Art & Photography: Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth, Four Colors Four Words, 1966

Joseph Kosuth: Amnesia: various, luminous, fixed is at Sprüth Magers London until 14 February 2015.
This exhibition comes as something of a surprise: I have long been familiar with Kosuth's dryly witty conceptual art; I have, too, long been aware that he made work in neon; nevertheless, I have never really thought of him as a 'colourful' artist. Installation pictures of this show prove otherwise.
Kosuth is one of the pioneers of conceptual art: his 1969 essay Art after Philosophy is one of the foundational texts of the movement: All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually... Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he states that “if someone calls it art, it’s art”).
Works in this exhibition include characteristic tautological propositions as well as meditations on the works of Sigmund Freud and Samuel Beckett.
Watch a short video about this exhibition featuring an interview with Kosuth; read a reviews by Waldemar Januszczak and J.J. Charlesworth.