Joseph Kosuth

Joseph Kosuth studied at the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962, and simultaneously began to pursue his interest in philosophy and science. He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1964, and in 1965 produced his first language-based works, presenting his ideas in glass, and in assemblages of objects, photographs and dictionary definitions (such as one and five clocks, 1965; London, The Tate Gallery). In 1966 he began the Art as Idea as Idea series, and was already (at twenty-one) writing about and discussing Conceptual Art in various public fora. In the late 1960s he became the American editor of the mostly British Art/Language, an important publication about (and of) language-based conceptual art. During this period he also founded the Museum of Normal Art, an early exhibition space for conceptual art in New York. By 1969 he was no longer producing objects of any kind, but was placing thesaurus excerpts on billboards and in the advertising section of magazines. Until the early 1980s he continued to insert anonymous messages and phrases into a variety of public spaces, the most important of which are the Text/Context billboards of 1978-79. In the early '80s his work returned to the art context of the gallery space, creating works such as the Cathexis series, which juxtapose reproductions of historic paintings with texts.