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 marked 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 launched its Centennial with the voice and vision of a contemporary artist.

Joseph Kosuth has chose 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 reflected the cultural forces of the late 19th-century, but also opened the way to the 20th-century. Kosuth’s exhibition reflected 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 was 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.)' presented a passage from the artist's controversial 1885 'Ten O'Clock Lecture'. For his installation 'Isabella's Subtext(s)' Kosuth replaced the light protective cloth coverings for the display cases in galleries throughout the Museum with ones of his own. Each cover was 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 raised questions of language and context to the level of art. Kosuth took carefully selected sentences and re-contextualized 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 was inevitably be determined by the viewer's identity, values and cultural context.

Joseph Kosuth was an Artist-in-Residence in 2003. He lives and works in New York and in Rome, Italy.

Publications:
Joseph Kosuth: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Guide to Contemporary Art (Special Edition)
Joseph Kosuth: Limited addition print

Learn more about the artist

Joseph Kosuth: Artist Statement

“This exhibition is comprised of three parts, each an autonomous work, that functions both independently as well as being three elements of a whole. Not unlike words in a sentence, the more precise the choice of the individual word, the richer the meaning of the sentence itself.

The three elements will be located within an artist’s book created by me which is both a ‘Guide’ to finding my interventions throughout the museum and also a documentation of the work within its context. This book, which is a facsimile of the official guide to the permanent collection of the museum, assumes the role of the museum’s guide to contemporary art for this Centennial occasion.

The exhibition rests on three individuals who had three separate roles within the production of cultural meaning of their time. Anchored to this production is a view of history formed by the nature of their different roles. In Whistler you have an artist fully engaged in the production of his work and in putting it into the world. His experience of history is his assessment of the art of the past and how it forms his view of the present through his own work. More than just a fashionable portrait painter of the time, Whistler was a creative force with his own artistic agenda. In Berenson you have a scholar with a view of history implicit in his practical art historical application as a ‘hunter and gatherer’ of connoisseurship. His practice found its completion as part of a collaboration with the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. He would propose and she would choose. She would request and he would choose. Isabella Stewart Gardner was creative while defying the definition of an artist as understood at the time. Indeed, she is exemplary of the creative role of enlightened patronage. Her legacy included the making of Boston’s premier Gesamtkunstwerk, now known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Her legacy is, at the same time, further complicated because her persona was also thoroughly involved with being a socialite, grand dame and skilled wife, as one might expect at the time. All this said, one should not risk missing the feminist text which finds itself in the strength of a woman standing within the conventions of her time and having a vision she was not at all hesitant to defend. If one doesn’t experience the totality of the museum as a cultural object akin to an artwork then one is inadequate to experience any of its parts with full appreciation as well.

The wall which protects the Museum from its neighborhood has its own signifying role: something like ‘here stops the world.’ The otherness inside is an American’s experience of Europe. It is an idealized construction of a stage upon which History is played. If one can understand how architecture is perhaps the most psychological of the arts, entering here makes that case. So, written on the wall is one artist’s, James McNeill Whistler’s, notations about museums. In a sense it is a kind of visceral critique of collectors and the institutionalization of museums, formed by his own observation and constituting a kind of warning.

In the museum cases one has the attic residue most reflective of the 19th century museological culture, the Wunderkammer of items which bridge the detritus of cultural production with the fragments of social intercourse. There meets the public life with the personal woman. Yet, like everything, these things are vulnerable to the passage of time, and the light it takes to ‘read’ them is the same light which erases them. They remain hidden from view, available for only a glimpse. Embroidered on the cloths (which the ‘viewer may lift’) the viewer/reader will find fragments of the texts which anchor this detritus of a life to a larger social and cultural space. These cases are the sottovoce murmur, the subtitles to the cinematic pictorial autostrada which adorns the walls. They are filled with things which play in a different key than the masterpieces which surround them. On their own they are things without ontological direction, one could say, but they have a presence—even while masked—that is the important ‘lesser’ role of punctuation in the big text.

As a device to approach ‘Guests and Foreigners, one can say art has two faces, one can be nominated as its internal construction, that which could be called a 'subject' in another context, which, in 'Guests and Foreigners' provides a kind of organization and linkage by being an historical and social fact, of actual lives once lived. It is the 'internal' putting into play of the outside world of facts and events, be they literary or historical. (In Oslo we had Ludwig Wittgenstein in Norway and out of Austria, in Dublin we had James Joyce out of Ireland and Wittgenstein in Ireland, in Frankfurt we have Goethe out of Germany and in Italy, in Istanbul we have Rossini out of Italy and in Turkey, in Japan, the world outside of Japan, in New Zealand, the Maori and Europeans outside of each other, in New York, the foreigner inside of the body, in Hong Kong, objects coming and objects going and the people with them. Here in Boston we have the parallel lives of James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner as ‘Guests and Foreigners’ being Americans outside of the United States, yet while at home feeling the strength of an outside culture inside of their own.) The other face can be seen as its external play, and yet it organizes the work's syntax. It is built around and with the architecture, it's how the work works, yet this means it is also formed by its relation to the world, since the architecture concretizes, in a cultural form, the social world. The play of the work is how these two faces mirror each other and become one thing. Both sides of this mirror must reflect the world, as it is with any mirror or there would be nothing there to reflect, yet they are reflecting each other as the world, even if one experiences the reflection and not the world. In this way, the work shows itself while being about more than just itself.”

Whistler's Warning (c.c.c.c.c.)

A large-scale textual work in white neon by Joseph Kosuth installed along the Museum’s exterior wall, Evans Way, The Fenway, Boston.

Collecting – comparing – compiling – classifying – contradicting

Experts these – for whom a date is an accomplishment a hall mark, success

Careful in scrutiny, are they, and conscientious of judgment

Establishing with due weight unimportant reputations

discovering the picture by the stain on the back

testing the Torso, by the leg that is missing

filling folios with doubts on the way of that limb

disputatious and dictatorial concerning the birthplace of inferior persons

speculating in much writing, upon the great worth of bad work

True clerks of the collection, they mix memoranda with ambition

And reducing Art to Statistics,

they ‘file’ the Fifteenth Century and pigeonhole the Antique!

J.M.W.

Artist Talk
Saturday, January 25, 2003, 1:30 p.m.
Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner––Three Locations in the Public Artworks By Joseph Kosuth,”
A lecture and slide presentation by the artist.

Noontime Talk
Wednesday, February 19, 2003, 12:00 noon
Guests and Foreigners: Kosuth’s Latest Investigation
Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art

Eye of the Beholder Lecture
Thursday, March 6, 2003, 6:30 p.m.
Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner––Three Locations in the Creative Process: A Centennial Project by Joseph Kosuth.
Lecture and book signing by the artist

Noontime Talk
Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 12:00 noon
A Curator Talks About an Artist Curating: Some Thoughts on Joseph Kosuth at the Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Brooklyn Museums.
Linda Norden., Associate Curator of Contemporary Art for the Fogg Museum.

Gallery Talks
Presented Saturdays at 12:00 noon.