One and three chairs

Mediums: сhair, photograph of the chair, text describing the chair.
Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York (the USA).

Kosuth’s student work was the first and most famous example of his “One and Three” series. According to the artist, he saw this famous work in a dream. The first concept was to eliminate any sense of authorship, creativity or individual expression. In this and similar installations in which the object, its photograph and vocabulary are collected, the author calls into question what actually constitutes even the banalest object in our thinking. Is it a solid object that we see and use, or is it a word that we use to identify a real object and transmit this information to other people? Kosuth shows how integral the role of the language and a single word is in conveying meaning and identity. The author makes the viewer ponder on how words are used to explain and define visible, tangible things. Later Kosuth used a shovel, a hammer, a lamp and even a picture for the series, including the photograph of the photograph and the definition of “photograph”.