Is It a Mirror or a ‘Mirror'? Ask Joseph Kosuth.
It was 1965, and Joseph Kosuth was a 20-year-old undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts when he made the pieces that made his career. Their premise was simple enough: He'd take an object, like a crate, a wooden door, or a shovel, and either hang it on or lean it against a wall. To one side he'd place a life-size photo of that same object, as installed in that place, and to the other, a dictionary definition, enlarged and printed on poster board.
The most famous iteration is 'One and Three Chairs,' consisting of a chair, a photo of a chair and the definition of 'chair,' which the Museum of Modern Art acquired shortly after it was made. But 'One and Three Mirrors' (1965), the version that appears in his current show, 'Future Memory' at Sean Kelly Gallery, is even better. It is as fresh now as the day it was made, and well worth revisiting, both because of its broad influence on contemporary art practice and because it offers such a clear example of the Conceptual approach. Joseph Kosuth, '#II 49 (On Color/Multi #1),' 1991. Credit... Joseph Kosuth; Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 2025; via, Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Like the chairs, Kosuth's mirrors raise fundamental questions about art — is it an object, an image or an idea? It's easy enough to pose such questions, but realizing them in an artwork, with actual objects, gives them a special urgency, because they become practical instead of hypothetical. If you're standing in front of 'One and Three Chairs,' you have to decide what you're looking at: Is it a chair, or a 'chair'? Making the same piece with a mirror, which reflects you, your gaze and the gallery you're standing in, only adds to the categories being so thrillingly destabilized.
Along with recent shows at Sprüth Magers in London and Almine Rech in Paris, and an upcoming exhibition at Lia Rumma in Naples, Italy, 'Future Memory' amounts to a kind of deconstructed retrospective for Kosuth, who just turned 80. It's the first gallery show he hasn't designed himself as an overall installation, and it includes a work from nearly every decade of his career, from the 1960s to the present. Installation view of 'Joseph Kosuth: Future Memory' at Sean Kelly; '#82 (O.M.),' 1990, appears in the upper left corner and 'The Question (G.S.),' 2025, in the middle. Credit... Jason Wyche; via, Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
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