American artist Joseph Kosuth isn’t trying to win your heart. So if a visceral punch is what you’re after, he’s probably not your man. But what his conceptual art does deliver is an open-ended dialogue with the artist himself, you the viewer, and a vast number of cultural references out there in the world. Having studied philosophy as well as visual art, Kosuth is fascinated by Wittgenstein’s language theories, Freud’s psychoanalysis and Beckett’s absurdism. He wonders what it means to find meaning in the art object at all, and who creates meaning anyway.
This mini retrospective presents some of his neon works completed between 1965 and 2011, all of which are word based. Using phrases (none of them his own), redaction, correction marks and translation, among other things, Kosuth is encouraging a cerebral response. ‘What does this mean?’ reads one sign. ‘Imagine hands’, another. A quote from Hegel about the dialectic hangs adjacent to an illuminated Calvin & Hobbes comic strip about the cyclicality of high and low culture. We’re encouraged to find the connection between these two artefacts, though what it is remains open to interpretation.
In lesser hands these neon creations might have come off as pat or pretentious. But Kosuth’s approach is coherent, assured and surprisingly approachable. And what’s in danger of feeling old hat – so many other artists have made neon their own – still resonates; it’s clear that he was a pioneer of the form. Surrounded by the warm glow of all these words on the gallery walls, you can almost hear Kosuth’s mind ticking over, as though you were standing in the middle of his very thoughts. The ultimate effect is to bring you closer to the artist, not just in mind, but in spirit. Perhaps he’s vying for the heart after all.
Ananda Pellerin