This indexical work takes the form of anonymous advertisements in media—newspapers, magazines, billboards, television—based on a taxonomy of the world developed in the early nineteenth century by Roget for use in his thesaurus. Marking the start of Kosuth's sustained engagement with public media, this work anticipated the media orientation of New York postmodernism beginning in the late 1970s.
Featuring a significant reexamination of Kosuth's work with
language and media by art historian
John C. Welchman, an appendix by art historian Gabriele Guercio, as well as the artist's own reflections on art and media, the book is richly illustrated with unpublished material from the artist's archive along with documentation of the artist's eponymous 1997 exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and his 2004 retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
Joseph Kosuth (born 1945 in Toledo, Ohio, lives and works in New York and Rome) is one of the pioneers of
Conceptual art 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.
