‘Plays of / for a Respirateur’ An Installation by Joseph Kosuth – October 21, 2015 – October 30, 2016
http://www.philamuseum.org/
Conceived by American artist Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), this installation includes a selection of his work along with a group of seminal works by Marcel Duchamp from the Museum’s collection. The installation takes as its point of departure Duchamp’s notion of “elementary parallelism,” coined to refer to his pictorial treatment of time and movement in Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), from 1912. This same expression finds concrete resonance in Kosuth’s ‘An Elementary Parallelism’, from 2013, which is the starting point for the installation unfolding across four gallery walls. For Kosuth, the phrase serves as a springboard to investigate the multiple ways in which his work intersects with that of Duchamp.
Kosuth, a pioneer of Conceptual art, began in the 1960s to employ a language-based methodology as a way to question a purely formal notion of art. Like Duchamp, Kosuth intends to return art to “the service of the mind,” working with ideas as the primary material for art. Manifesting in a deliberate—at times playful—use of words and meaning, Kosuth’s work advocates the interplay of the visual and the verbal.
Toward the end of his life, when asked about the use of his time, Duchamp often described himself as a breather—arespirateur—in which art and life were seamlessly intertwined. In homage to his predecessor, Kosuth’s installation seeks to entangle, blur, and redefine these boundaries, through a process of reference, reproduction, and appropriation.
Sponsors
This installation is supported by Sean Kelly Gallery, with additional generous contributions by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Levine and Mari and Peter Shaw.
Curators
Carlos Basualdo, The Keith L. and Katherine Senior Curator of Contemporary Art; and Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art
Location
Gallery 181, first floor
About author
You might also like
TechnoCool.
New Trends in Hungarian Art in the Nineties (1989–2001) Building C – 27 October 2023 – 11 February 2024 The exhibition titled TechnoCool, opening in the Hungarian National Gallery at
About David Zwirner Books
http://davidzwirnerbooks.com/ David Zwirner Books was founded in 2014 as the stand-alone publishing house of David Zwirner. The imprint publishes catalogues, monographs, historical surveys, artist books, and catalogue raisonnés related to
FIRST LIGHT: A DECADE OF COLLECTING AT THE ICA – AUG 17, 2016 – JAN 16, 2017 PAUL AND CATHERINE BUTTENWIESER, FOTENE DEMOULAS, AND KIM AND JIM PALLOTTA GALLERIES
https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/first-light-decade-collecting-ica First Light brings together new acquisitions and permanent-collection favorites in a series of interrelated and stand-alone exhibitions. #ICAFirstLight Coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of ICA’s move to its iconic







