One and Three Chairs

Two elements of the work remain constant: a copy of a dictionary definition of the word "chair" and a diagram with instructions for installation.

Finally, a blow-up of the copy of the dictionary definition is to be hung to the right of the chair, its upper edge aligned with that of the photograph.

[1] "Event cards" of Fluxus-artists like George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono prefigured Kosuth's concern with the difference between a concept and its mode of presentation.

The enlarged dictionary definition of the word chair is also open to formal analysis, as is the diagram containing instructions of the work.

Kosuth's thematization of semantic congruities and incongruities can be seen as a reflection of the problems which the relations between concept and presentation pose.

In "Art after Philosophy," Kosuth provoked a confrontation with the formal criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried.

In the sixties, Greenberg's and Fried's modernist doctrine dominated the American discussions on art; meanwhile, the artists Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, Henry Flynt, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson and Joseph Kosuth wrote articles on art exemplifying a pluralistic anti- and post-modernist tendency which gained more influence at the end of the sixties.

"[9] Sam Hunter offered a more positive view in 1972: "The situation of open possibilities which confronted artists in the first years of the seventies allowed a variety of means and many fertile idea systems to coexist, reconciling through the poetic imagination apparent contradictions.