Joseph Kosuth

Known for his exploration of language and meaning within the realm of art, Joseph Kosuth is a conceptual artist whose works are largely text-based and often self-referential - his earliest conceptual work, Leaning Glass, consisted of an object, a photograph of the same object and dictionary definitions of the words denoting it – a similar approach was taken for one of his most notable works, One and Three Chairs, a visual depiction of Plato’s Theory of Forms which asserts that abstract ideas, as opposed to physical phenomena, retain the highest and most elementary form of reality. Extremely well-read, Kosuth’s work draws a large amount of influence from the psycho-analysis work of Sigmund Freud and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language; conscious of his status as a ‘white, male artist’, Kosuth studied Anthropology and spent a number of years traveling areas such as Australia, the Peruvian Amazon and the Trobriand Islands – spending time with natives of these areas, Kosuth studied and experienced the differences in culture, resulting in his text ‘The Artist as Anthropologist’.