Word: exhibit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...work, largely textual, incorporates quotes from essays by Walter Benjamin and Kosuth himself into a montage of philosophical meanderings that derives most of its forcefulness from Kosuth's chosen venues of display. The exhibit thus records not only Kosuth's work, but the context in which the work was originally displayed. One of the projections and a majority of the photographs show Kosuth's text as first introduced to the public: printed on newspapers, computer screens, banners, buildings and big-city billboards...
...example, the projection facing the exhibit's entrance flicks slowly from a barely legible Walter Benjamin quotation on a computer screen to a fuzzy video image of a building sporting another quote on windblown banner. To compensate for the poor image quality and slow scene change, each quotation is re-printed on plaques next to the projection...
...self-consciousness and selfinvestigation in his pieces from the 1970s. A series of four photographs from 1975 shows questionnaires that Kosuth demanded that his viewers complete before leaving the gallery. The questionnaire asks the viewer to respond not only to the work, which is not shown in the MIT exhibit, but also to contemporary politics, such that one questionnaire mentions U.S. foreign policy with Cuba...
...from bland, Kosuth's most recent work consists largely of a dozen photographs of his billboards in major cities throughtout Europe and the U.S. These photos, by far the most visually compelling and intellectually intriguing pieces in the exhibit, show paragraphs of original prose, printed on billboards that blend into the cityscape, even capturing people's candid reactions to the esoteric signs. A knowledge of German, French or other European languages would help the viewer because no translations accompany these photographs. But there are enough photos of billboards in New York and California that the English-speaking viewer can gather...
...intrigued by these incidences and the phenomenon that they exhibit. Is competitive drive a trait that inherently cannot be selectively applied? Is it impossible to rein in our classroom instincts? I do not believe so. Rather, Harvard students seem to have made a collective choice. We view it as safer to maintain a cut-throat edge at all times and so we have permanently locked ourselves into a defensive posture. Lowering our guard might mean certain death, or worse, a lower slot on the curve...