b. Toledo, Ohio, 1945
The Paradox of Content #1′ [Green]
2009
Neon and transformers
72 × 56 3/4 in. (182.9 × 144.1 cm)
Gifted in honor of Barbara and Aaron Levine by Joseph Kosuth and Sean and Mary Kelly, 2016 (16.16)
© 2021 Joseph Kosuth / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Jason Wyche
One of the key figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York, Joseph Kosuth is best known for text-based artworks that question the arbitrary relationship between language and the objects and ideas it represents. The Paradox of Content #1′ [Green] is part of a series of neon works that juxtapose Charles Darwin’s theories of human evolution and natural selection with Friedrich Nietzsche’s principles to consider how science and philosophy have created the systems through which we view and understand the world. Here Kosuth appropriates the neon’s form from a well-known excerpt from Darwin’s notebooks, which begin with the open-ended statement “I think” above an early sketch of the Tree of Life. Nietzsche, by contrast, offered a critique of the phrase “I think” due to his belief that thoughts come to us of their own accord rather than requiring some sort of agency.
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