A CHAIR, IS A CHAIR, IS A CHAIR.

'One and Three Chairs' Joseph Kosuth

Kosuth is a conceptual artist who's work was at the forefront of the contemporary art movement in the 1960's. The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein influenced the development of his work, where he has consistently explored the connections between words and things, between language and representation.

This work, titled 'One and Three Chairs' consisted of an actual chair, a photograph depicting the same chair and a written description of the chair. This tautology creates a closed system that resists any kind of transcendent meaning, though it does probe questions as to which is the most valuable or the most real version of the chair. While reading some responses to the work on various Blogs, I came across a suggestion that the title indicates the existance of a fourth, imagined chair. How important would the idea of the chair be?

In terms of my project, I can relate to these relationships between the actual object, the imagined, the photograped and the written. Though I am also interested in the spaces between them. As the object passes from one mode to another, how much information is lost and how information is gained? Does a new expression of the object bring about new meaning? I'd like to know how much room there is for interpretation.



The mechanisms of this particular work were founded by Kosuth, though he also devised a set of instructions, so that any curator was able to recreate the installation. Various chairs were used, alongside a saw, a kitchen pot, a lamp and other everyday objects.



'Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass--a Description' - Joseph Kosuth 1965

Barthes suggests that objects can be the same in reality, however, since they are made up of differing substances, they cannot be treated or read in the same manner. The written version, for example, is made up of letters and words, while an image can be visually processed in terms of lines, shapes and colours. Within the written language, there are possibly more variations? Where synonyms can bring about a comparible association.

The above work is also by Joseph Kosuth. Five glass boxes are presented - where each is labeled with a different adjective. The description of the box in each case becomes varied in it's meaning, although the object is exactly the same. Here the relationship between language and its visual counterpart become evident. The viewer could have interpreted the boxes as any one of these things, but by fixing the language to an object in this way, there is almost no room for interpretation.


'Four Coulors, Four Words' - Joseph Kosuth


'Neon' - Joseph Kosuth, 1965



Magritte discussed the relationship between words and images: "An object is not so attached to its names that one cannot find another which suits it better." In his systematic, broken up composition, Magritte points out the superficial nature of language.


'This is a piece of cheese' - Margritte


'The Interpretation of Dreams' - Margritte

tau·tol·o·gy (tô-tl-j)
n. pl. tau·tol·o·gies
1.
a. Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy.
b. An instance of such repetition.
2. Logic An empty or vacuous statement composed of simpler statements in a fashion that makes it logically true whether the simpler statements are factually true or false; for example, the statement Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow.

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[Late Latin tautologia, from Greek tautologi, from tautologos, redundant : tauto-, tauto- + logos, saying; see -logy.]