REVIEW: JOSEPH KOSUTH AT SPRÜTH MAGERS
TEXT BY TANYA Mascarenhas
Installation view: Joseph Kosuth’s The Question at Sprüth Magers. Photography by the author.
Joseph Kosuth’s solo exhibition The Question at Sprüth Magers‘ London gallery encompasses light, philosophy and the new. The American artist presents new ideas in an ever-moving world in relation to art, its rejection of the object form and its public. Upon entering the exhibition, bold, neon signs present themselves as textual, yet permeate the conscience with a myriad of philosophical musings. Art and philosophy manifest in tandem, coming to life with the allure of luminous text.
Installation view: Joseph Kosuth’s The Question at Sprüth MagersPhotography by the author.
The political and cultural happenings of the 1960s and ‘70s allow Kosuth to propel his art into a broader social and political context, presenting a temporality that literally and figuratively moves with the times. The collective works allude to postmodernism, referencing the collapse of traditional aesthetic categories in the latter half of the twentieth century that gave way to a new aesthetic regime. Kosuth’s strong focus on language plays with a modern reality, posing the question, or questions in the plural.
Joseph Kosuth, The Question (J.M), 2024. All rights reserved to the artist and Sprüth Magers, Photography by the author.
One of the main works that directly addresses this theme is The Question (J.M), which presents an enlarged clock inscribed with a quote with John McTaggart: “We come back, then, to the main question”. The movement of the clock’s hands and its mechanics are strongly in line with a universal understanding of time; time moves in a linear and standardised fashion and returns, yet again, to the notion of the question.
Left: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Doors [Ety./Hist/], 1965. Right: detail. All rights reserved to the artist and Sprüth Magers, Photography by the author.
The viewer enters the exhibition through a door that acts as an entry point as well as citing the work One and Three Doors [Ety./Hist/] (1965), which in turn addresses a physical object through its use of static photographic form and the dictionary definition of “door”. Through numerous literary and linguistic allusions, the viewer becomes a reader, or viewer-reader. These viewer-readers are conditioned to experience what could be considered sublime sensations, perhaps emerging from an overwhelming engagement with language, presenting itself as a series of signs and overbearing philosophical thoughts. Works such as #II49. (On Color/Multi #2)’, present text reading “II49.The coloured intermediary between two colours” in white, cobalt blue, ruby red, yellow, orange, violet and green neon. The work appears playful and alluring, with each colour associated with a different word and sensation, drawing on both objectivity and subjectivity.
Joseph Kosuth, #II49. (On Color/Multi #2), 1991. All rights reserved to the artist and Sprüth Magers, Photography by the author.
Joseph Kosuth, Fetishism Corrected #2’ (Blue), 1988. All rights reserved to the artist and Sprüth Magers, Photography by the author.
Sigmund Freud’s influence on the artist in the 1980s allowed for the production of a body of work directly addressing themes of psychoanalysis, again drawing on the subject/object. Works such as Fetishism Corrected #2’ (Blue) draw on the Freudian object fetishism of a subject’s relationship to the self through an object, which, in this case, can emerge from interpretation of the art object, or object as/of art. Once again, there are no intermediaries, where everything is either/or. The exhibition’s rooms are spacious yet the viewers’ interactions with the was individual and as collective, bringing together a whirlwind of concepts, language and forms that become increasingly familiar. With these actions being all too purposeful, we are invited to carry on the question, into the complexities and realities of our world.