Animalism in Orwell's Animal Farm

Principles of Animalism 1: The basic ideas Old Major passes on in his first speech are that humans are the enemy because they overwork the animals and treat them badly. He says all animals should cooperate to overthrow the humans. He teaches that all animals are equal, even the wild creatures like rats and rabbits, and that they should all protect each other as friends. All humans are enemies. He warns the animals never to live in houses, sleep in beds, wear clothes, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, touch money or engage in trade - these are all the evil habits of humans. Particularly, no animal must ever try to exert power over another animal - strong or weak, they are all brothers. As a symbol of Animalism and its ideas, he teaches them the song, Beasts of England.

A Natural History of the Senses- Diane Ackerman

Humans might luxuriate in the idea of being “in” nature, but Ms. Ackerman has taught generations that we are nature—for “no facet of nature is as unlikely as we, the tiny bipeds with the giant dreams.” In prose so rich and evocative that one can feel the earth turning beneath one’s feet as one reads, Ackerman’s thrilling observations—of things ranging from the cloud glories to the human brain to endangered whooping cranes—urge us to live in the moment, to wake up to nature’s everyday miracles.

Marcus Coates Ideal Syllabus

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/ideal-syllabus-marcus-coates/

Mark Dion- Tate Thames Dig

http://edu.warhol.org/app_dion.html

Nicolas Bourriaud, Precarious Constructions. Answer to Jacques Rancière on Art and Politics

http://classic.skor.nl/article-4416-nl.html?lang=en

Drawings of Freud

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/health/psychology/25freud.html?pagewanted=all

Tony Swain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/guide-painting-tony-swain

Non-monumental

http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=291

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/3

Narrow Larry's Guide to American Folk Art

http://www.narrowlarry.com/page1.html

Underwater Sculpture

http://underwatersculpture.com/

Kippenberger Hotel Drawings

The Life of an Object

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/monumental-mission.html

Collective Memory

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/SHEM_topics.htm

Haim Steinbach

http://www.jca-online.com/steinbach.html

Art as Social Enterprise

I wrote this short essay in response to a reading by art critic Polly Ulrich, which focused on the role of Functional Ceramics in the world of Contemporary Art. I took great deal from it in terms of questioning what we can define as contemporary art and how the establishment is opening up to a new way of thinking about the functionality of art in society. This is interesting to me as it's something I regularly question in relation to my own choice and efforts to make art for a living.

------------------------------------------



‘The meaning of something is in its use, not in itself.”

John Cage


Here Cage asserts that we can find profound meaning not only in abstract ideas,
but more often through the effective, relational and ordinary activities through
which we conduct our lives.

Increasingly artists tap into diverse sources for their practices, often aiming to
bring aesthetic experience closer to practical lived experience,
understanding that, even while working in a field full of disembodied work
practices, abstract language and virtuality, that it is still the sensuous qualities
which give art its emotional power.

Functional craft art has always been unacknowledged and remains a kind of
primal, subterranean field underlying the variable trends in our visual culture.
Functional Ceramic work finds it’s main foundation in it’s relationship with the
body yet we should not forget that it maintains a simultaneous relationship with
the abstract world of concepts: such as social meaning, tradition, culture and
connection to history. As literary critic Bill Brown commented-

‘There is no such thing as a dumb object’.

The art establishment has long ignored the practice of functional ceramics as, for
one, it de-stabilises where art is expected to be located, placing it in everyday life
situations, away from the white cube gallery or museum space. This situation
however, has long been the goal of avant-garde artists, and increasingly we see
art works emerging which are based on encounter and a recognition that art should engage embodied perception, as an endlessly evolving relationship between one’s body, one’s mind and the environment in which we live. In other words, art that reflects the dynamic model of human existence.

Classical Greek (carried on by the Enlightenment) ideas about the superiority of
reason and logic over the experience of the senses are being reconsidered in the
post-modern world we live in. We now hold a more nuanced understanding of
perception and the world around us, thus our attitude towards what constitutes
an artwork must change also.

Functional Ceramics could be seen to operate at the centre of Contemporary Art
as it brings us closer to actual experience through it’s location in the social
context of daily life. Since Duchamp’s ‘Fountain, in 1917, we have seen the avant-
garde try to push art out into the world. The Western-European attitude that
defines artefacts by whether or not they should be placed in a gallery or museum
is one which has been learned and maintained so this practice should not be seen
as being intrinsic to art itself.


The example of Joseph Beuys planting 7000 Oak Trees in Kassel, Germany can be
seen as an illustrative example of revolt against this kind of elitism, here Beuys
is aligning his art with a useful purpose, a clear social goal and placing it firmly
outside of the gallery context.

Art works do not just represent reality, they create reality: they create images,
narratives and points of view which we absorb, and in doing so we are led to the
constructing and reconstructing of our own beliefs.

Art that deals with experience, social interaction and that which is located in
daily life, owes a great deal to the aesthetic traditions of functional ceramics as it
is an art that implements both body and mind. It stands as an art form of
humanizing values and acknowledges the importance of both knowing and doing
in the making of things.


Image - Rirkrit Tiravanija- contemporary artist residing in New York. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.

Today I Wrote Nothing

Short stories and poems by Russian absurdist Danill Kharms

http://absurdist.obook.org/kharms/

Visions of Paradise Series on Folk Art

http://folkstreams.net/film,102

Garden of Eden on Wheels

Museum of Jurrasic Technology, Culver City, LA

Introductory Essay by Erna Aljasmets, Eesti NSV udhariduskoolide opilaste toid

And swear by him who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer. Rev 10:6

In 1933 Mary Elliott Wing, a seamstress living in Roanoke Virginia, conceived of and constructed the first truly modern mobile home. Inspired both by the dimensions of the Biblical ark as well as Scriptural accounts of the Noachian deluge and promises of subsequent apocalyptic eras, Mary Wing devised a mobile dwelling capable of quickly adapting to a world of rapid changing environmental and social conditions. Whether driven by the lure of distant attractions or the threat of impending disaster, Mary Wing's mobile home was able to uproot at a moments notice and migrate to any location to which her 1930 Chevrolet could haul her and her mobile dwelling. Mary Wing's construction project was inspired not only by the physical Ark but by its plan and purpose as well. Living as she was in the early years of the economic downturn of the 1930's, Mary Wing carefully and lovingly equipped her trailer with all such things as would be needed to preserve life against the devastating economic storm that raged outside the protected confines of her land-ark.

Mary Wing's was, of course, neither the first mobile dwelling nor even the first mobile home in the contemporary understanding of the term. As noted by J.B. Jackson in his The Movable Dwelling and How it Came to America,

The verb to dwell has a distinct meaning. At one time it meant to hesitate, to linger to delay, as when we say, "He is dwelling too long on this insignificant matter." To dwell, like the verb to abide (from which we derive abode) simply means to pause, to stay put for a length of time; it implies that we will eventually move on.

As if propelled by a literal understanding of the verb, the dwellings of our forefathers were for millennia predominantly mobile in nature. As David A. Thornburg remarks,

The history of the house trailer really begins with the covered carts and wagons used by prehistoric nomads who wandered the steppes of Asia. Four thousand year old models of these ox drawn vehicles have been unearthed in Syria, and Assyria, some of them looking surprisingly like 19th century Conestogas.


The house trailer is, of course, but a sub-set of the larger age-old category of mobile dwelling. From the Basque sheepherder tent/coat and Bedouin woven goat hair "blacktent" to Mongolian yurts, human ingenuity has created an astonishing array of portable dwellings.

However, in America, it was the migratory worker and seasonal factory worker, tacking together small masonite trailers or packing up their home built housecars and assembling in camps as early as 1920; or, the evangelist, carpenter or salesman, who built their first trailer to follow some private dream; or simply the old time "trailerite" or auto camper, a casual, cantankerous and fiercely independent soul of the teens and twenties who together caused a brand new industry, mobile home production, to emerge and flourish right out of the depths of the Great Depression.

* * *

Coincidentally, as the seamstress Mary Elliott Wing was designing and constructing her mobile home on the Atlantic coast, 3000 miles away on the Pacific coast, the astronomer, Edwin Hubble, observing distant stars from the vantage point of a 5000 ft. mountain-top a short distance north east of Pasadena, California, was making important observations concerning the spectra of distant stars - observations that help place Mary Wing's unique efforts in perspective.

Hubble's keen, if fortuitous, 1933 observation that the more distant the star the redder the coloration of its characteristic spectra, was the first step in what was to become a cascade of deductive reasoning which culminated in two of the most significant understandings in the history of Western cosmological thought - namely that the universe is thousands or millions of times larger than was commonly supposed and secondly, the universe is not only much larger than had been assumed but it is dramatically increasing in size with each passing moment.

There is an important corollary to Hubble's second realization that all of existence is expanding: if the amount of matter in the universe is more or less fixed but the size of the universe is constantly expanding, then the space between the objects in the universe is that which is increasing. The amount of matter in creation is not expanding; the distance between the bits of matter is getting greater. In other words the stuff of existence is thinning out, getting colder, running down. Or in the words of W.B. Yeats "the center does not hold; things fall apart."

Ants Viires, the noted Estonian historian, responding in 1975 to Hubble's view of an ever expanding cosmos, wrote in his Puud ja inimesed: puude osast Eesti rehvakulturis "...time ravages everything, our person, our experience, our material world. In the end everything will be lost. In the end there is only the darkness. ...and despite the apparent fullness and richness of our lives there is, deposited at the core of each of us, a seed of this total loss of this inevitable and ultimate darkness."

Against this flood of darkness, against this inevitable annihilation, certain individuals are called upon to preserve what they can. And those of us who hear and heed this call to hold back for a time some small part of existence from the inevitability of entropic disintegration have come to be known as collectors.

* * *
Steven Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell in their poetic essay on collecting, Finders, Keepers, note that collecting is an act of passion. Speaking of the 16th through 19th century collectors, represented in their unabashedly beautiful book, Gould and Purcell note:

They all believed passionately in the value of their work; they were driven, sometimes at the cost of life or sanity, by this conviction, this urge to collect, to bring part of a limitless diversity into an orbit of personal or public appreciation. In an age of passivity, where Walkman and television bring so much to us and demand so little in return, we must grasp the engaging passion of these collectors, And we must also remember that passion, for all it public and private joys, literally means suffering.

If viewed from the perspective of self-preservation, this activity of gathering together, compiling and tending to often useless objects might appear illogical. In attempt to make sense of this seeming senseless and curiously compulsive activity, commentary on themes of collecting often focus on issues of scarcity and value, on the of amassment of objects as a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth and/or power. But it is all too easy to ascribe motives of self interest to this passion to gather - to view collecting as an act of hoarding, of taking for one's self when, in fact, to assume the mantle of gathering for aftertime can just as easily be viewed as a self-less if not sacrificial act.

* * *
Over the past half century agricultural science has engineered remarkably successful plants with yields that would have been unthinkable a century ago. These remarkable successes have understandably rendered these hybrids nearly ubiquitous. This success and ubiquity, however, carry with them very real if often overlooked risks - risks of susceptibility of the world's hybridized food stuffs to disease and the very real potential for famine - risks which have been eclipsed in the largely justifiable euphoria of success. Against this possibility of potential wide scale famine, as well as out of simple concern for the loss of genetic material, there has developed a system know as The Indigenous Seed Bank Project, a loose network of gardeners around the world.

Like Adam and Eve tending to and caring for their Garden, the seed bank gardeners, by collecting, sowing and harvesting seeds of traditional indigenous plants, are similarly cultivating and caring for genetic strains, perhaps as ancient as the Garden itself - strains that would have surely been lost were it not for the seed bank's collective effort. Similarly, if less concretely, all collectors can be seen as participating in a larger species wide project of keeping and preserving the "stuff of life", nourishment in another but not less important form, from the ravages of time.

* * *
Four thousand three hundred and forty three years ago, Noah, was called to build an ark and provision it with all such as was necessary to withstand the impending apocalypse. That ark proved to be the first and most complete museum of natural history ever assembled and, by extension, Noah and his family, the first and most successful of collectors - collecting systematically, if urgently, to rescue from extinction all of creation. Sixty three years ago, Mary Elliot Wing was also called to build an ark and provision it with all such as was necessary to withstand the economic apocalypse of the 1930's. Like Noah and his family, Mary Wing also built and assembled those things necessary to rescue from extinction life itself.

* * *
And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. Rev 10:6

Whether by earthquake, seas of blood and clouds of human-faced locusts or the final entropic death of all star matter, knowledge of the end of time is part of human consciousness and Ants Viires' "seed of total loss, of inevitable and ultimate darkness" resides in us all. Against this inevitability of ruin, some of us are called to collect and preserve. And it is our belief that those who have been appointed collectors are in fact serving in that capacity for us all. This exhibition presents the fruits of the efforts of five such individuals to whom we are deeply indebted.

__ _____________________ __

Erna Aljasmets is Keeper of Folk, Traditional and Urban Handcrafts at the Eesti NSV udhariduskoolide opilaste toid in Tallinn, Estonia. Erna teaches Vernacular Art and Aesthetics at the Eesti vabariik kultuuripaevade raames and is a Research Fellow in Visual and Cultural Studies at the Vasteliina keskkooli optetaja. She has curated several handcrafts exhibitions in locations as diverse as Moscow, Yerevan, Kiev, Switzerland, Berlin, and Helsinki, as well as her native Tallinn. Her books include Ma ise ilutegija (1969), Laste loomeroom (1978), and Laste loomertoo (1988).

Jesse Howard instructional Signage

Can Animals Think? Time Magazine Aug '10

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978023,00.html

The Red Birds, Brigitte Cornand, 2009

http://www.art-agenda.com/shows/view/956

Nauman - Hand Circle

Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations - In this book (which was post-humously published in 1953) W would follow an idea until he could say that it either worked or that life doesn't work this way, so we have to start over. He would not throw away his failed argument, but would include it in his book.'

Bruce Nauman - Square Deression, Munster 2007 *** Donald Judd, Untitled, Munster 1977

I Like America and America Likes Me

Flood

Birds Gather

The Birds (1963)

The Birds (1963) is a modern Hitchcock thriller/masterpiece, his first film with Universal Studios. It is the apocalyptic story of a northern California coastal town filled with an onslaught of seemingly unexplained, arbitrary and chaotic attacks of ordinary birds - not birds of prey. Ungrammatical advertising campaigns emphasized: "The Birds Is Coming." This Technicolor feature came after Psycho (1960) - another film loaded with 'bird' references.

Novelist Evan Hunter based his screenplay upon the 1952 collection of short stories of the same name by Daphne du Maurier - Hitchcock's third major film based on the author's works (after Jamaica Inn (1939) and Rebecca (1940)). In du Maurier's story, the birds were attacking in the English countryside, rather than in a small town north of San Francisco. The film's technical wizardry is extraordinary, especially in the film's closing scene (a complex, trick composite shot) - the special visual effects of Ub Iwerks were nominated for an Academy Award (the film's sole nomination), but the Oscar was lost to Cleopatra. Hundreds of birds (gulls, ravens, and crows) were trained for use in some of the scenes, while mechanical birds and animations were employed for others.

The film's non-existent musical score is replaced by an electronic soundtrack (including simulated bird cries and wing-flaps), with Hitchcock's favorite composer Bernard Herrmann serving as a sound consultant. It was shot on location in the port town of Bodega Bay (north of San Francisco) and in San Francisco itself. Hitchcock introduced a 'fascinating new personality' for the film - his successor to Grace Kelly - a cool, blonde professional model named 'Tippi' Hedren, in her film debut in a leading role. [Hedren reprised her character in a minor supporting role, in an inferior made-for-TV sequel, The Birds II: Land's End (1994), set in the New England fishing town of Land's End. The director was Rick Rosenthal, although the standard generic pseudonym 'Alan Smithee' is found in the credits. Leads Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are replaced by Brad Johnson and Chelsea Field.]

Initially, critics were baffled when they attempted to interpret the film on a literal level and measure it against other typical disaster/horror films of its kind. The typical Hitchcock MacGuffin is the question: Why do the strange attacks occur? But the film cannot solely be interpreted that way, because as the actors in the film discover in the long discussion scene in the Tides Restaurant, there is no solid, rational reason why the birds are attacking. They are not seeking revenge for nature's mistreatment, or foreshadowing doomsday, and they don't represent God's punishment for humankind's evil.

When this is understood, the symbolic film's complex fabric makes more sense, especially if interpreted in Freudian terms. It is about three needy women (literally 'birds') - and a fourth from a younger generation - each flocking around and vying for varying degrees of affection and attention from the sole, emotionally-cold male lead, and the fragile tensions, anxieties and unpredictable relations between them. The attacks are mysteriously related to the mother and son relationship in the film - anger (and fears of abandonment or being left lonely) of the jealous, initially hostile mother surface when her bachelor son brings home an attractive young woman. Curiously, the first attack has symbolic phallic undertones - it occurs when the man and woman approach toward each other outside the restaurant in the coastal town.

On an allegorical level, the birds in the film are the physical embodiment and exteriorization of unleashed, disturbing, shattering forces that threaten all of humanity (those threatened in the film include schoolchildren, a defenseless farmer, bystanders, a schoolteacher, etc.) when relationships have become insubstantial, unsupportive, or hurtful. In a broader, more universal sense, the stability of the home and natural world environment, symbolized by broken teacups at the domestic level, is in jeopardy and becoming disordered when people cannot 'see' the dangers gathering nearby, and cannot adequately protect themselves from violence behind transparent windows, telephone booths, eyeglasses, or facades. Numerous allusions to blindness are sprinkled throughout the film (the farmer's eyes are pecked out, the children play blindman's bluff at the birthday party, the broken glasses of the fleeing schoolchild, etc.), giving the hint that the camera's voyeuristic lens (and its screen-viewing audience) is also being subjected to assault.

Ways of Seeing 2

I have been thinking about the singular world view of humans and the widely held assumption that our social systems, communication and brains are superior to that of all the other creatures living on this planet.. I am interested in the subtle and non-comprehensible ways in which the world, unseen to human eyes, goes on around us, I see it as millions of parallel dimensions existing alongside one another.

I am interested in exploring the interaction between humans and animals, and in particular, the place where two worlds collide. It's that space that interests me, the gaze of one set of eyes to another, of two species connecting on different tracks. This connection happens from time to time and tends to give the feeling of having experienced a 'moment' with another creature, but animals are living a different by set of rules to us and the emotional connection we put onto these situations is something quite different to the reality of what actually happened, here lies my interest in the point in between, the point where it is possible to connect on some level.

In this way, I also think it is possible to consider this point of connection in terms of the object and the viewer. It's the place where a connection is made, a meta-physical space, nothing touching anything else, just a recognition of some sort happening, sparked by the meeting of two sets of world views, in the case of viewer and object, the object; inanimate yet communicative, represents the view/interests/personality and emotions of a non-present participant while the viewer looks on through eyes soaked in their own life experience.

In human and animal interaction both bring their own sets of life experience to the table, none more valid than the other and each putting their own way of seeing things onto the situation, in an effort to understand it. The idea that one possesses the capacity to reason while one does not is questionable and I am unsure that it even matters when one discards the singular Biblical worldview of human superiority and accepts that there are many ways of seeing.

http://www.kunsthalle-bern.ch/en/agenda/exhibition.php?exhibition=131
http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=634
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Burnett_Tylor

A Bird in the Hand

If you get them at the right time of year, many birds are easy to catch. For an agile hunter, a small boy for example, there isn't much of a problem in collecting eggs and chicks from the nest; some adults can also be snatched by hand. Commercial hunters in the nineteenth century reported that Passenger Pigeons - once their eggs had hatched - could be plucked right off the nest.

Even among birdwatchers there are those who feel the need to possess the birds, if only symbolically. To have them is to tick them off your list. And the best list is 'the life list'- the record of all the species you have ever seen.

What is it, this urge to own another living creature? And why is it that we understand so well the universal symbol of the bird being set free from the cage?

The Biblical Flood

After Nature - New Museum, NYC, 2008

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/399

When Nature Takes Over

http://blog.art21.org/2009/12/21/when-nature-takes-over/

Primitive Culture

Tylor's "Primitive Culture"

http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S207.htm

Excerpt from by a review by Alfred Russell Wallace, published in 'The Academy', 1872

It is perhaps inevitable that in the present chaotic state of our knowledge of man's mental nature and its relation to his visible organism, a work like the present should be unsatisfactory. The minute anatomy of the brain has been long ago exhaustively investigated, while the comparative study of its form and size in different races and individuals has been carried on by means of extensive collections of crania and casts; yet, although the brain is almost universally admitted to be the organ of the mind, by neither of these lines of research nor by any combination of them, have any definite conclusions been arrived at as to the relation of the brain to the various mental faculties. Up to the present day our physiologists dispute as to whether the forehead or the occiput is the seat of the intellect, yet they scout the idea of giving up their hitherto barren line of investigation, in favour of that experimental method of comparing function with development which, the much-abused phrenologists maintain, leads to complete success. Equally unsatisfactory is the practice of leaving out of view, in theories of mental development, the numerous well-established cases of abnormal mental phenomena which indicate latent powers in man beyond those usually recognised. These are looked upon as obscure diseases of the nervous system, and although their occurrence is very rare to individual experience, the records of them are now sufficiently voluminous to furnish comparable cases to almost all that occur. They can thus be grouped into classes, and this fact, of each one forming an item in a group of analogous cases, is supposed to preclude the necessity of any attempt at a rational explanation of them. This is the method very largely adopted by Mr. Tylor, who in treating of the beliefs, customs, or superstitions of mankind, seems often to be quite satisfied that he has done all that is required when he has shown that a similar or identical belief or custom exists elsewhere.

Animism

Belief in the existence of spirits separable from bodies. Such beliefs are traditionally identified with small-scale ("primitive") societies, though they also occur in major world religions. They were first competently surveyed by Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871). Classic animism, according to Tylor, consists of attributing conscious life to natural objects or phenomena, a practice that eventually gave rise to the notion of a soul. See also shaman.

Paul Gaugins attempt to enter into the 'primitive' world

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://communitas.princeton.edu/blogs/wri152-3/altucker/GauTehura.jpg&imgrefurl=http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/altucker/archives/002058.html&usg=__RxUPd0_lC7yun7T5YHaVm_RAGMw=&h=285&w=384&sz=24&hl=en&start=10&sig2=gieOtE3tPpinxOdNl5U4KQ&um=1&tbnid=WqQlay9-6_C6QM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=123&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dprimitive%2Bculture%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1&ei=YM5mS9-2ItHK-QbNt4SyBw

Marcus Coates - Being Animal

Joseph Kosuth

One and Three Chairs, 1965, is a work by Joseph Kosuth. An example of conceptual art, the piece consists of a chair, a photograph of this chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph depicts the chair as it is actually installed in the room, and thus the work changes each time it is installed in a new venue.

Two elements of the work remain constant: a copy of a dictionary definition of the word "chair" and a diagram with instructions for installation. Both bear Kosuth's signature. Under the instructions, the installer is to choose a chair, place it before a wall, and take a photograph of the chair. This photo is to be enlarged to the size of the actual chair and placed on the wall to the left of the chair. 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.

Kosuth's concern with the difference between a concept and its mode of presentation was prefigured in the "event cards" of Fluxus-artists like George Brecht, Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono. These artists also tackled the problem of presenting "concepts" to an art audience. One and Three Chairs is, perhaps, a step towards a resolution of this problem. Rather than present the viewer with the bare written instructions for the work, or make a live event of the realization of the concept (in the manner of the Fluxus artists), Kosuth instead unifies concept and realization. One and Three Chairs demonstrates how an artwork can embody an idea that remains constant despite changes to its elements.

Kosuth stresses the difference between concept and presentation in his writings (e.g., "Art after Philosophy", 1969 and interviews (see the quotation below). He tries to intimately bind the conceptual nature of his work with the nature of art itself, thus raising his instructions for the presentation of an artwork to the level of a discourse on art. In 1963 Henry Flynt articulated these problems in the article "Concept Art". This was a forerunner to Kosuth's thematization of "Concept Art" in "Art after Philosophy", the text that made One and Three Chairs famous.

The work One and Three Chairs can be seen to highlight the relation between language, picture and referent. It problematizes relations between object, visual and verbal references (denotations) plus semantic fields of the term chosen for the verbal reference. The term of the dictionary includes connotations and possible denotations which are relevant in the context of the presentation of One and Three Chairs. The meanings of the three elements are congruent in certain semantic fields and incongruent in other semantic fields: A semantic congruity ("One") and a threefold incongruity ("One and Three"). Ironically, One and Three Chairs can be looked upon as simple but rather complex model, of the science of signs. A viewer may ask "what's real here?" and answer that "the definition is real"; Without a definition, one would never know what an actual chair is.

There exist different interpretations of these semantic and ontological aspects. Some refer to Plato´s Republic (Book X); others refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein´s Tractatus or to Charles Sanders Peirce's triad icon-index-symbol. Dreher discusses the semantic problems of One and Three Chairs as inclusions of circles which represent semantic fields.

The work tends to defy formal analysis because one chair can be substituted for another chair, rendering the photograph and the chair photographed elusive to description. Nevertheless the particular chair and its accompanying photograph lend themselves to formal analysis. There are many chairs in the world; thus only those actually used can be described. Those chairs not used would not be analyzed. 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. Kosuth uses the related questions, "how meanings of signs are constituted" and "how signs refer to extra-lingual phenomena" as a fundament to discuss the relation between concept and presentation. Kosuth tries to identify or equate these philosophical problems with the theory of art. Kosuth changes the art practice from hand-made originals to notations with substitutable realizations, and tries to exemplify the relevance of this change for the theory of art.

In "Art after Philosophy," Kosuth provoked a confrontation with the formal criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Both exposed the concept of the art work as a non-substitutable instance realized by an artist who follows no other criteria than visual ones. They defined this concept as the core of modernism. 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. In 1968, Greenberg tried to disqualify the new tendencies as "'novelty' art": The different mediums are exploding...when everybody is a revolutionary the revolution is over. 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."