EXHIBITION: JOSEPH KOSUTH - Anna Schwartz Gallery Eveleigh

Conceptual art couldn’t get more conceptual than that issued by American Joseph Kosuth, whose most famous work One and Three Chairs (1965) is a visual representation of Plato’s Theory of Forms housed at MoMa in New York. In it, a chair literally sits, is represented sitting in a photograph and is delineated by dictionary definition. Which is its truest form? This is art that questions art itself – which Kosuth further elaborated on in his Art After Philosophy (1969), asserting that it is necessary to separate aesthetics from art, to divorce it from decoration and return it its philosophical roots. All very heady. His latest exhibition at the appropriately austere Anna Schwartz Gallery is entitled ‘An Interpretation of This Title’: Nietzsche, Darwin and the Paradox of Content – showing his concerns have not shifted. In a large room painted grey are the lit-up sketches of a mad mathematician; rigid lines, species trees, map-like configurations, errant phrases. Kosuth himself describes the piece thus: “The device of the work is Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship with the implications of Charles Darwin’s theories about human evolution.” A self-reflexive discourse with very little post-modern humour to lighten the load, but plenty of conceptual meat to evolve the brain.