From the Fundraising Edition series I Was In The Middle Before I Knew That I Had Begun
20% of the proceeds from the total sales of this edition, will be donated to three organizations continuing to support mutual aid efforts within local communities in the ongoing movement to protect Black lives.
Signed and Numbered.
The texts used in this edition build on Joseph Kosuth’s Existential Time series, which is scheduled to be shown in the US for the first time in late 2020. As a reflection on the gap that holds together beginnings and ends, Kosuth’s Existential Time endeavors to punctuate the lack, limits, and surplus of meaning surrounding the narrative experience of time and life, while exploring the powerful and finite territory of the present. These texts are used to ‘draw’ the map of a possible play of meaning, like a diagram of an unknown entity: the architecture of uncharted thinking. This work continues the artist’s use of readymade texts, and appropriation strategies that he initiated in the 1960s. Existential Time includes texts by writers and thinkers that represent a body of theory or literature that has made a significant contribution to present day culture. The meaning of these fragments stand independent of Kosuth’s, while being simultaneously employed by him in the production of meaning.
Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) is a pioneer of Conceptual and installation art, initiating language-based works and appropriation strategies in the 1960s. His work has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art. In 1969 Kosuth held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York and in the same year became the American editor of the journal Art and Language. His nearly forty year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia.
