Joseph Kosuth: Redefining the Context of Art, 1968 and After: The Second Investigation and Public Media

Description

The first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth's work, centering on The Second Investigation (1968-74)This first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth's work with public media centers on his pioneering project The Second Investigation (1968-74). This indexical work takes the form of anonymous advertisements in media-newspapers, magazines, billboards, television-based on a taxonomy of the world developed in the early nineteenth century by Roget for use in his thesaurus. Marking the start of Kosuth's sustained engagement with public media, this work anticipated the media orientation of New York postmodernism beginning in the late 1970s. Featuring a significant reexamination of Kosuth's work with language and media by art historian John C. Welchman, an appendix by art historian Gabriele Guercio, as well as the artist's own reflections on art and media, the book is richly illustrated with unpublished material from the artist's archive along with documentation of the artist's eponymous 1997 exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and his 2004 retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Joseph Kosuth is one of the pioneers of conceptual art and installation art. His more than forty-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 Asia, including seven Documentas and eight Venice Biennales. Awards include the Brandeis Award, 1990; Frederick Wiseman Award, 1991; the Menzione d'Onore at the Venice Biennale, 1993; and the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1993. John C. Welchman is Professor of Modern Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is the editor of Minor Histories- Statements, Conversations, Proposals, a collection of writings by the artist Mike Kelley (MIT Press). Gabriele Guercio is an independent writer living in Milan. He has a doctorate in art history from Yale University and has lectured at the Universities of Rome and Naples. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery and a recepient of a J. P. Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities. Editor of Art after Philosophy and After by Joseph Kosuth (MIT Press, 1991) and De Dominicis, Raccolta di scritti sull'opera e l'artista, he has written on modern and contemporary art as well as the history of art theory.