Joseph Kosuth at Castelli - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

For those who think of Joseph Kosuth as inhabiting solely the high realm of Freud and Wittgenstein, this exhibit was something of a collision Walking past his groups of blown-up newspaper articles, you got to read about Lorena Bobbitt, Dr Jack Kevorkian, Sarajevo, the destruction of rain forests and an Egyptian novelist jailed for eight years; you could also peruse syndicated cartoons similar as Blondie and Doonesbury. All this was a far call from installations like the individual in which the artist overlayed every inch of Castelli's advanced in years Greene Street space with pages from Freud although Kosuth's intellectual pursuits were still evident in the quotations, usually from Kafka or Robert Musil, that frame each succession of articles and cartoons.

The works were simply not absented with each group of five or six variously sized photostats clipped to a extent of wire like prints drying in a darkroom. The first repeat in the show, from Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn plant the tone: "Spare no charge to make everything as economical as possible." level the way the bottoms of the photostats ringleted up during the course of the exhibit (which carried the unwieldy title "The Thing-in-Itself is ground in Its Truth through the Los of Its Immediacy") added to the stripped-down gaze of the work.

A typical piece began with James Joyce's famous repeat about trying to awaken from the nightmare of history. It hung alongside an article upon the unequal educations received by the agency of rich and poor Americans, a photograph showing the cleaning of the Lincoln Memorial by dint of an African-American applying a brush to the white marble, and a Blondie cartoon in which Dagwood argues with his neighbor. The following ended with a quote from Kafka to the event that "nobody would fight his way end here, least of all individual with a message from a dead man." Although the work took several minutes to read, it didn't take drawn out to identify Lincoln with Kafka's "dead man," and Stephen Dedalus, trying to wake up from history's nightmare, with the United States itself. For all their effective engagement with the issues of the day, these works could also be read autobiographically, conjuring up the cliched image of the Conceptual artist who has nothing better to do than sit around reading the newspaper. The paper greatest in quantity frequently used was the International Herald Tribune, a reminder that Kosuth has exhausted much of his time in Europe where Conceptual art has historically been better received than in the US

Any given day brings a diverse mixture of reading matter. You might read the Times upon the way to work, the pillar on the way home and disburse half an hour with a novel before going to slumber Most of us, at least greatest in quantity of the time, don't bear upon ourselves with the way these various constitutings may or may not relate. The force of this show was that it proffered an accessible way not sole to bring together the fragments of daily life on the contrary to find meaning in the spaces between them.

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