Joseph Kosuth’s Dynamic Didactic Chromatics at Mazzoleni
BY NICHOLAS FORREST | JULY 11, 2017
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Colour in Contextual Play
Mazzoleni London is currently presenting an utterly fascinating installation conceived by American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. Titled “Colour in Contextual Play,” the exhibition is part of a series in which Kosuth installs contemporaries or forebears, in this case works by post-war masters which he has juxtaposed with new works from his seminal text series “Art as Idea as Idea”
The post-war masters in the exhibition were originally proposed by influential Arte Povera artist Emilio Prini, who was invited to mount an exhibition for Mazzoleni. He selected Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Kosuth himself, and Piero Manzoni. A few months before his untimely passing in 2016, Prini requested that Joseph Kosuth replace him.
Joseph Kosuth is not only one of the originators pioneers of conceptual and installation art, he is also responsible for initiating language-based works and appropriation strategies. Since he emerged in the mid-1960s he has continued express the nature of art and language and their relationship to each other, using text to question the very definition of art.
“Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art . . . That’s because the word ‘art’ is general and the word ‘painting’ is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art,” he has said.
According to Mazzoleni, “Colour in Contextual Play” investigates the idea of colour which is a theme that is explored by each of the post-war masters, both conceptually and technically. It is described as an homage to all five artists that is divided into chromatic and achromatic parts and includes sections in which the wall colours match works of the same hue.
The new text works by Kosuth in “Colour in Contextual Play” comprise dictionary definitions of the colours “white,” “black,” “grey,” “red,” “green,” “yellow,” and “violet.” Pairing Kosuth’s works with works by the other artists utilizing those colours, “Colour in Contextual Play” asks the viewer to question the very act and nature of viewing itself.
Colour is more than just a hue or frequency if light. Colour has the power to change the way we experience shape, form, shape, and time. The brilliance of “Colour in Contextual Play” is that it reveals the power of colour through the work of a range of artists who interact, harness, and work with colour in a variety of different ways.
To find out more about “Colour in Contextual Play,” BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with Kosuth and asked him a few questions.
What is the history and motivation behind your interest in presenting installations which showcase the works of contemporaries or forebears and how did you end up creating an installation that focuses on works by artists proposed by Arte Povera artist Emilio Prini?
My motivation exists on a few levels. I like to show the linguistic play in all works of art even in those comprised of other works of art. It's also valuable to remind works based on modernist suppositions that the window pane of the painting is, in fact, not the edge of the known world in art. When a painting is reduced to one element within a construction of a larger work in a sense one liberates it. I like to show by hijacking curatorial methodology that this methodology is not “objective” and that, unlike art historians, artists construct meaning by taking subjective responsibility for the surplus meaning their juxtapositions generate. This is unlike art historians, who are forced to engage with art with the presumptions of a faux-science and with the presumptions of “objectivity”. There are more reasons but these should suffice.
Could you explain your theories and ideas on colour and how have expressed and reflected these with the site-specific installation that you have produced specifically for Mazzoleni London which places your monochrome works in company with works by the other artists utilizing these colours?
For me color is just there in a natural sense and is only usable, by me, to construct meaning. This usually is in “counting off” in a code of articulation. As a basis for the making of artworks color is pretty much 'used up' by all of the conventional ways it has been focused on within modernism. But artists are capable, when doing authentic work, to invent new ways of doing anything. As for your question, my works are not really monochrome but rather achromatic.
What is the conceptual basis and physical nature of the works in your “Art as Idea as Idea” series in terms of your ongoing exploration of the production and role of language and meaning within art and how does the series connect and relate to the theme of the overall installation?
I thought that by putting into play my works from the time of these paintings, mostly all of the same time period, several things were revealed. The contrast bares the device of my post-modern practice with paintings representing the last great blast of modernism. The definitions of color also exposes the interesting issues around language and experience. Definitions of color really show the limits of language.
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