Joseph Kosuth is an American artist known as the founder of the conceptual art and its most leading representative. His installations explore the connection between words and objects as well as the role of the language in art.
Background
Ethnicity:
Joseph Kosuth’s mother came from the United States and his father was of the Hungarian origin.
Joseph Kosuth was born on January 31, 1945, in Toledo, Ohio, United States.
One of the artist’s notable relatives was Lajos Kossuth, a Hungarian nobleman, and Governor-President of the Kingdom of Hungary during the revolution of 1848-49.
Education
Joseph Kosuth entered the Toledo Museum School of Design in 1955 and had studied there for seven years. Then, he received some art lessons from the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper.
In 1963, Kosuth became a student of the Cleveland Institute of Art where he had learned drawing and painting till 1964. While at the institution, Joseph obtained a scholarship which allowed him to develop his skills in Paris, Europe and North Africa.
The next year, the artist moved to the New York City where he pursued his artistic training at the School of Visual Arts. He graduated in 1967 and three years later, enrolled at the New School for Social Research. Joseph Kosuth had spent at the institution one year during which he studied anthropology and philosophy.
Despite, Joseph Kosuth received two doctorates – in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna, Italy in 2001 and Honorary Degree from the University of Arts of Cuba (Instituto Superior de Arte) in 2015.
The start of Joseph Kosuth’s artistic career can be counted from the 1965 when he produced his first conceptual installation dubbed One and Three Chairs consisting of the chair, its photo and the definition of this piece of furniture. The artwork somehow gave birth to the conceptual art movement.
This piece of art was followed by the couple of other installation series. The first one, Art as Idea as Idea (1966) represented the photostat replicas of the dictionary definitions of the words ‘water’, ‘meaning’, and ‘idea’. For the second series the artist used neon light tubes which highlighted words united in simple and obvious statements attached to different objects or surfaces. Among these series were ‘One and Eight – A Description’ and ‘Neon Electrical Light English Glass Letters Red Eight’. Despite, Kosuth organized in 1967 the exposition space in the New York City baptized by the author the Museum of Normal Art.
All these activities led to his appointment as the teacher on the Department of Fine Art at the School of Visual Arts in 1968. The artist had taught there till 1985.
The year after Joseph Kosuth started his career at the School, he had his debut solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City which was followed by his project Fifteen Locations presented concurrently at fifteen different galleries all over the world. Kosuth took part as well in the seminal exhibition of Conceptual art at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery in New York City.
As a person fascinated by the language and words, Joseph Kosuth became in 1970 an American editor of the journal Art & Language based in the United Kingdom. Kosuth had served at the periodical until 1979 when its contributors had dissidences on the content. Later, he fulfilled the similar duties at the art magazine The Fox (1975-76) and Marxist Perspectives (1977-78)
By the age of twenty-eight, the artist had already his retrospective held by the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, which was shown around Europe.
As an author Kosuth published in 1975 his famous writing The Artist as Anthropologist. He gathered the results of his study of cultural anthropology from different cultures, explored during the travelling to Peruvian Amazon, Aboriginal tribe in Australia and Trobriand islands in Papua New Guinea.
In 1981, the artist had his next major retrospectives organized at the Stuttgart State Gallery and at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld museum. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s death, Joseph Kosuth along with Peter Pakesch established the Foundation for the Arts as part of The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and became its President. Despite, Kosuth used some of Freud’s theories in his installations, like in Cathexis series, for example.
Joseph Kosuth held his position as a Professor of the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg for a couple of years since 1988, and later at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart which he joined in 1991 and spent there six years.
In fact, during for about forty years of his career, the artist had worked as a guest lecturer and faculty member in a huge number of universities including Yale University, Cornell University, New York University, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, all in New York City, Art Institute of Chicago, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Oxford University, University of Rome, Berlin Kunstakademie, Royal College of Art in London, Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, the Sorbonne in Paris and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (2001-2006).
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Joseph Kosuth has also worked on large installations commissioned by many public institutions in various countries, which include Government-sponsored monument to the Egyptologist Jean Francois Champollion, ‘Words of a Spell, for Noëma’ for the city of Tachikawa (1994), the Deutsche Bundesbank (1997), the Parliament House in Stockholm (1998), the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region (1999), the renovated Bundestag building in Berlin (2001), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (2003), the Louvre in Paris (2009), the work on the façade of the Council of State of the Netherlands (2011) and the National Library of France in Paris (2012).
Despite these public projects, Joseph Kosuth has collaborated with individual artists, as well. So, he created the design of the album cover for Fragments of a Rainy Season by John Cale in 1992 and in two years, worked with his Russian-American colleague Ilya Kabakov on his Corridor of Two Banalities.
Except the above-mentioned expositions, the reach collection of exhibitions where Joseph Kosuth demonstrated his pieces of art include seven Documenta (1972, 1978, 1982, 1992 and onwards) in Kassel, Germany and nine Venice Bienale (1976, 1993, 1999, 2011 and onwards). One of his most recent shows took place at the Palazzo Bembo in Italy in 2017.
Nowadays, Joseph Kosuth is living and working Rome, in New York City and London studios. He is a Professor on the Faculty of Design and Art at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice, Italy, as well.
Quotations:
"It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deals with opinions on perception of the world in general."
"All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually."
"Anything can be art. Art is the relations between relations, not the relations between objects."
"Art before the modern period is as much art as Neanderthal man is man'. It is for this reason that around the same time I replaced the term "work" for art proposition. Because a conceptual work of art in the traditional sense, is a contradiction in terms."
"Making something new to look at is a futile and empty act if its only audience is the eyes."
"I was being dealt with as an eccentric. And that made me very unhappy. I thought I had a new agenda for art. But I realized nobody would listen to me unless I had a movement around. Nobody would get the message."
"The work process begins when I start selecting quotations from a large collection I already have ... I go through hundreds of these amassed quotes from my own research and that of my staff, make my choices, and then continually add them in relation to the quotes I already have selected."
"Those artists at the top of the list of billionaires’ [collections] are rather quite derivative artists."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud
Connections
Joseph Kosuth was married to an art historian and independent curator Cornelia Lauf who gave birth to their two daughters Noëma and Kliò.