Sigmund Freud-Museum | Newsletter - Sigmund Freud Museum Wien

e said in that language or any language” does not apply to art. It is the reflexive aspect of art, as a
process, in which it can see itself before it proceeds, which limits the analogy of art with language.
The location of the process (or how it comes to be manifested) is that shifting interface where art is
both like and unlike language. The ways in which it is like language is what makes sense to you, now,
hearing this, as one that knows and can identify language. Yet art, because of the agency of the artist
and his or her subjective role, has properties which language – pragmatic, and potentially usable by
anyone – does not and cannot have. One could say that art is like a language comprised only of
language games, from which other language games are constructed. What it ‘says’ can only be said
elliptically. Art as a language game, in this analogy, can be comprised of anything – like that of
language, its presence as sound, or ink on a page, or photography, is arbitrary – as long as it becomes
perceived as an additional game, introducing additional rules. One ‘speaks’ through the addition and
elimination of games and rules, even if seemingly speaking of the world, but what one ‘says’ in the
short term only seems to alter our view of that historicized compilation of language games (which is
experienced, at any given moment, as one game). This is art’s elliptical quality, and what its slow
circling makes visible is the mechanism of culture itself. Seen another way, we have consciousness
itself made external and functioning as a concrete event (not unlike a language being made visible
without loosing its transparency).
In this ‘external’ state of visibility it can then become accountable. It is this aspect of accountability
which gives art its political life. What I have called elsewhere ‘the questioning of the nature of art’ is
precisely that act of accountability. It is a part of the creative process, when it is truly creative. Such a
questioning process can only, it seems to me, manifest itself in a meaningful war within the
construction of the new language game itself, and this through the comparison implicit in the alteration
of something like paradigm models which a new game with new rules can potentially provide. Thus,
political ‘content’ has really no effect within the slow circling of game and rule construction. Its only
political effect is equivalent to a kind of message which could be cloned, essentially, without being
staged as art. What its presentation as art adds to such a message is a form of institutional authority
within culture. This is why art as propaganda has always looked, and functioned, the same on the
political left and right. As a result, such work is doomed to be conservative because it cannot be truly
critically reflexive, either externally, of its own institutional dimensions, or internally, of its own
signifying operations qua art. Art is simply turned into a ‘delivery system’ of the political message.
There must be a real political life to art on the deeper level of the signifying process itself: exactly
those meanings produced by its own process and which tell us much about culture and ourselves,
without which the activity has no social value. Alternatively we are left with the specter of art as an
idealist category, one which reduces us all to passive receivers of a message, and then only the
message of a short-term goal, be it for ‘politics’ or for a market. Such an activity does exist, in fact,
and it is called advertising. It is pragmatic and is neither self-critical nor reflexive beyond what its
pragmatism demands. It neither questions its own nature nor is it accountable. The comparison of art
with advertising itself reveals the difference of a critical and even philosophical space, and that is the
difference which suggests art’s real political life. Art, as a process of game-making and rule-adding,
does not seem to produce knowledge in the conventional sense (as a ‘language’ it is, as I said, without
a pragmatic dimension), yet the process itself shows, and in so showing it tells us something important
about the world which culture constructs. As it sees itself, art sees the world, and changes it.
| Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth, born 1945 in Toledo, Ohio, was one of the pioneers of conceptual art, first becoming
widely known through his indoor and outdoor installations at the New York Guggenheim Museum and
the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among others. Currently he is working on projects for
the German Bundestag in Berlin and the Hiroshima Municipal High School in Hiroshima. Joseph
Kosuth lives and works in New York and Rome.
Since the 1980s Joseph Kosuth has devoted much attention to the theories of Sigmund Freud. At his
initiative, international artists were invited to put their work at the Sigmund Freud Museum’s disposal
– later the “Foundation for the Arts, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna” was created to further this
purpose. Kosuth’s contribution, the installation “Zero & Not,” was removed at the time of the
Museum’s renovation in 1996 and processed into multiples by the artist.