About the Exhibition
Presented in partnership with Talbot Rice Gallery, The University of Edinburgh
In this 150th anniversary year celebrating the work of Charles Darwin, conceptualist Joseph Kosuth creates a new commission in the library where Darwin was inspired to pursue his revolutionary, evolutionary theory.
Kosuth has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art. This new work is a series of debates between Darwin and Joseph’s long time collaborators, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
These Kosuthian sentences and dialogues probe the paradox of content that occurs between philosophy, science and art. Presented as a set of neon diagrams and words we find Darwin’s own immediate, intuitive and creative doodles and drawings introducing the ideas that we later take as the blue prints for scientific truths. Joseph uses Nietzsche’s thoughts with a Wittgensteinian approach to interrogate the creative and philosophical slippages that occur in the convergent descriptions of philosophy in relation to art.
