Erasmus University of Rotterdam

The idea as a motor of Conceptual Art

under the gaze of Joseph Kosuth

How is artistic technique lost as the idea is more important

than visuality in a work of Conceptual Art?

Nicoletta Unghiatti
557293
Date: October 26, 2020
 1

Introduction
We can never define with certainty what Art is, or who is capable of producing it; However,
Conceptual Art, suggests Sol LeWitt (1967), argues that anyone has the capacity to develop a
concept, regardless of the execution of a piece, sharing, to a certain extent, the perspective of the
artist Marcel Duchamp with his Ready-made. Visual arts as a discipline of creation, seek to convey
ideas and feelings through observable mediums, therefore its name, encompassing painting,
sculpture, film, photography, digital media, among others. Due to this, the question arises as to
which aspect is of greater importance in an artistic work, whether the concept behind it and the
reflection it invokes or its tangible, visual execution and material characteristic. Likewise, the artistic
competence of a person is questioned and whether it depends on what we call artistic technique,
encompassing the use of forms, composition, color, and the manipulation of different materialities, in
multiple forms of artistic creation.
The border between Visual arts and philosophy is put to the test in this discussion to develop.
Being able to define which components correctly constitute and compose a work of art is something
that we are faced with daily, particularly as students of the subject. Conceptual art, according to
Newman and Bird (1999) can be characterized as “a self-reflexive inquiry into art’s linguistic
structure, a procedure which, it was claimed, could itself be an artwork” (p.5). This type of art can be
considered one of the most difficult to understand and appreciate, every expression has its value, but
we must discuss where its essence lies. As a result of this, it is proposed to discuss the validity of
Conceptual Art as part of the visual arts and how this movement bases a work through its idea,
giving it more emphasis than its execution and visual presentation, considering its origins, context,
and processes. For this discussion, the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth will be used as a reference,
considered an icon and one of the most renowned American exhibitors of the 20th century, using one
of his artworks as the object of analysis in this paper.

Conceptual Art in context

What we call Conceptual Art, a term coined by the American artist Edward Kienholz, falls within the
realm of all the avant-garde art movements of the 20th century, and as such, arises as a rejection.
This sentiment was shaped by a changing global society, witnessing the downfall of recognized
moral, philosophical, and artistic institutions, evidently marked by the First World War. Most of the
artistic currents of the 20th century seek to go against established “traditional” art and are
characterized by being short-lived but with great impact. This rejection would be to a previous
artistic movement, allowing a constant change in the paradigm of what is considered Art as such,
however, Conceptual Art is present as an improvement and institution of its predecessors, being
 2

Dadaism and Fluxus principally. The main characteristic of the movement lies in the relevance of the
concept behind an artistic piece, leaving its material and visual execution as secondary where
according to LeWitt (1967) “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art”(p.12). The optical or
visual pleasure is not the objective and it resorts to the manipulation of objects, environments, and
settings, all in favor of the intellectual processes of the public, for LeWitt being “the objective of the
artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the
spectator”(p.12). Therefore, the aesthetic is rejected to arrive at something "pure", seeming to forget
an aspect that initially invites and captivates the audience.
The course of Contemporary art changes thanks to the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who,
after reflecting on the cultural state of the world during the First World War, introduced the Ready-
made artistic trend around 1915 in France. To define it, Elger (2004) says that "ready-mades
constitute a new and independent artistic genre devised (...) they are consumer objects produced on
an industrial scale, through exclusively their selection and presentation they enter the category of
art"(p.80). Under this definition, every individual is capable of creating Art, stealing an object, and
making it cultural. There may be Art in the common, but not everything common can be Art. In this
sense, Conceptual Art has a clear purpose, to generate discussion about the perception of the world in
which we live. But a purpose is just that without integrating the viewer into the artistic experience. In
the past, painting allowed the audience to identify with the pieces by presenting recognizable shapes
and colors, conveying a message.

Joseph Kosuth in USA

On one hand, we identify Joseph Kosuth (1945) in the United States as a conceptual artist aiming at
the same thing, escaping from any restriction of what is considered conventional in the art world
creating conceptual artworks based on the deconstruction of traditional American art. He proposes an
escape from conventional artistic molds, a reinvention, and a destruction of traditional art in the
United States by his ideas and therefore his works, narrating a reality that deconstructs itself, seeking
metacognitive explanations to questions about the perception of our world and in many cases leading
to nonsense. One of Kosuth's most emblematic works presented in 1965 is Figure 1 called “One and
three chairs”.1 This installation is made up of three different elements; the print of the dictionary
textual definition of the word chair, the real wooden manufactured chair, and a black and white
printed photo of the same object that we call a chair. With this piece, the artist tries to question the
meaning of the word chair and its concept, as well as the language itself, being a tool for the
construction of our reality as spectators. These concepts lie in the metacognitive domain when

1
Figure 1 in the Appendix on page 5.
 3

presenting the question What is a chair? A question that the artist throws to the audience assuming
their interest in a thought experiment of great philosophers like Immanuel Kant. There is merit in the
idea of his piece, the desire to question our perception is human and profound, but Kosuth's tendency
to repeat the same element in three material forms turns out to be redundant, repetitive, and absurd in
terms of artistic presentation.
There is no evolution or any manual artistic development from the artist, which is evidenced
with a series of objects presented as artworks during the same year with an identical purpose. Joseph
Kosuth’s works aim to analyze language as a constructor of reality, a theme seen mainly in
humanistic disciplines such as philosophy and literature. Pateman (2018) suggests that Art must be
seen or experienced, if it focuses on an idea regardless of the physical representation, Conceptual Art
by definition is not Art, its dogma contradicts it. Nevertheless, the inquiry question requires that we
look at the work of Kosuth in relation to his respective contexts, to assess the visuality of his
conceptual works. Kosuth's idea is valid, his need to capture it is not, so the perspective debated in
this study supports how visuality is secondary to the idea in Conceptual Art, not being part of the
appreciation by sight considered in Visual artworks.

Conclusions
To conclude, having a critical look at the work of Joseph Kosuth allows us to exemplify how this
artist translates his idea in front of an audience by mainly communicating it verbally or pasting
information about it and losing all capacity of artistic technique. It is emphasized that the idea behind
pieces of Conceptual Art always becomes more important than visuality and his work fails in the
communicative aspect regardless of its symbolic character being considered as a photocopy of
previous artworks presented. Therefore, the classification of this conceptual work should not be
validated as visual art, since as an optical stimulus, it does not reach its objective; communicating the
artist's idea. Its concept may be greater than its execution, although it is considered that a specific
visual work is executed with a certain technical capacity on the medium or material used,
complemented with a concept where the work is born and sustains it, this is not the case seen in one
piece from an American Conceptual artist. To finalize, this modern art movement evidences a clear
loss of the artistic technique as the idea is more important than its visual representation, so only the
concept behind is what actually matters and interacts with the audience leading as to think that every
time there is gain in the artistic world, there is also a loss.
 4

References
Alberro, A., & Stimson, B. (Eds.). (2002). Conceptual art: A critical anthology. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Elger, D. (2004). Dadaísmo. Madrid: Ed.Taschen America Llc.
Galenson, D. (2009). Conceptual Revolutions in 20th-Century Art. Historically Speaking, 10(5), 20–
22. DOI10.3386/w15073.
Godfrey, T. (1998). Conceptual Art A&I (Art and Ideas). London: Phaidon Press.
LeWitt, S. (1967). Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Artforum, (5:10), 79-84.
https://monoskop.org/images/3/3d/LeWitt_Sol_1967_1999_Paragraphs_on_Conceptual_Art.
pdf
Newman, M., & Bird, J. (Eds.). (1999). Rewriting Conceptual Art (Critical views). London: Reaktion
Books.
Pateman, T. (2018). The case against Conceptual Art. Philosophy now. 129.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/129/The_Case_Against_Conceptual_Art
 5

Appendix

Figure 1

One and Three Chairs2

Joseph Kosuth
1965
Wood folding chair, mounted photograph of a chair, and mounted photographic enlargement of the
dictionary definition of "chair", Chair 32 3/8 x 14 7/8 x 20 7/8" (82 x 37.8 x 53 cm) and
photographic panel 36 x 24 1/8" (91.5 x 61.1 cm), text panel 24 x 30" (61 x 76.2 cm).

2
https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/joseph-kosuth-one-and-three-chairs-1965/