Arte conceptual joseph kosuth biography

Fiona Gruber
ABC Books and Arts, 10 October

American conceptual artist

Joseph Kosuth (; born January 31, ) is a Hungarian-American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and Venice, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including London, Ghent and Rome.

Early life and career

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth had an American mother and a Hungarian father. (A relative, Lajos Kossuth, achieved notability for his role in the Hungarian Revolution of ) Joseph Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from to and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art on a scholarship. He spent the following year in Paris and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa. He moved to New York in and attended the School of Visual Arts there until From he studied anthropology and philosophy with Stanley Diamond and Bob Scholte at the New School for Social Research, New York.

At the School of Visual Arts he made a significant impact while technically a student, influencing fellow students as well as more traditional teachers there at the time such as Mel Bochner. As Kosuth's reputation grew, he was removed from the student body and given a position as a teacher, by Silas Rhodes the founder and President of the school, in This caused a near revolt of the faculty, as he had been a disruptive presence in the opinion of many of the instructors, several who had unhappily faced his questioning of basic presumptions. His elevation to a teacher was also a result of Kosuth's outside activities, which included the co-founding of the Museum of Normal Art (giving the first exposure to artists such as Robert Ryman, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven, among others) along with proselytizing and organizing artists in a direction which was later identified as the conceptual art movement. Through his art, writing and organizing, he emphas

Summary of Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth was one of the originators of Conceptual art in the mids, which became a major movement that thrived into the s 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 installations (), in which he assembled an object, a photograph of that object, and an enlarged photographic copy of the dictionary definition of it, explored these relationships directly. His enlarged photostats of dictionary definitions in his series Art as Idea as Idea () eliminated objects and images completely in order to focus on meaning conveyed purely with language. Since the s, he has made numerous site-specific installations that continue to explore how we experience, comprehend, and respond to language.

Accomplishments

• 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 be no obstacles to conveying ideas, and so images should be eliminated since he considered them obstacles. This notion became one of the major forces that made Conceptual art a movement in the lates.
• 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 between the visual and the linguistic. To this extent, he was influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas on language.
• 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 presentation of language to make his audience contemplate issues of poverty, racism, loneliness, isolation, the meaning of life, and personal identity - usually withou

biography

Joseph Kosuth, born in Toledo, Ohio, is an American conceptual artist. After studying at the Toledo Museum School of Arts, the Cleveland Art Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York, Kosuth quickly became on of the founders and representatives of Conceptual Art in which he is engaged „with an investigation of the nature of art“ and with the problems of sensory perception – reality, identity and the definition of the object. In his work Kosuth has dealt systematically with the role of language in art. He does so by employing appropriation strategies, texts, photography, installations and the use of public media and transfers art into a questioning process.

His works have been shown at various institutions including The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Salomon R. Guggenheim (New York), The Whitney (New York), The Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Tate Gallery and The Reina Sophia (Madrid).

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Joseph Kosuth (A Grammatical Remark) #11, Chelsea College of Arts, London

Still Waters Run Deep, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiun

A Symposium on Marcel Duchamp, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Words Are Deeds, Phillips, London

Made At Conception, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

Existence and the World – Das Dasein und die Welt, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Thurgau

Joseph Kosuth. Eine verstummte Bibliothek, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Thurgau

Texts For Nothing (Waiting For-) Samuel Beckett, in Play, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich

Joseph Kosuth, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Nichts, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

(No Title), Castello Di Rivoli, Turin

Re-Defining the Context Of Art: /The Second Investigation/Public Media, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven

Guests and Foreigners, Rules and Meanings, He