26 November 2011

A key moment in Conceptual Art

Arguably Joseph Kosuth's best known work - One and Three Chairs, 1965 -
This static composition represents an idea three ways. It addressed what conceptual artists saw as a crisis of reconciling  the realisation of concepts with the concepts themselves - and it did this reconciliation by including not just a photo of the chair but the dictionary definition as one of the "actual" chairs - so that the text was both a literal and metaphorical focus in the work of art.

For decades thereafter, conceptual artists used text to convey their ideas.  Art and Text  (the book, 2009) will tell you so much more... a review is here. It's because of the overwhelming amount of information on the subject that my essay is confined to handwritten text in the first instance.

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