
Cash crop
05/29/12 • 2 min
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One and three tables
When he arrived in New York in 1965, Joseph Kosuth was a 20-year-old recent graduate from art school, yet he quickly established himself as a founding member of the conceptual art movement in the United States. At this time Kosuth was inspired by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigations of language. Wittgenstein’s posthumously published book ‘Philosophical investigations’ was a radical departure from previous philosophical texts, presented as a series of aphorisms that proposed assumptions from the traditional Augustine view of language and then deconstructed them, exposing the impossibility of using any set of rules to explain how we learn and use language.1 In 1965 Kosuth conceived a number of works using words written in neon that conveyed nothing more than what they were: ‘Five words in red neon’, for example, consisted of the five words of the title written in red neon lights, while ‘One and eight – a description (pink)’ consisted of the words ‘Neon Electric Light English Glass Letters Pink Eight’ written in pink neon lights.2 The next year he started his ‘Art as idea as idea’ series, in which he printed enlarged dictionary definitions of words in negative (white text on black ground). He deliberately chose words that commonly appear within the lexicon of art writing, words such as ‘original’, ‘meaning’ and ‘material’. In the series ‘One and three’ Kosuth poses the question, ‘What do we mean by a specific word such as “table”?’ He placed a pre-existing object in a gallery space next to a photograph of that object taken in situ, and a dictionary definition of the word used to describe, generically, that object. The viewer is led to compare the levels of accuracy in communicating meaning through both visual and verbal means. The dictionary definition is more accurate as a generic description of a table, whereas the photograph is more accurate as a description of this specific table. Yet removed from its functional context and placed in a gallery, even the table itself is only a sign: a three-dimensional and generic ‘example’ of what might be meant by the word ‘table’. Displayed as a triptych, the three signs for ‘table’ are all ultimately unsatisfactory as signifiers of the word if shown to an individual who had never before come across the notion of ‘table’. By exposing the limitations of language in such seemingly simple and concrete words as ‘chair’, ‘table’ or ‘broom’, Kosuth questions the possibility of using any language, and specifically, the language of the visual arts, to convey the meaning of more abstract phenomena such as ‘love’, ‘spirituality’ or even the meaning of the word ‘art’ itself. 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical investigations’, GEM Anscombe (trans), Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1953 2. This work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006
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Untitled (old woman in bed)
Encountering Ron Mueck’s sculptures is like suddenly being in a contemporary version of ‘Gulliver’s travels’: everything looks real and familiar but the scale is wrong. Giant boys and pregnant women tower over us, small men row boats and lie dead, a swaddled baby is shrunk to miniature size. In ‘Untitled (old woman in bed)’ a frail elderly woman lies under a blanket on a gallery plinth, her small scale increasing her vulnerability as we loom over her. This is one of Mueck’s most poignant works: the woman seems only to have a tenuous hold on life as she shrinks from this world into whatever comes next. It is imbued with the pathos of our own experiences of the death of elderly friends and relatives just as it foretells our own inevitable demise. As with all of Mueck’s sculpture, this figure is more than life-like. The moist eyes, veins just below the skin and flushed cheeks all add up to an near palpable sense of life, or in this work of life ebbing. We almost expect to hear a rattling breath as we look at the work for signs of the life that is about to end. The realism of his sculptures is like a series of three-dimensional freeze frames taken from the world, life momentarily paused but still fully evident. This filmic metaphor is not inappropriate as Mueck has worked as a modelmaker for television and film. While we know these people are sculptures, it is almost impossible not to touch them to make sure that they are indeed not real. Mueck’s deployment of scale distances this realism just as it entices us by the sense of wonder it evokes. The expressions of his sculptural subjects are subtly exaggerated to increase their emotional impact; indeed their heightened emotional and psychological states and the response this triggers in the viewer is the subject of Mueck’s art rather than their extraordinary verisimilitude. His figures are almost always alone and there is a strong sense of isolation and vulnerability to many of his works. Mueck’s realism is perhaps sculpture’s riposte to the virtual reality that digital technologies have made possible. Filmic and digital photographic recreations of past worlds, mythical places and future possibilities have stretched the real in so many directions as to make it no longer a viable visual category. There is no digital sleight of hand to Mueck’s work, however, as he makes his sculptures traditionally, applying clay to a framework, modelling the figure until he has the form to create a mould and then casting the final work. It is a labour-intensive and highly skilled process. The resulting works seem to have the weight of the history of sculptural realism behind them, just as they seem to mark its end by leaving it with nowhere further to go. © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006
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