The chair in front of the door


In creating his pieces, Joseph Kosuth usually uses quotations of writings and images that he inserts in a new context. In his work quotation and context become an indivisible whole that creates meaning; since, over time, context changes and signs stratify, no meaning can ever be termed definitive. So the artwork is only a pretext, since the text is something that can be read by anyone at any time. The author, who as such tends to disappear, is not a subject who expresses himself in personal terms but is rather a vehicle through which new meanings - and therefore new collective meanings - can take form.
Kosuth chose to work in the Loggia of the Podestà in San Gimignano. For centuries, this was the centre of city power while today especially the elderly citizens gather here. With its wealth of historic and human connotations, the site suggested the chance to highlight a text that Walter Benjamin had written about San Gimignano in his City Images (1925); in it, Benjamin refers to the local custom of sitting on the threshold of the house and therefore outside (but only men at the café). In effect this is a salient aspect of Italian life, a behaviour made possible by the climatic conditions that make it necessary to have a house (since a completely nomadic life would be too cold) but allow people to spend long periods of time outdoors.

   
  The architecture of Central and Southern Italy has always taken this behavior into account, emphasizing the importance of balconies, patios, of every form of interspatial area between indoors and outdoors that we could define as a threshold. This appears especially evident when comparison is made to the architecture of colder countries where extra space has been allotted to such structures as, for instance, bow windows. This digression on architecture is not out of place in our discussion; it is essential, in a work like Kosuth’s, to investigate the urban fabric in which the artwork is to be inserted because the piece originates in a strict relationship with the environment.
In Kosuth’s installation Benjamin’s quotation is carved in pietra serena and placed like a ribbon under the loggia which - on account of its central position and of its function as a gathering place for the townspeople who sit there to chat and comment - represents a sort of threshold for the city between its human "inside" and touristic "outside".
This artwork also seems to proof of a "return to Tuscany" that is as metaphoric as it is real: Kosuth and Benjamin are only two examples the intellectuals who have made the pilgrimage to Tuscany. In fact this region is one of the main cradles of modern Western culture and so it is inevitably one of the places in which this culture’s crisis is most felt. So Kosuth’s work combines the thought of a contemporary visual artist with that of a theoretician from the last century; present with past culture; a specific place that today has lost its function and has become little more than a side-show with the international culture of which it had been an inspiration.
 
© Arte Continua 1996-2002. Per le opere il © copyright è degli artisti
Casole d'Elsa
Colle di Val d'Elsa
Montalcino
Poggibonsi
San Gimignano
Siena
index