The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 257 A chair sits alongside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of the word chair. Perhaps all three are chairs, or codes for one: a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects, that is, a chair of wood. But isn't this last chair simply . . . a chair? Or, as Marcel Duchamp asked in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, does the inclusion of an object in an artwork somehow change it? If both photograph and words describe a chair, how is their functioning different from that of the real chair, and what is Kosuth's artwork doing by adding these functions together? Prodded to ask such questions, the viewer embarks on the basic processes demanded by Conceptual art.
"The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art," Kosuth has written. "Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept 'art,' . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction." Chasing a chair through three different registers, Kosuth asks us to try to decipher the subliminal sentences in which we phrase our experience of art.
Here you can hear an interview/presentation on Kosuth and conceptual art and three ways of "being a chair": http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A3228&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1
ReplyDeletethis interview was really interesting; one thing that caught my attention:
ReplyDelete"there is nothing artistic or precious about the object... Not aesthetic pleasure, but pleasure from your own thinking..."
how do you think people appreciate the experience with and/or the collective objects: 'berlin chairs'? do you think it is an aesthetic experience?
i guess this came before art was really conceptual, but interesting to think about in terms of the operation in Kosuth's work:
Critique of the Aesthetical Judgement
"In order to distinguish whether anything is beautiful or not, we refer the representation, not by the understanding to the object for cognition, but by the imagination (perhaps in conjunction with the understanding) to the subject and its feelings of pleasure or pain. The judgement of taste is thererfor not a judgement of cognition, and is consequently not logical but aesthetical, by which we understand that whose determining ground can be no other than subjective. Every reference of representations, even that of sensations, may be objective (and then it signifies the real (element) of an emperical representation), save only the reference to the feeling of pleasure and pain, by which nothing in the object is signified, but through which there is a feeling in the subject as it is affected by the representation. To apprehend a regular, purposive building by means of one's cognitive faculty (whether in a clear or a confused way of this representation) is something quite different from being conscious of this representation as connected with the sensation of satisfaction."