Joseph Kosuth: The Question

Sprüth Magers (London), Jan-Mar/25

Joseph Kosuth’s work, One and Three Chairs (1965), is an iconic illustration of what has become known as Conceptual Art — an art movement that prioritises the idea over the object. Like Marcel Duchamp, Kosuth is often credited with shifting the paradigm of contemporary art and, therefore, blamed by some for the proliferation of artworks that feel elusive or impenetrable to the viewer without extensive reading or explanation.

Kosuth’s current exhibition at Sprüth Magers (London) opens with One and Three Doors (1965): a physical door, a photograph of that door, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word “door”, introducing the viewer to Kosuth’s investigation into the nature of art. He is concerned with the conceptual frameworks that allow an art object to exist: how we interpret it, the language we use to define it, and the societal structures that shape those interpretations. The door, in this context, is more than just an object – it exists simultaneously as a tangible thing, an image, and an idea, demonstrating how meaning is constructed through the interplay of reality, representation, and language.

He continues this exploration in Text/Context (1978–79), adopting the visual language of the advertising industry. In a series of twenty photographs depicting urban billboards, Kosuth replaces the original billboard images with text that directly addresses the viewer, revealing how meaning is constructed. By shifting language into an everyday setting, he exposes the role of context in influencing our perception and interpretation of a text.

Much of Kosuth’s use of text takes the form of neon works inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the fetish object and Samuel Beckett’s literary experiments with absence and repetition. Texts for Nothing (Waiting for-) #15m references Waiting for Godot, a play in which meaning is deliberately deferred as characters endlessly wait for someone (Godot) who never arrives. This work is juxtaposed with a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a reference to Romanticism’s contemplation of the infinite. But while Beckett constructs meaning through absence, Kosuth exposes meaning as contingent, not only on language itself but on the structures that frame it.

This exhibition covers over 60 years of Kosuth’s practice from the mid-1960s to the present. His most recent work, The Question (J.M.) (2024) – a large clock with the phrase “We come back, then, to the main question”, a reference to John McTaggart, philosopher and author of a famous paper on “The Unreality of time” (1908)  – explains the exhibition’s central inquiry. Positioned in the first, which is also the last room, as the viewer needs to go back to entrance, it acts as both an introduction and a conclusion, looping back to Kosuth’s investigation into the meaning of art. This self-referential gesture reinforces the exhibition’s premise: that the question of what art is, remains open-ended, perpetually unfolding through language, context, and interpretation.

Kosuth is a trickster, and visiting the exhibition feels as if one has stepped into a game of semiotics where meaning is constantly shifting, and the viewer themselves actively participates in the process of the construction and dissolution of meaningfulness.

Ana Teles for London Art Walk
February 2025