One and Three Chairs
Encyclopedia
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
. An example of conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, the piece consists of a chair
Chair
A chair is a stable, raised surface used to sit on, commonly for use by one person. Chairs are most often supported by four legs and have a back; however, a chair can have three legs or could have a different shape depending on the criteria of the chair specifications. A chair without a back or...
, a photograph of this chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph depicts the chair as it is actually installed in the room, and thus the work changes each time it is installed in a new venue.
Two elements of the work remain constant: a copy of a dictionary definition of the word "chair" and a diagram with instructions for installation. Both bear Kosuth's signature. Under the instructions, the installer is to choose a chair, place it before a wall, and take a photograph of the chair. This photo is to be enlarged to the size of the actual chair and placed on the wall to the left of the chair. Finally, a blow-up of the copy of the dictionary definition is to be hung to the right of the chair, its upper edge aligned with that of the photograph.
Early conceptual art
Kosuth's concern with the difference between a concept and its mode of presentation was prefigured in the "event cards" of FluxusFluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
-artists like George Brecht
George Brecht
George Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
, Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
and Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
. These artists also tackled the problem of presenting "concepts" to an art audience. One and Three Chairs is, perhaps, a step towards a resolution of this problem. Rather than present the viewer with the bare written instructions for the work, or make a live event of the realization of the concept (in the manner of the Fluxus artists), Kosuth instead unifies concept and realization. One and Three Chairs demonstrates how an artwork can embody an idea that remains constant despite changes to its elements.
Kosuth stresses the difference between concept and presentation in his writings (e.g., "Art after Philosophy", 1969
) and interviews (see the quotation below). He tries to intimately bind the conceptual nature of his work with the nature of art itself, thus raising his instructions for the presentation of an artwork to the level of a discourse on art. In 1963 Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
articulated these problems in the article "Concept Art". This was a forerunner to Kosuth's thematization of "Concept Art" in "Art after Philosophy", the text that made One and Three Chairs famous.
Interpretation
The work One and Three Chairs can be seen to highlight the relation between language, picture and referent. It problematizes relations between object, visual and verbal references (denotationsDenotation (semiotics)
In semiotics, denotation is the surface or literal meaning encoded to a signifier, and the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.-Discussion :Drawing from the original word or definition proposed by Saussure , a sign has two parts:...
) plus semantic fields of the term chosen for the verbal reference. The term of the dictionary includes connotations
Connotation (semiotics)
In semiotics, connotation arises when the denotative relationship between a signifier and its signified is inadequate to serve the needs of the community. A second level of meanings is termed connotative...
and possible denotations which are relevant in the context of the presentation of One and Three Chairs. The meanings of the three elements are congruent in certain semantic fields and incongruent in other semantic fields: A semantic congruity ("One") and a threefold incongruity ("One and Three"). Ironically, One and Three Chairs can be looked upon as simple but rather complex model, of the science of signs. A viewer may ask "what's real here?" and answer that "the definition is real"; Without a definition, one would never know what an actual chair is.
There exist different interpretations of these semantic and ontological aspects. Some refer to Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
´s Republic (Book X); others refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
´s Tractatus or to Charles Sanders Peirce's triad icon-index-symbol. Dreher discusses the semantic problems of One and Three Chairs as inclusions of circles which represent semantic fields.
The work tends to defy formal analysis because one chair can be substituted for another chair, rendering the photograph and the chair photographed elusive to description. Nevertheless the particular chair and its accompanying photograph lend themselves to formal analysis. There are many chairs in the world; thus only those actually used can be described. Those chairs not used would not be analyzed. The enlarged dictionary definition of the word chair is also open to formal analysis, as is the diagram containing instructions of the work.
The concept and the theory of art
Kosuth's thematization of semantic congruities and incongruities can be seen as a reflection of the problems which the relations between concept and presentation pose. Kosuth uses the related questions, "how meanings of signs are constituted" and "how signs refer to extra-lingual phenomena" as a fundament to discuss the relation between concept and presentation. Kosuth tries to identify or equate these philosophical problems with the theory of art. Kosuth changes the art practice from hand-made originals to notations with substitutable realizations, and tries to exemplify the relevance of this change for the theory of art.In "Art after Philosophy," Kosuth provoked a confrontation with the formal criticism of Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
and Michael Fried. Both exposed the concept of the art work as a non-substitutable instance realized by an artist who follows no other criteria than visual ones. They defined this concept as the core of modernism. In the sixties, Greenberg's and Fried's modernist doctrine dominated the American discussions on art; meanwhile, the artists Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow
Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...
, Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
, Henry Flynt, Mel Bochner
Mel Bochner
Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist. Mr. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University...
, Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....
and Joseph Kosuth wrote articles on art exemplifying a pluralistic anti- and post-modernist tendency which gained more influence at the end of the sixties. In 1968, Greenberg tried to disqualify the new tendencies as "'novelty' art": "The different mediums are exploding...when everybody is a revolutionary the revolution is over." Sam Hunter offered a more positive view in 1972: "The situation of open possibilities which confronted artists in the first years of the seventies allowed a variety of means and many fertile idea systems to coexist, reconciling through the poetic imagination apparent contradictions."
Quote
Joseph Kosuth, WBAI, April 7, 1970:- "I used common, functional objects - such as a chair - and to the left of the object would be a full-scale photograph of it and to the right of the object would be a photostat of a definition of the object from the dictionary. Everything you saw when you looked at the object had to be the same that you saw in the photograph, so each time the work was exhibited the new installation necessitated a new photograph. I liked that the work itself was something other than simply what you saw. By changing the location, the object, the photograph and still having it remain the same work was very interesting. It meant you could have an art work which was that idea of an art work, and its formal components weren't important."
See also
- The Treachery of ImagesThe Treachery Of ImagesThe Treachery of Images is a painting by the Belgian René Magritte, painted when Magritte was 30 years old. The picture shows a pipe...
, a series of paintings by René MagritteRené MagritteRené François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
which includes the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) inscribed alongside a painting of a pipe.
Further reading
- Archer, Michael: Art since 1960. Thames and Hudson, London 1997, p. 80.
- Art & Language (Atkinson, Terry/Baldwin, Michael/Pilkington, Philip/Rushton, David): Introduction to a Partial Problematic. In: Joseph Kosuth: Art Investigations & `Problematics´ since 1965. Cat. of exhib. Kunstmuseum Luzern. Luzern 1973, vol. 2, p. 12,22.
- Dickel, Hans u.a.: Die Sammlung Paul Maenz. Neues Museum Weimar. Edition Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 1998, p. 82s. (with descriptions of the constituents of the German-English version and a bibliography).
- Dreher, Thomas: Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976. Thesis Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität/Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 70-79.
- Inboden, Gudrun: Introduction: Joseph Kosuth - Artist and Critic of Modernism. In: Joseph Kosuth: The Making of Meaning. Selected Writings and Documentation of Investigations on Art Since 1965. Cat. of exhib. Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Stuttgart 1981, p. 16-19.
- Kosuth, Joseph: Art after Philosophy, Part III. In: Studio International, December 1969, p. 212.
- Maenz, Paul: 1970-1975 Paul Maenz Köln. Gallery Paul Maenz, Cologne 1975, p. 85 (Illustrations of three different realizations of One and Three Chairs (English/German)).
- Prinz, Jessica: Text and Context: Reading Kosuth's Art. In: Prinz, Jessica: Art Discourse/Discourse in Art. Rutger U.P., New Brunswick/New Jersey 1991, p. 52,58.
- Rorimer, Anne: New Art in the 60s and 70s. Redefining Reality. Thames & Hudson, London 2001, p. 94.
- Tragatschnig, Ulrich: Konzeptuelle Kunst. Interpretationsparadigmen: Ein Propädeutikum. Reimer, Berlin 1998, p. 116.
External links
- Thomas Dreher Intermedia Art: Konzeptuelle Kunst: illustration "One and Three Chairs", version with English-German definition (blow-up of an article in a dictionary with an English-to-German translation).
- Centre Georges Pompidou Paris: version with English-French definition (blow-up of an article in a dictionary with an English-to-French translation).
- Remko Scha/Jochem van der Spek Algorithmic Art and Artificial Intelligence: Conceptual Art: Tautologies (with three examples). Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam (IAAA), Course.