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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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We're studying semiotics this week in school. I modified a bit of an assignment for the blog. It's not scintillating, but I gotta post something cause I'm afraid L.M. will abandon me for my bloggy slackerness!
 Rogier van der Weyden, St. Luke Drawing the Virgin, c. 1435-40. Image from SUNY- Oneonta  Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. Wood folding chair, mounted photograph of a chair, and photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of “chair.” Image from philosophie-spiritualite.com Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs” reads like a text book illustration for semiotic theory. Here the sign of the chair is presented in three forms, a photograph of a chair, a chair, and a dictionary definition of a chair. Each instance of ‘chair’ functions very differently, yet all three are presented under a third, unifying category — that of art. It is as if the kind of self-reflexive step taken by artists such as Rogier Van der Weyden in his portrayal of St. Luke drawing the Virgin was here presented bare — divested of context and content so that the cognitive act of reference is itself the object of the work. By choosing a referent as neutral as a chair, Kosuth draws attention to the codes of meaning rather than the content. In a contemporary context, the piece reads as illustrative, dry and didactic. But in the early days of conceptual art, there was an exhilaration to the notion that art ideas were not on reliant physical form. Releasing the idea from the object meant, at that time, emancipation from the market, from aura, from the gallery, from authorship, from genius and a whole host of artworld hierarchies. History has shown that conceptual art was ultimately as susceptible to commodification as other forms, but it did open the door for a slew of modes of meaning. |