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A labyrinth into which I can venture — Kosuth at Sean Kelly
Polonius: What do you read my lord? In the context of Joseph Kosuth's monumental installation at the Sean Kelly Gallery a quote from Michael Foucault (1969) that appears at the entrance to Kosuth's blacksheetrock maze seems pointed: Aren't you sure of what you are saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you… By way of contrast, Kosuth offers a consistent yet evolving position that aligns his earliest word pieces from the sixties within a grand scheme that includes his most recent endeavors. It's been a while since French Poststructuralist philosophers maintained a strong presence here, but for those of us who engaged their thinkingwhenit was au currant, that moment is still resonant. …do not ask me to remain the same… In the present climate, the reappearance of Foucault and Derrida is sobering. Barthes, however, remains hidden. A fragment of white neon visible from the entryreminds us of: …the great worth of bad work. If we choose to follow: "History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare… which wraps around the left corner, wewill bypass Wittgensteinon the right: We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. which brings us to a cul de sac where the first of Musil's texts is centrally laid out: The human being is a far less disinterested metaphysician than is commonly admitted. A dull accompanying feeling of the strange situation rarely leaves him. Death, the tiny-ness of the whole world, the questionableness of the illusion of ego, the senselessness of existence which grows more pressing with the years: those are questions which the average person turns away with scorn, and which he nevertheless feels surrounding his whole life like the walls of a black room. The buzzing of the neon, along with the whiffs of noxious gas it seems to emit, threatens to derail the whole experience. It requires a concerted act of will to go on; the terms of engagement are entirely of our own making. Some texts jump out as we move into the labyrinth. Those highlighted on silver, like most of the Wittgenstein, or the unattributed texts in neon, demand to be read immediately. Others, like the texts of Deleuze, wrap around rooms continually, near the ceiling or along the baseboards, defying our ability to read them in their entirety. We catch glimpses of them in provocative chance meetings with other texts. And still others, like the densely florid italics of Kafka's textual fragments, generate an overall pattern that can be easily glanced over. There is no such thing as a pretty good omelet. French proverb The word context? appears on a signpost in the corner. Like signposts, which relay the themes of the wall texts in many of the successive 20 or so rooms, it serves as a guide through the labyrinth. collecting and comparing both in white neon, accompany the word context? verbally grounding us in our experience of the exhibition. No matter how irreducible the content of a work is to its intention – if only for the simple reason that no matter how carefully thought through, no intention is ever destined to be fully realizable in a representation – only a rigid dogmatism would disqualify the category of intention as a moment in the work of art. Intentions have their proper place within the dialectic. Theodor Adorno An inner process stands in need of outward criteria. Wittgenstein Nearby, hanging low on the first wall, a small, framed work from the 1970's presents a stack of words in 5 languages: function These framed word stacks, of which there were originally 85, like the signposts, reappear in various rooms throughout the exhibition. The field cannot be well seen within the field. Ralph Waldo Emerson Once we realize that what characterizes the flow of things does not necessarily, cannot necessarily be extended to the whole itself, we are no longer so lost in the cosmos. David Walsh contributed by Brendan Purcell An inner process stands in need of outward criteria. Ludwig Wittgenstein There are moments where Kosuth seems to be telling us how to look at his work. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. Ludwig Wittgenstein Near the signpost text? : A philosophy is characterized more by the formation of its problems than by its solutions of them. Susanne Langer But unlike philosophical reflection, which aims to go back to its own source, the reflections we are dealing with here concern rays whose only source is hypothetical. And in seeking to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythological thought, this essay, which is also both too brief and too long, has had to conform to the requirements of that thought and to respect its rhythm. It follows that this book on myths is itself a kind of myth. Freud quoted by Jacques Derrida The queer resemblance between a philosophical investigation (perhaps especially in mathematics) and an aesthetic one. Ludwig Wittgenstein
DEFINE –a white text on black sheen (from 1967) embedded in the wall between DJ Spooky quoting Patti Smith and: Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement. Simone Weill Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Soren Kierkegaard The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions. Susan Sontag The white neon compiling floats in the third room, which opens in two directions. If you steal from one person it's plagiarism, if you steal from many its research. Wilson Mizner As comprehension diminishes with the density of apprehension, many of the quotes begin to seem glib; it's a relief to find: In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering. William James The concepts of purposelessness beauty or of beautiful things which continue to play an important role in our view of art… Robert Musil leads us again into a cul de sac. a signpost part? What I tell you three times is true. Lewis Carroll It was for this purpose that our rationalizations were created. The whole world is full of them, indeed the whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. The attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached – Franz Kafka Above the Kafka, a fragment of Deleuzeruns across the top of the wall: … there’s an image of thought that changes a lot, that’s changed a lot through history. By the image of thought I don’t mean its method but something deeper that’s always taken for granted, a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think, and to ‘orient oneself in thought.’ However one sees it, we’re on the plane of immanence; but should we go around erecting vertical axes and trying to stand up straight or, rather, stretch out, run out along the horizon, keep pushing the plane further out? And what sort of verticality do we want, one that gives us something to contemplate or one that makes us reflect or communicate? and trails off around the corner, leading us to the spot where “Portrait of a Man” byHans Memling hangs upside down; covered with X's, it's titled “Cathexis.” On the wall opposite: Sisyphus was basically a happy man. Albert Camus The secret has a privileged but quite variable relation to perception and the imperceptible, the secret relates first of all to certain contents. The content is too big for its form. Deleuze and Guattari Another signpost with the word sign? Centrally located, a line from Robert Musil enables us to reflect upon how little some things changedespite time. The person who thinks artistically today is threatened by the person who does not think artistically and by the artist who does not think. The signpost stands opposite a cul de sac where a text on glass is superimposed over one inscribed on the wall, for the most part canceling each other out. Kafka's vertical stacks of italicized words stubbornly remain a pattern unless we make the effort to decipher them: There remained the inexplicable mass of rock – the legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable. If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. Abraham Maslow Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely, their silence. and though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might have escaped from their singing, but from their silence, certainly never. Franz Kafka Meets us at the end of a cul de sac. A narrow hallway holds works from Documenta IX in 1992. Brendan Behan begins: The author's first duty is to let down his country, From here the labyrinth opens up in many directions. We are again confronted by Musil, wrapping around the edge of a jutting corner: Progress would be wonderful if only it would stop. above which stands Wittgenstein's: It is only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems. next to Sartre's: Hell is other people. while in the corner another signpost greets us with occasion? and one of the few female voices, Virginia Wolfe intones: On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. SELF DEFINED SUBJECT in neon (1966) leads us on to another room. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. Djuna Barnes Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it and that is true anywhere in the world. Andrew Young Even the most fastidious of minds intent on remaining cognizant of their place in the labyrinth will become disoriented trying to read the large white letters winding around just below the ceiling. The text speaks to the problem of translating "unheimlich" (the uncanny) into English while retaining the sense of the strangely familiar root – heim (home) – buried in the heart of the German word. Next, The intention consisted above all in forgetting the hand, since fundamentally even your hand is chance. Marcel Duchamp is reconsidered in light of Bruno Schulz's: For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase… which fades into the shadows of the adjacent corner. Near the western exit, Frank Lloyd Wright's: Pictures deface walls oftener that they decorate them. leads to an opening where a nine-square grid of cancelled text from a 1987 Whitney Museum installation occupies the entire wall. A single line of italicized text runs underneath and is thereby cancelled out by it. In the center of the room a fragment of buzzing neon advises: testing the torso by the leg that is missing The signpost here is object? Nearly illegible between the extremes of light and shadow, Voltaire, positioned so that his words wrap over edges and corners, remains in character: People will cease to commit atrocities only when they cease to believe absurdities. What representations (mise en scène) do dreams provide for 'if', 'because', 'just as', 'although', 'either/or', and all other conjunctions without which we cannot understand sentences or speeches? Freud quoted by Jacques Derrida Near the signpost topics? a fragment from Deleuze: … without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have the line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are, geometric. runs part of the way over the Thing-in-itself is found in its Truth through its immediacy XX (1993), a clothesline hung with clippings from newspapers both domestic and foreign, and then ends. Above, a quote from J. William Fulbright: In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine. The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. Dante Alighieri Having just seen Dona Nelson's exhibition Brain Stain, the neon piece hanging above Dante: discovering the picture by the stain on the back has particular resonance. It signaled the presence of a kind of network of thought, as if a family of minds were staging a reunion. Other coincidences occurred both inside and outside Kosuth's labyrinth. Su-Mei Tse's sculpture “Proposition de detour” at Peter Blum Gallery next door proved to be its antipode: a carpet cut into the pattern of a maze, whose trajectory is singular, centering. Almost every educated man of our time was a mason by profession and infallible in the matter of laying foundations. That however, was not what our scholar was concerned to prove: for he maintained the Great Wall alone would provide for the first time in the history of mankind a secure foundation for a new tower of Babel. First the wall, therefore, and then the tower. Franz Kafka Here we pick up Deleuze's text again: …you see I think concepts involve two other dimensions, percepts and affects. That's what interests me, not To continue reading we must wind our way back to where we've just come from images. Percepts aren't perceptions, and then the text ends. they’re packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever Obscured by the 9-square grid of cancelled text in the object? room it resumes again on the other side: experiences them. Affects aren't feeling, they are becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else). Affects, percepts, and concepts are three inseparable forces, running from art into philosophy into art. The text ends above “Cathexis,” next to the signpost sign? Now that we have been ledback to a familiar place, werecognizenot only that the meaning of some previously encountered texts and fragments of texts has shifted, deepened by the experience of the succeeding rooms, but also that we are seeing what had previously been invisible: Yes, here's what my senses have learned all by themselves; things have no meaning – they have existence. … Fernando Pessoa location? signpost When you get there, there is no there, there. Gertrude Stein Ideas too are a life and a world. G.C. Lichtenberg Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. George Jean Nathan A Brechtian Maxim: do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones. Walter Benjamin For the value of thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. Theodore Adorno It might be that we are all tattooed savages since Sophocles. But there is more to art that the straightness of lines and the perfection of surfaces. Plasticity of style is not as large as the entire idea. We have too many things and not enough forms. Gustave Flaubert contradicting in neon in the cul de sac, where a virgin granite surface obscures a clean white text, “The Adelp: I repeated, ‘yes the place where’ ” which disappears behind the blank granite “ ‘angle, coexist. I revealed my discovery to no one, but I did return.’ ” We are sinful not merely because we have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten from the tree of life. The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt. Franz Kafka Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Rosa Luxemburg in the hallway leading back to the signpost occasion?: Far from harboring the secret of the being of the world, language itself is a world, is itself a being – a world and a being to the second power, since it does not speak of being and of the world and therefore redoubles their enigma instead of dissipating it. Merleau Ponty quoted by Michael Pelias a running fragment of Deleuzeinlarge grey letters: Who isn't grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. opposite to Wittgenstein's: In order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of the limit. which is surely to be overlooked the first time around since it's visible only on the way out. For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself greater than he is. Goethe signpost whole? If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know. Mario Vargas Llosa Consciousness occurs each time there is a surface such that it can produce an image. Jacques Lacan Our religion, morality and philosophy are decadent forms of man. The countermovement: art. Friedrich Nietzsche It is the philosopher who has to keep on the move traversing the landscape of language this way and that, in an effort to find his or her way about. Wittgenstein's own account of his own difficulties in presenting a picture of grammar is thus closely related to his metaphysical accounts of the nature of language itself: as a complex terrain, a city, a maze, a labyrinth: 'our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares or old and new houses… trails off in the next room, the final room in Kosuth's labyrinthine world. Here we are greeted by “Mondrian II” (2006), a large-scale adaptation in glass and silkscreen of Mondrian's field of vision at the seaside. Abandoningtheir formerlylinear format,here words float freely in white on the dark black bands of Mondrian's pluses and minuses. Liberated from syntax, the words have lost their ability to connote and we are now obliged to determine our own meaning in a world of (literally) floating signifiers. I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right. Tallulah Bankhead It was Kosuth's diatribes against formalism in the 60's that helped to pave the way for the climate of the eighties, where text and image proliferated in the galleries and the notion prevailed that the visual was not capable of communicating content on its own. In light of Kosuth's textual position, “Mondrian II” appears revolutionary. The paradox Kosuth leads us to in the end is a conflation of visual and written language. The composition of the visual has taken precedence over the syntax of the written and for Kosuth this means having come full circle. First of all, ‘talking isn’t seeing,’ a difference that means that by saying what one can’t see, one’s taking language to its ultimate limit, raising it to the power of the unspeakable. Then there’s the primacy of the third person, the ‘he’ or neuter, the impersonal ‘one,’ relative to the first two persons – there’s the refusal of any linguistic personology. Lastly, there’s the theme of the Outside: the relation, and indeed ‘nonrelation,’ to an Outside that’s further from us than any external world, and thereby closer than any inner world. All through the exhibition I kept looking for Barthes, thinking about the "Responsibility of Forms" which was so influential during Kosuth's early years. In it, Barthes tackled the question, "Is Painting a Language?" in an essay so named. His attempt to find an order he could call the language of painting stipulated with the terms of written language proved inconclusive; it leaves off with the thought that a language cannot communicate by analogy. With the labyrinth of minds Kosuth winds his way to a coming to terms with Barthes' argument. In configuring a text within the world of a painting's composition in "Mondrian II" he reveals the absurdity in Barthes approach, though Barthes remains here as "a guest who persists in staying at the party without uttering a word". As we turn to leave, Molière's: Grammar, which can govern even kings. gives us a perspective on power relations as we begin to make our way back to the beginning: Have I been understood? Nietzsche The last thing we see before leaving is the beginning of a text by Walter Benjamin that runs from room to room: I am unpacking my library, yes I am… LINKS
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