JOSEPH KOSUTH

Kosuth’s interest is in the meaning of time as we experience it within the array of contexts life provides. In the sixteen individual works titled ‘Quoted Clocks’, Kosuth’s use of the analog clock referentially anchors the concept of time to its most literal and familiar visual representation, serving as a canny reminder that time is contained in a clock no more than the complex process of making meaning in art is contained in a single object. However precise the mechanism, a clock functions visually as little more than a punctuation mark in need of a sentence, allowing those who look at it, collectively, individually, only a glimpse of a moment that never simply passes. By removing the clock as a fabricated object from its cultural context of functionality and then combining it with quoted language also taken from prior contexts, ‘Quoted Clocks’ further punctuates the insufficiencies, limits, and surpluses of meaning that characterise our perceptions of duration. As an ongoing series of reflections, Kosuth’s Existential Time invites us to reflect on our own lived experience as it flashes by or hangs heavily, leading to questions of consciousness, to what we mean within time.

The pioneer of Conceptual art, throughout his career, Kosuth has insisted on maintaining the integrity and rigour of his fundamental insight that the ‘visual’ component of art is only one part of a complex structure that produces meaning within art, and not its basis. Since the 1960s, Kosuth has used inherited meanings, particularly language-based categories, such as quotes, names, and definitions, to construct new meaning in visual work. His work poses fundamental questions about the presentation and reception of art by investigating the very categories that define what art is. He selects elements for his work from contexts outside of visual art: philosophy, literature, history, popular culture, dictionaries, scientific theory, and linguistics, among others.