Joseph Kosuth Cunningly Inflects the Armenian

Joseph Kosuth Cunningly Inflects
the Armenian Dictionary in Yellow Neon
View of The Language of Equilibrium of Joseph Kosuth.
Project curated by Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg.
ART REVIEW
All Venice photographs © 2007 Seamus Farrell.
VENICE, ITALY — If the name Arshile Gorky has become the
indispensable and sole representation of Armenian culture upon the
prominent landscape of the inescapably incomplete, official history of
Western art, a minute yet remarkable expansion of that parable might be
underway. This may in part be due to Joseph Kosuth’s groundbreaking
project entitled The Language of Equilibrium that is currently on view in
Venice, on the Island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, at the Monastic
Headquarters of the Mekhitarian Order.
This project, estimably curated by Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg,
founder of ART for The World, is a collateral event of the 52
nd
Venice
Biennale that is organized for the first time by an American curator,
Robert Storr.
Through audacious inscriptions of Armenian, Italian and English lexical
terms and signs in yellow neon directly upon four diverse architectural
surfaces, The Language of Equilibrium urgently rearticulates the visual
and conceptual parameters of the locale and beyond, conjoining the far
past and present. The promontory, the bell tower, the northwest wall and
the observatory of the Monastic Headquarters are no longer solitary
instances of architecture and urban setting. By means of a taut, graffitilike undertaking, a secluded setting has become pertinently intruded by a
sense of an obligation to narrate its own history and current state, which
Kosuth has mapped to three languages.
Presently Professor at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice,
Joseph Kosuth has based his installation on research of the color yellow
and the word “water” within the context of the Mekhitarian Order. “Yellow
neon,” Kosuth notes, “is chosen for this work because of the symbolic
understanding of yellow at the time of the founding of the monastery as
meaning ‘virtue, intellect, esteem, and majesty.’” In here, the definition of
the word “water” has been extracted from the 1749 Armenian Dictionary,
or Haygazian Pararan, compiled by Abbot Mekhitar of Sebastia.
Along with the lexical definition of the word “water” in Armenian, this
simultaneously hyperobjective and sensuous textual opera juxtaposes
dictionary definitions of the Italian counterpart “acqua” and the English
word “water.” At first the viewer confronts the phonetics (pronunciation),
etymology (root), syntax (grammar) and semantics (meaning) of water in
three languages. Soon after, references to water are discursively invaded
not only by physical water enveloping the island, but by water contained
within the physical corpus of the viewer. Topography, mind and body are
interwoven uncannily, evoking the range of conjectures put forth by the
Kosuth modulates architecture through Armenian, Italian and
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
English neon texts.
A journey to the Island of San Lazzaro thus becomes a journey to mindbody and text-image problems: Kosuth’s rendition of architectural
surfaces through neon text as sites of verbal phenomena stems from an
ingenious purport that obliges the visitor’s engagement within the
archaeology of Armenian culture and its history, a culture that is
simultaneously autonomous and tied to other cultures—past and present.
Modernism had infused painting with linguistic signs and words through
Cubism (Picasso) and Surrealism (Magritte), among other movements,
leading on the one hand to the expansion of painting as at once a verbal
and visual phenomenon, while on the other hand paradoxically isolating
painting by committing it to pure abstraction via the primacy of line
(Mondrian, Malevich) and that of color (Gorky, Pollock). The autonomy of
painting would culminate in the Minimalist “Specific Objects” of Donald
Judd, who had reduced the boundaries between painting and sculpture by
1963. In the mid-sixties, however, “it was Joseph Kosuth who quickly saw
that the correct term for this paradoxical outcome of modernist reduction
was not specific but general,” as art historian Rosalind Krauss fittingly
Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965.
notes. “That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is
Wood folding chair, mounted photograph of a chair, and
specific,” states Kosuth. For Kosuth, on can say, art, language and
photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of "chair."
philosophy are inseparable on one level or another.
1
Chair 32 3/8 x 14 7/8 x 20 7/8" (82 x 37.8 x 53 cm), photographic
panel 36 x 24 1/8" (91.5 x 61.1 cm), text panel 24 x 24 1/8" (61 x
It is somewhat impossible to disconnect The Language of Equilibrium
61.3 cm). Copyright © 2007 Joseph Kosuth / Artists Rights
from Kosuth’s 1965 paradigm of Conceptual art, an artwork entitled One
Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly
Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
and Three Chairs, in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. By placing a photograph of a chair next to the physical
chair, itself next to a dictionary definition of the word “chair,” Kosuth has
submitted the definition of art to a theoretical and essentialist revision.
Namely, before semiotics and structuralism would become spread and
methodologically utilized in art, criticism and history, Kosuth had
conjugated signification itself through three intersecting devices: the
Duchampian readymade, photography and language. The quagmire of
the distinctions and inseparability of the object, the image, and the text is
central to Kosuth’s schema.
The Language of Equilibrium is not precisely a “comprehensive” work, for
the moment the spectator diverts attention to the press release of the
project, the neon text renders itself as somewhat of a surplus, now
replaced by invaluable historical data available elsewhere. Nonetheless,
Kosuth’s work acts as a key catalyst to text that is provided by the curator
online: Abbot Mekhitar of Sebastia “settled together with his monks on the
island in 1717 after escaping persecution. Mekhitar understood the
implicit potential of the written word for the preservation of Armenian
culture threatened by the vicissitudes of history. The monastery therefore
\
not only has a rich library, consisting of over 140,000 volumes, but until
1993 it also contained an active printing office capable of publishing texts
in thirty-six languages, making San Lazzaro a global reference point for
Eastern and in particular Armenian culture. It is thanks to this printing
office that the first translation of the Bible into Armenian was made,
including a guide to grammar and a dictionary of classical Armenian.
These books are archived in the library along with 4,500 precious
manuscripts, including many illuminated works by Armenian miniaturists
and by the Greek and Syrian holy fathers.” And today this online text
desires to act as a catalyst to Armenian studies and beyond.
As these luminous words impose themselves like veils upon architectural
surfaces, the linguistic morphologies of Armenian, Italian and English
serve as means of narrating material histories. But can unsteady histories
ever gain equilibrium? Kosuth invites us viewers to delve into our
languages resolutely so as to learn and perhaps unravel myths and truths
Night view of The Language of Equilibrium of Joseph Kosuth.
through, upon and behind cultural veils, despite inevitable abysses all
across. The acknowledgment of that inevitability is one crucial language
of equilibrium.
At night, the optical purity of darkness renders space a backdrop for a
rhapsodic transfiguration of Abbot Mekhitar of Sebastia. Yellow neon is
Kosuth’s contingency of the Abbot’s lexicon now walking exuberantly on
the water.
The installation will be on view through November 21, 2007. Further
information
can
be
obtained
via
www.artfortheworld.net
and
www.mekhitar.org.
─ Raphy Sarkissian
A slightly different version of this review first appeared in The Armenian
Reporter, June 30, 2007. The author is grateful for the paper’s
authorization of the present publication. Raphy Sarkissian is an artist and
curator. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Joseph Kosuth’s Conceptual aesthetic expands the boundaries of linguistics, phenomenology, art and philosophy.
“At night, the optical purity of
darkness renders space a backdrop
for a rhapsodic transfiguration of
Abbot Mekhitar of Sebastia.”
NOTE
1
Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea:” Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), p. 10.