Жозеф Косут: Америкалық тұжырымдама суретшісінің өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American conceptual artist

Joseph Kosuth (/k//ə/'/s//uː//t//, // /'/s//uː//θ/; born January 31, 1945) is an American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and London, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including Ghent and Rome.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth had an American mother and a Hungarian father. (A relative, Lajos Kossuth, achieved notability for his role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.) Joseph Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963 Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art on a scholarship. He spent the following year in Paris and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa. He moved to New York in 1965 and attended the School of Visual Arts there until 1967. At the School of Visual Arts he made a significant impact while technically a student, influencing fellow students as well as more traditional teachers there at the time such as Mel Bochner. As Kosuth's reputation grew, he was removed from the student body and given a position as a teacher, by Silas Rhodes the founder and President of the school, in 1967. This caused a near revolt of the faculty, as he had been a disruptive presence in the opinion of many of the instructors, several who had unhappily faced his questioning of basic presumptions. His elevation to a teacher was also a result of Kosuth's outside activities, which included the co founding of the Museum of Normal Art (giving the first exposure to artists such as Robert Ryman, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven, among others) along with proselytizing and organizing artists in a direction which was later identified as the conceptual art movement. Through his art, writing and organizing, he emphasized his interest in the dialectical process of idea formation in relation to language and context. He introduced the notion that art, as he put it, "was not a question of forms and colors but one of the production of meaning." His writing began a re reading of modernism, initiating a major re evaluation of the importance of Marcel Duchamp and signaling the shift into what we now identify, in art, as post modernism. His analysis had a major impact on his practice as an artist and, soon after, on that of others. During this period he also maintained his academic interests. His position on the Faculty, Department of Fine Art, The School of Visual Arts, New York City continued until 1985. He since been Professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, 1988–90; and at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, 1991–1997. Currently he is Professor at the Kunstakademie Munich and at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Faculty of Design and Art, in Venice. He has been invited as a visiting professor and guest lecturer at various universities and institutions for nearly thirty years, some of which include: Yale University; Cornell University; New York University; Duke University; UCLA; Cal Arts; Cooper Union; Pratt Institute; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Royal Academy, Copenhagen; Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford University; University of Rome; Berlin Kunstakademie; Royal College of Art, London; Glasgow School of Art; The Hayward Gallery, London; The Sorbonne, Paris; The Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. Kosuth continued his work, writing, exhibiting and exhibition organizing and rapidly became acknowledged as one of the pioneers of Conceptual art and installation art; initiating language based works as well as photo based works and appropriation strategies since the beginning of his work in the mid 1960s. His activity has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art. Kosuth's nearly thirty five year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and the Far East, including five Documenta(s) and four Venice Biennale(s). His earliest work, the Protoinvestigations, were done when he was only twenty years old and as they are considered among the first works of the Conceptual art movement they are included in collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim, The Whitney, Centre Pompidou, The Tate Gallery, The Reina Sophia, Madrid, among many others, and constitute a youthful record in most of these major collections. Joseph Kosuth's career includes over 170 one person exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, twenty two of them by the time he was twenty five years old. In 1989 Kosuth, along with Peter Pakesch, founded The Foundation for the Arts as part of The Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. He is the President of the foundation. The foundation was established on the 50th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's death, and is a society of artists engaged, through contributions by members, in forming a collection of contemporary art in honor of and in relevance to Sigmund Freud. The foundation's exhibition space is in the former offices of Anna Freud at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna.

Kosuth belongs to a broadly international generation of conceptual artists that began to emerge in the mid 1960s, stripping art of personal emotion, reducing it to nearly pure information or idea and greatly playing down the art object. Along with Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven and others, Kosuth gives special prominence to language. His art generally strives to explore the nature of art rather than producing what is traditionally called "art". Kosuth's works are frequently self referential. He remarked in 1969:
"The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art." Kosuth's works frequently reference Sigmund Freud's psycho analysis and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. of words such as "water", "meaning", and "idea". Accompanying these photographic images are certificates of documentation and ownership (not for display) indicating that the works can be made and remade for exhibition purposes. One of his most famous works is One and Three Chairs. The piece features a physical chair, a photograph of that chair, and the text of a dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph is a representation of the actual chair situated on the floor, in the foreground of the work. The definition, posted on the same wall as the photograph, delineates in words the concept of what a chair is, in its various incarnations. In this and other, similar works, Four Colors Four Words and Glass One and Three, Kosuth forwards tautological statements, where the works literally are what they say they are. A collaboration with independent filmmaker Marion Cajori, Sept. 11, 1972 was a Minimalist portrait of sunlight in Cajori's studio. His seminal text Art after Philosophy, written in 1968–69, had a major impact on the thinking about art at the time and has been seen since as a kind of "manifesto" of Conceptual art insofar as it provided the only theoretical framework for the practice at the time. (As a result, it has since been translated into 14 languages, and included in a score of anthologies.) It was, for the twenty four year old Kosuth that wrote it, in fact more of a "agitprop" attack on Greenbergian formalism, what Kosuth saw as the last bastion of late, institutionalized modernism more than anything else. It also for him concluded at the time what he had learned from Wittgenstein dosed with Walter Benjamin among others as applied to that very transitional moment in art. In the early 1970s, concerned with his "ethnocentricity as a white, male artist", Kosuth enrolled in the New School to study anthropology. He visited the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific (made famous in studies by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski), and the Huallaga Indians in the Peruvian Amazon.

In 1992, Kosuth designed the album cover for Fragments of a Rainy Season by John Cale. Two years later, Kosuth collaborated with Ilya Kabakov to produce The Corridor of Two Banalities, shown at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. This installation included 120 tables in a row to present text somewhat symptomatic of the cultures of which they both came from.

Since 1990 Kosuth has also begun working on various permanent public commissions. In the early 1990s, he designed a Government sponsored monument to the Egyptologist Jean Francois Champollion who deciphered the Rosetta Stone in Figeac; in Japan, he took on the curatorship of a show celebrating the Tokyo opening of Barneys New York; and in Frankfurt, Germany, and in Columbus, Ohio, he conceived neon monuments to the German cultural historian Walter Benjamin. After projects at public buildings such as the Deutsche Bundesbank (1997), the Parliament House, Stockholm (1998), and the Parliament of the Brussels Capital Region (1999), Kosuth was commissioned to propose a work for the newly renovated Bundestag in 2001, he designed a floor installation with texts by Ricarda Huch and Thomas Mann for the Paul Löbe Haus [de].

Kosuth has taught widely, as a guest lecturer and as a member of faculties at the School of Visual Arts, New York City (1967–85); Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (1988–90); State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (1991–97); and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (2001–06). Currently Professor at Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Venice, Kosuth has functioned as visiting professor and guest lecturer at various universities and institutions for nearly forty years, some of which include: Yale University; Cornell University: New York University; Duke University; UCLA; Cal Arts; Cooper Union; Pratt Institute; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Royal Academy, Copenhagen; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University; University of Rome, Berlin Kunstakademie; Royal College of Art, London; Glasgow School of Art; Hayward Gallery, London; Sorbonne, Paris; and the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. His students have included, among others, Michel Majerus.

Kosuth became the American editor of the Art & Language journal in 1969. That same year, he organized an exhibition of his work, Fifteen Locations, which took place simultaneously at fifteen museums and galleries worldwide; he also participated in the seminal exhibition of Conceptual art at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery, New York.

For Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book, a show mounted at Lannis Gallery, New York, in 1967, Kosuth assembled fellow artists Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Robert Ryman, among others. That same year, with fellow artist Christine Kozlov, he founded the Museum of Normal Art, New York, while they were both students at the School of Visual Arts. After giving a work in 1989 to the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Kosuth, heavily influenced by Freud, he invited other artists to do likewise; today the museum owns 13 works by 13 Freud influenced Conceptualists. Also in 1989 Kosuth curated the show Ludwig Wittgenstein Das Spiel des Unsagbaren to commemorate the 100th birthday of the philosopher, in which he showed numerous works by fellow artists. He culled objects from nearly every department of the museum, including religious paintings, many depictions of nudes, social satire and some erotica; among the selected works, therew were sculptures by Auguste Rodin of lesbians embracing, and furniture from the Bauhaus, the avant garde German design school closed down by the Nazis.

Kosuth was awarded a Cassandra Foundation Grant in 1968, at the age of 23, as the choice of Marcel Duchamp one week before he died. In 1993, he received the Menzione d'Onore at the Venice Biennale and was named a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1999, in honour of his work, the French government issued a 3 franc postage stamp in Figeac. In 2001, he received the Laurea Honoris Causa doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna. In 2003, Kosuth was awarded the Austrian Republic's highest honour for accomplishments in science and culture, the Decoration of Honour in Gold. In 2017 European Cultural Centre Art Award was awarded to Kosuth for his lifelong dedication to create meaning through contemporary art. Other awards include the Brandeis Award (1990) and the Frederick Weisman Award (1991). The Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, Massachusetts), the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, Oklahoma), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Centre for International Light Art (Unna, Germany), the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (Lyon, France), the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), the Saint Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, Missouri), the University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, Arizona), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) are among the museums holding work by Joseph Kosuth.