Joseph Kosuth
Rules and Meanings
EXHIBITION
28 July–17 September 1995
FAR – Lungo Lario Trento
Joseph Kosuth produced a permanent installation, titled Rules and Meanings, in the Antonio Ratti Foundation spaces. This installation reflected Kosuth's work method that he had been developing since the mid-sixties. His method is based on exposing written texts which are connected to the specific exhibition context (space), as well as to the environment and figures that contribute to the cultural background of the work (the city of Como and its important guest, Plinio il Giovane). The walls were entirely painted in black and the texts from the Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus by Wittgenstein were silk-screened on the walls. Wittgenstein was the main philosopher who created the pathway for modern research on the nature of language and thought. The quotations on behavioural rules at a nineteenth-century English dinner reception and the texts taken from Plinio il Giovane's letters appeared next to Wittgenstein's.