Double Reading No. 3

Mediums: screen printing on laminated glass, neon lights.
Location: the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles (the USA).

Joseph Kosuth’s series “Double Reading: An Allegory of Limits” consists of twenty silkscreen prints on the glass that are illuminated with neon. In each of the works, a caricature of a newspaper or magazine with dialogues and signatures is combined with a quote from some famous philosopher, politician or theologian. Some of them, like this one, contain cartoons with texts and long quotes. Here, a man in a large, brightly lit office and surrounded by rectangular furniture, windows and doors, uses a selector to ask the secretary to bring him a “round object”. The idea of ​​the concept is ambiguous, as it is accompanied by a short quote from the scripture of St. Augustine, “Dogmas – Fences Around Mystery”. This quote may mean that a religious or other dogma provides a means of understanding life and the Divine, or it involves controlling and restricting thinking.