STAMPA

JOSEPH KOSUTH

Lecture given during the symposium Existence held at Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan, 3 April 2008

Joseph Kosuth (*1945, Toledo, OH, USA) is one of the pioneers of Conceptual art and installation art, initiating language based works and appropriation strategies in the 1960s. His work has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art. Kosuth lives in New York City and Rome, Italy.

‘Existence’ Applied | Joseph Kosuth

‘The self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and posits it own existence by virtue of merely existing. It is at once the agent and product of action; and hence the ‘I am’ expresses an Act.’

J.G. Fichte.

What I will do today is to briefly outline a certain view; it’s my view of art and it will attempt to underscore an aspect of its relationship with philosophy, both implicitly and explicitly. What I say begins with a necessary understanding by you that it is grounded in a practice of art. My comments should be seen as part of a kind of manual or handbook for a device, but they shouldn’t be confused with the device itself. That device, that practice of art, has dialectically evolved along with the handbook itself over a forty-year period. If you’ve seen my installation last summer at the Venice Biennale, or the installation at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York last year, or my last installation at this moment visible on the facade of La Casa Encendida in Madrid, you already know that updates on my practice are ongoing and continuous. However, I won’t be speaking of my present work today. For our purposes here I need to go to the beginning.

The evolution of my handbook is more than consistent and even more sporadic. It emerges when and where needed. Today we add a chapter because I have been asked to address the question of ‘existence’. To do that this chapter of the handbook will attempt to look at the origins of my practice with an elliptical view of what may constitute the origin of its ‘theory’ and, simultaneously, possibly provide a better understanding of its history. What I say should be understood as framed by the issue of ‘existence’ even when it is only an argumentative presence just out of view. This is our context today. What a philosophical discipline might feel obliged to confront directly and explicitly within one or another of many established discourses, my writing, which is itself philosophically homeless outside of the practice which goes with it, is not compelled to participate within or satisfy. It qualifies itself on other grounds as part of a larger context than an academic discipline would permit. And please take that as an explanation, not an apology.

I was asked by The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969 to describe my work for the catalogue of a rather quick and imperfect attempt to give a public presentation of what they saw as a phenomenon, taking place way downtown, called ‘Conceptual art,’ by participating in a group show called Information. This is how I put it then, and please forgive the pretensions of a 24 year old: ‘Every unit of an (art) proposition is only that which is functioning within a larger framework (the proposition) and every proposition is only a unit which is functioning within a larger framework (the investigation) and every investigation is only a unit which is functioning within a larger framework (my art) and my art is only a unit which is functioning within a larger framework (the concept ‘art’) and the concept of art is a concept which has a particular meaning at a particular time but which exists only as an idea used by living artists and which exists only as information. To attempt an ‘iconic’ grasp of only a part or unit of the above paragraph (which means to consider one action a potential ‘masterpiece’) is to separate the art’s ‘language’ from its ‘meaning’ or ‘use’. The art is the ‘whole’ not ‘part’;. And the ‘whole’ only exists conceptually.” No question, that’s at least part of what I had to say in 1969.

Whatever one would want to say now about that project called Conceptual art, begun over 40 years ago, it is clear that what we wanted was based on a contradiction, even if an intellectually somewhat sublime one. I wanted the act of art to have integrity (to this end I discussed it in terms of ‘tautology’ at the time) and I wanted it untethered to a prescriptive formal self-conception. So, in my talk to today I will return, in a sense, to the origins of my thinking as I approach the question of ‘existence’. One could say that it is both the starting point of how I began to form my own conception of my existence as an artist, and thus a man, and it constitutes the tool by which I, if not also society itself, can reflectively approach those issues which form our conception of existence.

At one point in his writing Wittgenstein discusses the question of existence and says the following:

‘If I say “I wonder at the existence of the world” I am misusing language. Let me explain this: It has a perfectly good and clear sense to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger than anyone I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a dog of another, namely the normal size, at which I would not wonder. To say “I wonder at such and such being the case” has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it’s clouded. But that’s not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it’s just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.’

Obviously Wittgenstein is not arguing against the existence of the world. While he cannot support an assertion of an absolute, compared to a relative, value because it would lie outside the world, he is saying one can however acknowledge the experience of a ‘feeling of wonder’ at the world. It is simply that the ‘wonder’ that Wittgenstein feels becomes nonsense when put into words. His sense is that the wonder which he feels when he confronts the nature of existence, shares the same kind of significance as religious and ethical truths. The wonder we have at the world isn’t nonsense even if what we would say about it is.

‘In a sense this brings us back to the issue of contingency. We begin with ‘the existence of something’ and would like a verbal explanation but cannot have one. What then do we face? We have, of course, the famous statement of Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Nausea: “The essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessary. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it. There are people, I believe, who have understood that. Only they have tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not an illusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is absolute, and consequently perfect gratuitousness. Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself. When you realize that, it turns your stomach over and everything starts floating about…’

So we have nothing less than the contingency of existence itself. We are forced to face the alternative to ‘something’, which is nothing. The way in which death lurks ahead for all of us forms our experience of existence more than anything else. Martin Heidegger has said that “Only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and ‘provisional’ possibility driven out. Only being free for death, gives Dasein it goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude. One has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches it back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one – those of comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly….’ But finally, as Joshua Schuster, in discussing Derrida, tells us: ‘…Since we have yet to ask, what is death? We have avoided asking for the simple reason that we do not know who to ask. Who could tell us, guide us to ask the right questions, lead us into familiarity which we presume corresponds with knowledge? Is there a question which can question the non-empirical, what is outside epistemology, what has no thought, what is at the limits of limits? It seems to me a philosophical commonplace now, as many claim, that “death can only be represented.” On one level, this assertion may be true, but in order to speak competently about the passage of dying, I must already have an understanding and recognition of death, a pre-theoretical understanding of death. This is already to suggest that death lurks not in representationality, but in between the spaces of what is representable.’ Well, this question remains open ended. I could say, more on death later, for all of us.

But, for the moment we shall return to my existence and thus my work. I want to suggest we consider, as a distinction, a rather simple diagram of something far more complex, probably, than tautologies, from a standard textbook on the theory of scientific models. It’s one which distinguishes models as being of two types, one being an illustration and one a test. I understood from the beginning that art was essentially a questioning process. What I felt such questioning directed us toward, of course, was not the construction of a theory of art with a static depiction (a map of an internal world which illustrates) but, rather, one which presumed the artist as an active agent in the world, one concerned with meaning; that is, with the work of art as a test. It is this concept of art as a test, rather than an illustration, which remains. In my text of 1968, ‘Art after Philosophy,’ I proposed for us to see art as an analytic proposition, essentially a tautology whose interior construction could not be put in play as ‘content’ about the world. What is not often understood is that it is not the same as to say that the process of the practice, culturally, socially and politically does not have effect on the world. Indeed, there is no greater manifestation of our existence in the world than art. What it says, manifested as a process of art, and in the resulting consciousness that it constructs, is the most telling reflection about our existence available.

Yet, for a further look at tautologies, consider Paul Engelman, a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the collaborator with him on the house for Wittgenstein’s sister in Vienna, who has commented about tautologies that they are not ‘a meaningful proposition (i.e. one with a content): yet it can be an indispensable intellectual device, an instrument that can help us—if used correctly in grasping reality, that is in grasping facts—to arrive at insights difficult or impossible to attain by other means.’

The tautology was a useful device for me, in both its theory and its practice, in my work of the 1960’s in specific ways. To give a concrete and early example I would cite my own work from 1965, from the Protoinvestigations, of which ‘One and Three Chairs’ (with examples in this series to be found at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Reina Sofia in Madrid) to ‘Clock—One and Five’ (from the Tate Modern in London) all being representative. This work, using deadpan ‘scientific style’ photographs which were always taken by others, employed common objects and enlarged texts from dictionary definitions. The physical elements were never signed, with the concept of the work being that this ‘form of presentation’ would be made and re-made. Necessary because the floor and /or wall should show the one seen with the object. The reason for this was an important part of my intention: eliminate the aura of traditional art and force another basis for this activity to be understood as art, that is: conceptually. For me as well as for other artists at that time, the issues of modernism were rapidly becoming opaque. One effect of this work was to ‘sum up’ modernism for me, and once that was visible I was able to use that view to get past it, as the work which followed showed. Thus, for me, this work was both a ‘summation’ of modernism and the way out of it.

Yet, the use of tautologies in the Protoinvestigations has generated a variety of confused responses. One aspect of this work was my attempt to actualize a Wittgensteinian insight: by drawing out the relation of art to language could one SPACING begin the production of a cultural language whose very function it was to show, rather than say? Such artworks might function in a way which circumvents significantly much of what limits language. Art, some have argued, describes reality. But, unlike language, artworks, it can also be argued, simultaneously describe how they describe it. Granted, art can be seen here as self referential, but importantly, not meaninglessly self-referential. What art shows in such a manifestation is, indeed, how it functions. This is revealed in works which feign to say, but do so as an art proposition and reveal the difference (while showing their similarity) with language. This was, of course, the role of language in my work beginning in 1965. It seemed to me that if language itself could be used to function as an artwork, then that difference would bare the device of art’s language game. An artwork then, as such a double mask, provided the possibility of not just a reflection on itself, but an indirect double reflection on the nature of language, through art, to culture itself. ‘Do not forget,’ writes Wittgenstein, ‘that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information is not used in the language-game of giving information.’ Whatever insights this early work of mine had to share, it did, and most agree it initiated within the practice an essential questioning process which, for the past forty years, has been basic to it. It should be obvious that the ‘baring of the device’ of the institutions of art would begin at the most elemental level: the point of production itself, the artwork. Seeing the artwork, in such a context, forced a scrutiny of its conventions and historical baggage, such as painting and sculpture itself as an activity. So, first inside the frame and then outside. One goal at the time of work which followed, like The Second Investigation, was to question the institutional forms of art.

Our contradictions illuminate. How can art remain a ‘test’ and still maintain a cultural, and thereby socially formed, identity as art, that is, continue a relationship with the history of the activity without which it is severed from the community of ‘believers’ which gives it human meaning? It is this difficulty of the project which constituted both its ‘failure’—as Terry Atkinson has written about so well—as well as the continuing relevance of the project to ongoing art production. It would be difficult to deny that out of the ‘failure’ of Conceptual art’s original project emerged a redefined practice of art. Whatever hermeneutic, and I really can’t think of a better word for it, we employ in our approach to the ‘tests’ of art, the early ones as well as the recent ones, that alteration in terms of how we make meaning of those ‘tests’ is itself the description of a different practice of art than what preceded it. That is not to say that the project did not proceed without paradox. Can one initiate a practice (of anything) without implying, particularly if it sticks, it as having something akin to a teleology? Indeed the very concept of the ‘avant-garde’ which frames it even if unintentionally, when unspoken and presumed, is teleological. The fact itself of a perceived end of modernism, with Conceptual art playing a major role in that, suggests a continuum, if only in the form of a rupture. This is one of the ways in which Conceptual art’s success constituted its failure. What it had to say, even as a ‘failure’, still continued to be art. Much art of the past couple of decades internalized the basis of such work, though such work no longer has to call itself ‘conceptual’, and if that’s not obvious enough I’ll say it again later. The paradox, of course, is that the ongoing cultural life of this art consisted of two parts which both constituted its origins, as well as remained—even to this day—antagonistic towards each other. The ‘success’ of this project (it was, in fact, finally to be believed as art, which obviously is why I am invited here today to speak), was obliged to transform it in equal proportion to its ‘success’ within precisely those terms from which it had disassociated itself from the practice of art as previously constituted. Within this contradiction one is able to see, not unlike a silhouette, the defining characteristic of the project itself: its ‘positive’ program remains manifest there within its ‘failure’, as a usable potential. One test simply awaits the next test, since a test cannot attempt to be a masterpiece which depicts an implicitly totalizing reflection of the world. Indeed, the art I speak of was finally understood to be only part of the path of a reflective process, ultimately only comprised of some manifestation of thinking, and it is only over the course of time that the process of a practice can make the claim of describing more than the specific initial program of its agenda. Such work, like any work, is located within a community, and it is that community which gives it its meaning. But meaning given is meaning which, as such, implicitly defines its own limits. And those limits, when understood well, describe what future work might possibly be. Art is always a project on limits. Now I ask you: how can a view of limits ever be reduced to simply being an object?

Going back, we can ask: what is the character of the ‘tests’ I discussed? As Wittgenstein put it: ‘In mathematics and logic, process and result are equivalent.’ The same I would maintain, can be said of art. I have written elsewhere that the work of art is essentially a play within the meaning system of art. As that ‘play’ receives its meaning from the system, that system is—potentially—altered by the difference of that particular play. Since really anything can be nominated as the element in such a play (and appear, then, as the ‘material’ of the work) the actual location of the work must be seen elsewhere, as the point, or gap, where the production of meaning takes place. In art the how and why collapse into each other as the same sphere of production: the realm of meaning.

As for the project of Conceptual art, we know that what is ‘different’ doesn’t stay different for long if it succeeds, which is perhaps another description of the terms of its ‘failure’ as much as its ‘success’. Thus the relative effectiveness of this practice of art was dependent on those practices of individuals capable of maintaining a sufficiently transformatory process within which ‘difference’ could be maintained. Unfortunately practices begun in the past are subject to an over-determined view of art history whose presumptions are exclusive to the practice of art outlined here. The traditional scope of art historicizing—that is, as a style, and attributed to specific individuals—is most comfortable limiting itself to perceived early moments which are then dated and finalized. My discussion of those moments here is precisely intended to suggest another approach, one which suggests their usefulness here in the present. Without that they are doomed to relevance only to historians. While such conventional ‘credits’ provide for the kind of tidy art history both professors and newspaper critics adore, we’ve seen that it stops the conversation just where it should begin. In actual fact, the continued ‘tests’, now, of the original practitioners (in those rare instances where they still constitute a test and not simply a recognizable market entity) should be considered on their own merit equally along with the ‘tests’ of other generations, insofar as all are present now, and all constitute, together, our present reflection on existence. Also, together, they are capable of an accumulative effect as part of the present cultural landscape from which meaning is generated. Indeed, we may be left with the consideration that the meaning we produce in our life is what defines our existence.

Let’s try it from this direction. My work, and Conceptual art later as a general practice, began with the understanding that artists work with meaning, not with shapes, colors, or materials. Anything can be employed by the artist to set the work into play—including shapes, colors or materials—but the form of presentation itself should have no value, formally or otherwise, independent of its role as a vehicle for the idea of the work, even if we must consider that ‘vehicle’ as part of the idea of the work. (Ah, the dialectical beauty of it all!) Thus, when you approach the work you are approaching the idea (and therefore, the intention) of the artist directly. An ‘idea’, of course, as an artwork, can constitute a cultural force that is as contingent (within the web of belief) as it is complex, and when I have said that anything can be used by (or as) a work of art, I mean just that: a play within the signifying process conceptually cannot be established, nor limited, by the traditional constraints of morphology, media, or objecthood, even as what it has to say is shaped by the limits which permit itself to be manifest in the world. It is precisely here where art is a reflection on existence. It is by resisting those limits, confounding them and reforming them that it defines what those less concerned can happily call ‘creativity’. If art has human value it is because it is capable of asking questions which other activities cannot. In art the question of existence is not an academic puzzle, it is actually manifested, reflected upon, and made visible in its own process and result in the world.

Art can manifest itself in all of the ways in which human intention can manifest itself. It is in this regard that human existence is recorded and reflected upon. The task for artists is to put into play works of art unfettered by the limited kinds of meanings which crafted objects permit, and succeed in having them become not simply things of a discourse that demonstrate a search for authority and validation, but the production of artists as authors within a discourse, one concretized through subjective commitment and comprised of the making process. It is the historically defined agency of the artist working within a practice that sees itself as such a process, wherein an artist’s work becomes believable as art within society. The ability of that process to see itself constitutes the moment of reflection in which humanity’s existence is brought into view. To do that, work must satisfy deeper structures of our culture than that surface which reads in the market as tradition and continuity. Here is where ‘authenticity’ finds its voice and form. As Michel Foucault has said, ‘Indeed, it is along this vertical direction of existence, and according to the structures of temporality, that the authentic and inauthentic forms of existence can best be allocated. This self-transcendence of the existent in its temporal movement, this transcendence designated by the vertical axis of the imaginary, can be lived as a wrenching away from the bases of the existence itself. Then we see crystallizing all those themes of immortality, of survival, of pure love, of unmediated communication between minds. Or it can be lived, on the contrary, as “transcendence,” as an imminent plunge from the dangerous pinnacle of the present.’

The more enriched our understanding of that ‘text’ of art becomes, so does our understanding of culture. A focus on meaning, by necessity, has focused our concerns on a variety of issues around language and context. These issues pertain to the reception and production of works of art themselves. That aspect of the questioning process some thirty years after I began my work, which some have since called ‘institutional critique,’ began here, and it originated with Conceptual art’s earliest works. It is but one of its consequential aspects. As I said at the beginning of my remarks today, these ongoing comments on this process, which some recognize as constituting a theory, really cannot be separated from the works which informed them.

The Second Investigation was my response to this situation. While I felt such work as ‘One and Three Chairs’ had initiated such a questioning process, it was increasingly limited by this new reading being given to work using photography because of the work of other artists in the following years using photography. The Second Investigation work used as its ‘form of presentation’ anonymous advertisements in public media such as newspapers, magazines, billboards, handbills, and, as well, television advertising. This is understood to be the first known use of such a context for the production of artworks, and it should be seen as something specific and quite different from the billboard art which followed in the next decade, where this presentational strategy was often used as an end in itself. The content of the advertisements I utilized in 1968 were based on a ‘taxonomy of the world’ developed by Roget as The Synopsis of Categories for use in his thesaurus. Each ad was an entry from this synopsis, which, in effect, put into the world the fragments of its own description. What this initiated, of course, was a questioning of the ontology of artworks: the role of context, of language, of institutional framing, of reception. For me, the concerns of this work focused clearly on what was to remain a central concern of my art.

Yet, limited as I have acknowledged it was in some regards, the ‘tautology’ which I employed at the beginning of Conceptual art was a useful device in blocking the ‘mirror effect’ which can compromise works which utilize elements from daily life (even if it was language) and do so without telegraphing the knowledge that it was art to the viewer based on the choice of morphology or media. For my project the meaning of this work could not be established a priori by a tradition which preceded it. The need to re-constitute art as a questioning process necessitated it. The descriptive role of art was put into disequilibrium: one could construct ‘a picture of relations’ (even if dynamic or contingent) and use it as a ‘test’ by putting it into play within the meaning-system of art. Such a work proved not to be an illustration but a demonstration, a test, and in so doing it told us some things about art and culture, and the function and role of both in society.

In summation, it was apparent to me by the mid-60’s that the issue for new work was not around the materialization or de-materialization of a work, in fact, it was not even concerned with materials. The issue which defined my work, as well as that activity which became known as Conceptual art, was the issue of signification. What are the questions pertaining to the function of meaning in the production and reception of works of art? What is the application and what is the limit of language as a model, in both the theory and the production of actual works? Then, following from that, what is the role of context, be it architectural, psychological or institutional, on the social, cultural and political reading of work? It was these issues which separated Conceptual art from the modernist agenda which preceded it, and it is this non-prescriptive practice which has remained flexible enough to endure and, quite obviously, continues to provide a basis for Conceptual art’s ongoing relevance to recent art practice. Indeed, what I alluded to before, I find it interesting that when I started my activity I had to give it a special name, ‘Conceptual art’ (which was meant to be only descriptive but now seems partly apologetic) but the work of younger artists now can just be called art.

As artists we all begin to construct with what is given. We take, we steal, we appropriate fragments of meaning from the detritus of culture and construct other meanings, our own. In the same sense, all writers write with words invented by others. One uses words, all having prior meanings, to make paragraphs which have a meaning of one’s own. As artists, we steal not only words or images, virtually anything at all. As I mentioned a moment ago, it was clear by the mid-60’s that the existing institutionalized form of art, the paradigm of painting and sculpture, could no longer itself provide for the possibility of making ‘a paragraph of one’s own.’ It had, for artists, become the sign and signage of the ideospace of modernism: an over-enriched context of historicized meaning institutionally signifying itself and collapsing new meanings under its own weight. What I realized, and this is what I believe my work shows, was that by reducing any ingredient of cultural prior meaning to being a smaller constructive element (functioning as a ‘word’ element, one could say) I could then construct other meanings on another level, producing ‘a paragraph of my own’ from what is culturally given and still remain within the context of art sufficiently enough to effect it. Once such work succeeds in being seen as art, it has altered it. This has been a basic aspect of my practice and has, for over forty years, necessitated some form of theft, now called appropriation, as is evidenced throughout my work.

No one better defined one important aspect of artistic practice than Kierkegaard, in 1843, when he stated, ‘The difficulty facing an existing individual is how to give his existence the continuity without which everything simply vanishes’ to which he then provided his own answer: ‘The goal of movement for an existing individual is to arrive at a decision, and to renew it.’ What we are discussing, of course, is something basic to artistic practice: repetition. Kierkegaard’s point, ‘The dialectic of repetition is easy; for what is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but precisely the fact that is has been gives to repetition the character of novelty.’ Perhaps the question, both for artists and for philosophers, is how one can satisfy the decision of our practice and do so without the a priori meaning which our traditions imply by their own forms.

Finally, for reasons quite similar to why Kierkegaard needed literature to ask philosophical questions at one moment in history, those reasons have no less relevance now for me as an artist. The philosopher who turns to art, as Kierkegaard did, shares the same space, is forced to confront the same modus operandi, as the artist who sees his or her project as having a philosophical dimension in a period in which speculative philosophy has lost its relevance. It seems to me such speculative questions, which once comprised philosophy completely, must now be manifested, not simply asserted. What I mean by manifested is that they be anchored to the world by locating themselves within that cultural discourse, art, which reflects as it forms consciousness. That is, such questions must be manifested in a way which reflects what we can acknowledge as ‘the real’ since they are linked to that horizon of meaning, one we call culture, that is the constructive web of our social reality: it is there where all of our consciousness is formed. Because of that, the once-called ‘visual arts’ have evolved into being a much larger context, and clearly one no longer limited to one sense, visual or otherwise, if indeed that was ever simply true, in which all our inherited cultural forms are put into philosophical play. It is there that an engaged project on meaning proceeds without an academic or formal prescriptive prejudice or agenda, satisfying at least Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, as well as most likely a few others. One pauses and considers Beckett’s comment in Texts for Nothing: ‘It’s the end what gives the meaning’ being locked in continuous play with Ad Reinhardt’s well-known statement: “In art, the end is always the beginning.”

And, to end this, I’ll offer two last thoughts. The first is from C.D. Broad, Wittgenstein’s first philosophy professor at Cambridge: ‘…the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.’ And, finally, Willard V.O.Quine: ‘A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word – ‘Everything’.’