Joseph Kosuth

Overview

As a prodigy of sorts, with his work One and Three Chairs in 1965, Kosuth began a career of questioning the nature of art. He and his peers (the conceptual artists) championed not the formalist aesthetics and craftsmanship of the previous decades, but the notion that the idea behind a work was to be revered. Throughout Europe and North America, Kosuth’s work has served in a series of retrospectives; now, in his first solo show in Australia (may I say, a few decades late), Kosuth will occupy both Anna Schwartz’s gallery space and the cavernous halls of CarriageWorks.

The works exhibited serve as a dialogue between the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and the survival-of-the fittest perversion of those theories by Friedrich Nietzsche. Darwin’s tree-of-life sketch’s logical conclusion is found in Nietzsche’s famous adage, “creating — as selecting and finishing the selected”.

Despite your knowledge of Kosuth, Darwin, or Nietzsche, the cold white neon lights against the pale grey gallery walls will strike you; these are enlightenment thoughts, real light bulb moments.