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Question man
Joseph Kosuth keeps asking at the Gardner
BY RANDI HOPKINS

It’s one of Boston’s best-kept secrets that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in addition to housing a vast trove of art and objects amassed by the acquisitive, colorful Mrs. Gardner, also presents totally today art exhibitions in a small space on the first floor that formerly served as a "green room" or waiting room for musicians, speakers, and other guests. Along with highlighting high-class Renaissance figures like Botticelli and Titian, the Gardner has offered work by state-of-the-art, 21st-century characters like Laura Owens and Nari Ward. This year marks the museum’s 100th birthday, and it’s launching a year and a half of centennial celebrations with an exhibition of brand new work made specifically for the Gardner by pioneering conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, who spent time last fall poring over Mrs. Gardner’s archives and collection as the museum’s artist-in-residence.

This renowned wordsmith and neon meister came to prominence as a key figure in the formulation of conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, and his interest in questioning art’s traditional forms and the assumptions surrounding them still drives him. Pieranna Cavalchini, contemporary curator at the Gardner, describes him as "a man who investigates, who searches out meaning." And indeed, his upcoming show, descriptively (pedantically? long-windedly?) called "Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson, and Isabella Stewart Gardner — Three Locations in the Creative Process, a Centennial Project by Joseph Kosuth," reveals the workings of a sharp and inquiring mind.

During his residency, Kosuth became intrigued with the relationship among Whistler, Berenson, and Gardner as principal players in the conception and creation of Mrs. Gardner’s museum. He draws on philosophy, literature, reference books, popular culture, scientific theory, and the like for his work. For this exhibition, he read through letters, lectures, and other writings by these three, as well as examining the paintings they made or bought; then he juxtaposed salient texts and images to provoke questions about how art is viewed from different perspectives, from artist to adviser to collector — to viewer.

The physical structure of the show mirrors its conceptual structure: it comprises three parts. A white-neon "sign" runs along the museum’s outside wall, spelling out the text of a lecture given by Whistler in London in 1885. There’s an installation of time lines and paintings in the Special Exhibition gallery. And there’s a sort of "intervention" in the museum’s upstairs galleries, where Kosuth replaced the covers printed with the cautious invitation "Visitors May Lift" (found on light-sensitive works in the collection since the 1930s) with fabric embroidered with texts relating to the objects they protect. "Kosuth uses language as art, as architecture, as idea," says Cavalchini. "His work holds a great intellectual complexity that engages and elevates viewers as ‘co-authors’ of the idea."

"Artist, Curator, Collector: James McNeill Whistler, Bernard Berenson, and Isabella Stewart Gardner — Three Locations in the Creative Process, a Centennial Project by Joseph Kosuth" will be displayed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2 Palace Road in the Fenway, from January 24 through April 6. Related events will include two talks by Kosuth: on January 25, at 1:30 p.m., the artist will speak about his public-art works, and on March 6, at 6:30 p.m., he will discuss his current exhibition as part of the Gardner’s acclaimed "Eye of the Beholder" lecture series. Call (617) 278-5129 or e-mail events@isgm.org.

Issue Date: January 23 - 30, 2003

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