AS THOSE people who read this interview with Luke Clancy will have gathered, Kosuth's main installation specially created for IMMA is built around texts by Joyce and Wittgenstein, two writers who used to carry the respectful reputation of being "difficult". The whole is called Guests and Foreigners, Rules and Meanings and is intricate, attention demanding and intellectually dense. No concessions are made to the viewer, who is hectored continually by, texts from all sides, rather as he might be by sacred writing, in a temple. The exhibition, in fact, might almost be called a Temple of the Text.
Kosuth is a teacher, a prolific writer and lecturer, and plainly a man with considerable energy and commitment and a sense of mission. He has little interest in the sensuous aspect of art, and most of his installations are in stark black and white with a tendency towards Minimalism in the broadest sense. Ideas and language are his obsessions, and the two are woven together to interact in a variety of ways.
In one section, Locke and Voltaire engage in a kind of dialectical duet, while throughout the walls are spattered with quotes from William James, Camus, Emerson, etc. There are also potted histories of certain years and their main events.
Excerpts from old dictionaries and encyclopedias stress the verbal obsessions, some of them being in French, classical Greek and Gaelic, while scraps of Italian and Hungarian appear in other contexts. It often puts you in mind of certain of Pound's late Cantos in which multilingualism is flourished like a heraldic stay and also inevitably of Finnegans Wake, with its warp and woof of many tongues. We are, it seems, continually being asked questions about the nature of language, perception, signs and "contexts".
Of course, much of this goes back to Wittgenstein himself, who was a rigorous stripper away of language and of our everyday, unthought out, facile assumptions and associations. However, while this was novel and challenging a generation ago or more, much or even most of it has become almost hackneyed since, and it may be that Kosuth, who was apparently a trail blazer of Conceptualism 25 years ago, is being overtaken by events.
Signs, texts (in the specialist modern sense), multiple readings and deconstruction are now part of many university courses and while not actually old hat, are in some danger of degenerating into the New Jar
What used to be genuinely questioning" is almost an academic ritual.
Nevertheless this exhibition holds you and in spite of its hectoring and its obsessive dialectics, it is good intellectual entertainment.
Kosuth's intellectual vitality and curiosity are not to be denied.