning in art and, like an archaeologist of language and culture, he orders words and ideas from our historical memory into distinct yet intersecting layers of cultural activity—ones that are experienced today.
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American artist Joseph Kosuth is one of the primary figures associated with the 1960s movement known as Conceptual Art. Along with Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner, and other conceptual artists, Kosuth approached art-making from a radical new perspective. For them, the totality of an artwork was the idea behind it.
- Summary of Joseph Kosuth
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- Biography of Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth was one of the originators of Conceptual art in the mid-1960s, which became a major movement that thrived into the 1970s and remains influential. He pioneered the use of words in place of visual imagery of any kind and explored the relationship between ideas and the images and words used to convey them. His series of One and Three ins...
Kosuth believed that images and any traces of artistic skill and craft should be eliminated from art so that ideas could be conveyed as directly, immediately, and purely as possible. There should b...Kosuth has often explored the relationships between words and their meanings and how words relate to the objects and things they name or describe. He has been fascinated with the equivalences betwe...Many of Kosuth's installations and displays of words have incorporated excerpts from literature, philosophy, psychology, and history that have that have intrigued him. Consequently, he has used the...Since he usually relies on the writing of others in his presentations of words and texts, Kosuth's work represents how Conceptual art, like much of postmodernism, involves a lot of appropriation, i...Early Life and Study
Joseph Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1945. He studied at the Toledo Museum School of Design starting at the very early age of ten and continued there until 1962, during which time he studied with the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. He enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1963 and studied drawing and painting there for a year. After traveling abroad for a year, he moved to New York City in 1965 and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where he studied painting until 1967. B...
Early Career
In 1965, at just 20 years old, Kosuth started to create a number of works that would effectively help start the Conceptual art movement and most fully realize his thinking about art as pure idea and meaning. These included his One and Three series of installations and his First Investigations, which were subtitled Art as Idea as Idea. The title for the series was inspired by Ad Reinhardt's comment in 1958 that "art is art as art and everything else is everything else." Kosuth's reductive pres...
Later Career
Kosuth has continued to write and edit for numerous alternative publications throughout his career, espousing a stringent philosophy of the separation of art and aesthetics, often citing Duchamp's readymadesas the basis for his thinking. In recent years Kosuth has received a number of commissions for large-scale public installations at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Louvre in Paris, and the Norman Foster-renovated Bundestag building in Berlin. He was on the faculty of the...
- American
- January 31, 1945
- Toledo, Ohio
Dec 6, 2023 · “Being an artist now means to question the nature of art,” Kosuth wrote in his 1969 essay “Art After Philosophy.” To this end, he created works that directed the viewer away from form and toward the ideas that generated them. In the case of One and Three Chairs, the central idea was to explore the nature of representation itself.
May 3, 2024 · Lisa S. Wainwright. Joseph Kosuth, American artist and theoretician, a founder and leading figure of the conceptual art movement. He often explored the relationship between words and objects, between language and meaning in art. His best-known work, One and Three Chairs, displayed a chair, its photograph, and the definition of the word.
Throughout his career, Kosuth’s practice has centered on the role of language and meaning within art. A foremost pioneer in Conceptual and Installation art, Joseph Kosuth is well-noted for the language-based artworks and appropriation techniques defining his oeuvre since the 1960s.
Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) is one of the founding pioneers of the 1970s Conceptual art movement. His work explores the role of meaning in art and, like an archaeologist of language and culture, he orders words and ideas from our historical memory into distinct yet intersecting layers of cultural activity—ones that are experienced today.
Nevertheless, One and Three Chairs is a defining work of conceptual art, a movement that emerged in the mid-1960s and advocated a radically new form of artwork: one whose value, meaning and existence was rooted in its concept, rather than in the work’s physical or material properties.
