<<Previous Exhibition

January 24 – April 6, 2003

Joseph Kosuth is one of the pioneers of the Conceptual art movement. His work explores the role of meaning in art and, like an archeologist of language and culture, he orders words and ideas from our historical memory into distinct yet intersecting layers of cultural activity-ones that are experienced today. In this exhibition he uses a variety of forms of presentation-text, photographs, neon signage, archival materials, objects from the museum's collection to create three site-specific installations.

In 2003 Kosuth participated in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Artist-in-Residence Program, which is inspired by Mrs. Gardner’s patronage of living artists, has encouraged artists to further their artistic practice for the past decade by exploring and responding to the museum's extraordinary collection, archives and environment. This exhibition, Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner—Three Locations in the Creative Process, represents the outcome of his work and marks the beginning of the museum’s Centennial celebrations.


 

In her heyday Isabella Stewart Gardner sought the company of contemporary artists, thinkers, and writers. She generously assisted artists, supported their work, and was in turn applauded and encouraged by them. With this legacy in mind, the Museum is launching its Centennial with the voice and vision of a contemporary artist.

Joseph Kosuth has chosen to investigate the cultural politics of putting work into the world: collecting, presenting, and exploring the individual thinking and ambitions that shaped an idea of art not only of the present, but of a contemporary view of the past. The coming into being of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum not only reflects the cultural forces of the late 19th-century, but also opens the way to the 20th-century. The Kosuth exhibition reflects on the history of this unique cultural institution, paying particular attention to the founder's relationships with two individuals that helped form the intellectual life of her time: James McNeill Whistler and Bernard Berenson.

The exhibition is comprised of three site-specific installations set up as an open-ended dialogue between Whistler, Berenson and Gardner. On the Museum's exterior wall, a neon installation titled 'Whistler's Warning (c.c.c.c.c.)' presents a passage from the artist's controversial 1885 'Ten O'Clock Lecture'. For his installation 'Isabella's Subtext(s)' Kosuth replaces the light protective cloth coverings for the display cases in galleries throughout the Museum with ones of his own. Each cover is embroidered with a phrase drawn from one of the documents inside the case. Finally, the installation, 'Guests & Foreigners: Three Faces of a Correspondence' occupies the special exhibition gallery.

In keeping with the Conceptual art tradition all three installations raise questions of language and context to the level of art. Kosuth takes carefully selected sentences and re-contextualizes them, inviting us to construct meaning both from the text itself and the context in which it appears, activating the viewer's relationship to the meaning-making process. The framing of new meaning will inevitably be determined by the viewer's identity, values and cultural context.

Joseph Kosuth is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

This Centennial project has been supported, in part, by patrons of the Centennial Program Fund, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

 
© Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum