JOSEPH KOSUTH 'Korrektur (Uncorrected)'

About

The first impression upon entering the exhibition is that of oversized book pages: neon configurations stand out against the white of the background, dispersing individual words in serif script over the six surfaces: 

idea, denken, gemeinen, light, pages, subject 

Each of these terms is extrapolated from the novel “Korrektur” by Thomas Bernhard from the year 1975, and in its semantic frugality, and simultaneously in its multiplicable compression corresponding to the print space, appears like a sign that refers to itself and to its being. Precisely in the absence of a context, a chain reaction of manifold registrations and transliterations is set in motion on the part of the viewer. It is, as is always the case with Joseph Kosuth, a process of multiple transformations: literature becomes material becomes art becomes philosophical interrogation.

Joseph Kosuth’s ‘Korrektur (Uncorrected)’ is the final module of his artistic trinity that engages with the parerga and paralipomena of the Viennese intellectual history of the last 120 years. At the same time it is an attempt to break and to deconstruct the canonical character of the texts of these master thinkers, and to create new perspectives in the multidisciplinary declension. In an interaction with the group of works of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that expand the black-and-white character of Thomas Bernhard’s space into something colouristic. “The coloured intermediary between two colours” shines in warm white, cobalt blue, ruby red, yellow, orange, violet, and green. 

A governing principle of Joseph Kosuth is that artists work with ideas and not with form and colour: “With the creation of meaning (which equally implies the extinction or the appropriation of already existing meaning), the artist has the freedom to use everything that is already available in the world.” In this sense the uncorrected Korrektur out of the space of ideas that Thomas Bernhard generated around the Austrian self-(mis)understanding is to be understood as an attempt at a rapprochement. At an approach to a concept of art that is located in a heterotopic site beyond the normal channels, with which the cultural Raison d'Être is founded and reinforced. (Thomas Miessgang, Vienna 2023, translated by Sarah Cormack)