Playing mind games with Joseph Kosuth

Last month, the Hungarian-American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth turned 80. One of the originators of the conceptual art movement in the 1960s, Kosuth was something of an enfant terrible, a veteran of bitter spats in the pages of Studio International and at New York’s School of Visual Arts. This retrospective show at Sprüth Magers in Mayfair takes in the span of Kosuth’s distinctive brand of linguistically oriented conceptualism over the last six decades.

The first room is a pleasure, reprising Kosuth’s One and Three works of the mid 1960s: an object flanked by both a photograph and a dictionary definition of itself: reality, representation, language. Glance behind you as you walk into the exhibition and beside the door you’ve just come through is a full-size image of the same door, the columns and mouldings of the gallery’s reception visible – but black and white – through its window. On the other side, a large card defines what we’re looking at. Door: an entrance-gate, from the Middle English dore, etc.

One and Three Doors [Ety./Hist.] (1965), Joseph Kosuth. Photo: Ben Westoby/Fine Art Documentation; courtesy the artist/Sprüth Magers; © the artist

Another work, One and Three Shadows, plays the same trick: a blurry rectangle of yellow and grey on the wall – the image cast from a spotlight suspended from the ceiling with its beam partially obstructed by a light fitting. On the left, a greyscale version of the same blur; on the right, a dictionary definition of shadow. Philosophically, we are back in the ’60s, the era of Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, and the One and Three works are really an embodied lecture on art and representation. But there really is play here. The works are wittily site-specific: that door; that shadow from that light fitting. One can even disturb the pieces, raising a hand to cast one’s own shadow, messing with the identity relationship between sign and referent, photograph and reality.

Text/Context (1979) toys with the gallery space too. The work consists of wall covered in framed photographs, each depicting a different billboard erected by Kosuth on city walls in London, Cologne, Paris and New York. Each displays a paragraph of text, written in the theory-speak of the time: ‘This text/sign is trapped by conventions which constitute its conception of the possible in terms which deny what they would want to suggest.’ So far, so portentous. But there is a wry comedy in the remediation that follows. Kosuth’s photographs of his billboards include not just the signs themselves but the scenes around them too: oblivious passersby, market traders unpacking their fruit boxes, a woman walking her dog. Meanwhile, something else happens when we see 20 of these images together. Quantity changes quality. Are we looking at a single work or a catalogue? The texts recede, deprioritised by repetition; instead the artist himself emerges as the subject of the piece.

Text/Context (1978–79), Joseph Kosuth. Photo: Ben Westoby/Fine Art Documentation; courtesy the artist/Sprüth Magers; © the artist

At the centre of Fetishism Corrected #2 [Blue] is a blown-up photograph of a page proof from Freud’s essay ‘Fetischismus’ (1927) showing the psychoanalyst’s handwritten corrections. Around it, these annotations have been reproduced in neon. Once again there is a wryness at work: Kosuth is making a fetish object of Freud’s work, robbing it of its meaning and turning it into an icon, with the aura of the master’s handwriting radiating, exaggerated, in electric blue. Freud, modernity’s fearless sounder of the depths, has been pressed against a wall, flattened. This is quotation as objectification.

In fact, there is rather a lot of quotation in this show, and not all of it as interesting as the Freud piece. The most recent work, and the one from which the exhibition takes its name, is The Question (J.M.) (2024). Here we are presented with a gigantic wall-mounted clock, telling the correct time, with a slogan across its face: ‘“We come back, then, to the main question” – John McTaggart.’ The words are from the Cambridge philosopher McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence (1921): ‘We come back, then, to the main question. Can a substance exist without content, and so be simple? It seems to me that it cannot.’

The Paradox of Content #3 [Yellow] (2009), Joseph Kosuth. Photo: Paul Zanre; courtesy the artist/Sprüth Magers; © Joseph Kosuth

McTaggart’s best-known essay, ‘The Unreality of Time’, appears in the same book. Hence, presumably, the giant clock. But what does Kosuth’s quotation do here? Does it question the reality of time? Or is this simply the artwork as index, a pointer gesturing offstage to a clever idea that we must go away and read for ourselves. There is something frustrating and facile about this, like a writ-large version of that social media idiom of quote-tweeting something while commenting simply: ‘This! 👇’.

In his essay ‘Art After Philosophy’ (1969), Kosuth declared that ‘being an artist now means to question the nature of art’. The best pieces on show in this retrospective at Sprüth Magers date from the first three decades of Kosuth’s career. One wonders if relentlessly questioning the nature of art in new ways becomes a harder and harder act to carry off. And perhaps Kosuth’s conceptual games have lost some of their potency as the ideas that form their bedrock have become more familiar. I left the exhibition challenged, amused, a little irritated – just the right mix, I suspect.

‘Joseph Kosuth: The Question’ is at Sprüth Magers, London, until 15 March.