Saturday, April 30, 2011

Nothing, Nothing, Something

A group of text based works by Joseph Kosuth are currently on view at the Sean Kelly Gallery. Language based Concept art has always intrigued me, so I was pleased to contemplate the “Nothing Paintings" selected from his well known series 'Titled (Art as Idea as Idea)’. These ten wall works present the idea of “Nothing” in paradoxically tangible form. 

Nothing is present in a series of 4’ x 4’ square format works on which definitions of the word “nothing” appear in white text on a black ground. Definitions range from one sentence to more extended meanings including literary usages of the word. Encountering them is like happening upon a Kosuthian grammar lesson on a classroom blackboard.

As his primary medium, Kosuth has long employed text to question traditional aesthetics and challenge the notion that the physical manifestation of an artwork is its essence. The format is derived from painting, but conventional materials are substituted for mounted photographs on paper. Is it even appropriate to call them images? Unlike a painting each presents dictionary text through photographic reproduction. Unlike a dictionary they isolate single word entries on the scale of painting and the aesthetic of minimalist abstraction. Hung like paintings, but without half tones, gestural marks, color or texture, they employ the visual language of print material. Operating between the two, how then, are they to be “read,” as text, or formally, as abecedarian abstractions?
However reductive, Kosuth does not fail to neglect visual concerns altogether. There is a controlling minimal aesthetic throughout. Careful arrangement is evident in their uniform installation, composition, and color. All text is systematically centered on a void ground and the group coalesces into a total unit. Their austere surfaces and equidistant spacing call to mind the serial works of Donald Judd.   
This anonymous format seeks to question the assumption of the artist as the special creator of a special kind of object. Here the artist becomes nothing. As mechanical reproductions they undermine or deny the supposed originality of the artist and the work they produce. Absent signs of manual intervention, the artist becomes a non-presence. Now the artist exists invisibly behind acts of selection and presentation of ready-made ideas. This is not creation ex nihilo.
 Ironically these works come with a certificate of ownership (not to be exhibited) which thereby advertises each, not merely as a unique objet d’art, but a genuine Kosuth. Does such documentation elevate them to the dignity of art? The provenance of Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein is apparent here. Yet those producers served up such writs with tongue in cheek. Perhaps these certificates undermine the very principles of Concept art by exposing its status as a commodity. Idea becomes object, art-value devolves into exchange-value. Am I buying an object or an idea?  It’s pleasantly absurd to ponder purchasing “Nothing.” Will I get something for my money?



Ironically “Nothing” is some-thing. “Nothing” exists as the work itself and the text found on it. Yet, the various physical manifestations of “nothing” can never fully point to the true meaning of no-thing. The being of nothing is an absence, a lack, a visual and material non-presence. Nothing is an “is not.” Following this logic, just writing “nothing” becomes tantalizing! The immaterial idea perpetually gets trapped and contradicted in its mediating form. This is an oft criticized dilemma of concept art but we might rather see it as a fruitfully vexing predicament to ponder.
Underlying appearances is an idea to which each definition refers. By emphasizing the intangible, word art hopes to become a libretto to be read silently or aloud where the true artwork is reconstituted as an idea in the viewer’s mind. Kosuth’s verbal intention and minimal aesthetic effectively displace visual concerns and art is transformed from object to idea as invisible thought displaces retinal sensation.    
Art, that is concept art, that is an Idea, has an intrinsic tension then between materiality and the content to which materiality can only attempt to point. Semantic reference is thwarted. A rupture emerges between object and idea. Kosuth manipulates this disparity throughout this series providing us, for example, with a definition of “Art” which looks nothing like the meaning of the given textual description. The gap between idea and object in these works becomes a microcosm for the hoped for global break Kosuth sought between his word based oeuvre, and the entire image based tradition he sought to repudiate. Past and present, symbol and referent, both inextricably rent in two.
All in all these works don’t fail signify “nothing,” visually and conceptually, as the text might suggest.

Another text work of literary inspiration is Ulysses, 18 Titles and Hours from 1998. The names of Joyce’s eighteen characters which form the titles of the book’s chapters ornament the gallery walls in neon. Time stamps appended to each reify the novel’s non-linear narrative time in concrete form.  To epic effect, Kosuth scatters the eponymous words as the visual analog to Joyce’s streams of consciousness. Visual text and temporal performance are brought together as Kosuth’s formal arrangement captures the textual cadences of Mallarmé’s A Coup de Dés



            Lastly is a new installation which runs along the perimeter of the ceiling of the central exhibition space. Here one enters the void of Samuel Beckett’s literary psyche as his fragments  text festoon the walls. Beckett’s literary consciousness ramifies across one’s visual field as a stream of words. 


Called 'Texts (Waiting for-) Nothing',  the title is a play on Beckett’s most famous work. Stop waiting and go see this exhibition before it closes on April 30.  But beware, once trapped in the abyss of language, there may be no exit!