#mpho601.1

The domesticated Eye confessional

Editing of the walled confessional: Lemon

Every morning I saw my mum use lemon juice to style her hair. She liked using natural products when she could. One day, I stole a single lemon from the market to style the hair of my little pony. I thought my parents wouldn’t let me use a lemon from their kitchen to play with a toy that I was told was unsuitable for a boy.

Even-though my intention was to work in colour, this particular one worked better in a high contrast black and white as the colour of the wall and the print was not as complimentary as I thought it would be. Perhaps it is the floor tiles that are too yellow...

I tried 3 different crop ratios: 2:3, 4:3, 1:1. Square format works well and lately I am constructing more square images for a reason I am yet to find out.

Kosuth believed that images and any traces of artistic skill and craft should be eliminated from art so that ideas could be conveyed as directly, immediately, and purely as possible. There should be no obstacles to conveying ideas, and so images should be eliminated since he considered them obstacles. This notion became one of the major forces that made Conceptual art a movement in the late-1960s. I have tried to make the previous Confessionals images as simple and direct as possible but I don’t want to eliminate the visual aspect of the series too much. Some of the confessions can exist purely in text format but even then I won’t be able to hold myself and try to make them have a visual impact by using texture and colour.

Kosuth has often explored the relationships between words and their meanings and how words relate to the objects and things they name or describe. He has been fascinated with the equivalences between the visual and the linguistic. To this extent, he was influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas on language.

Many of Kosuth's installations and displays of words have incorporated excerpts from literature, philosophy, psychology, and history that have that have intrigued him. Consequently, he has used the presentation of language to make his audience contemplate issues of poverty, racism, loneliness, isolation, the meaning of life, and personal identity - usually without any clear, overt commentary of his own. In this, Kosuth embodies how the contemporary artist may become a philosopher and moralist. Whilst the Confessionals series is more about early ideas and feelings that I revisit as an adult with the aim to share them publicly in the gallery and street setting, they do touch on race, gender, religion and anxiety over personal identity.

Since he usually relies on the writing of others in his presentations of words and texts, Kosuth's work represents how Conceptual art, like much of postmodernism, involves a lot of appropriation, in his case the sources being written and verbal as opposed to visual or art historical. His chosen texts are usually not particularly descriptive nor do they attempt to create images with words. Appropriation is something almost inevitable and for Confessionals I will borrow ways to incorporate text or create a textual piece. Also I will have to borrow different installation strategies as the series will be shown in Truman Brewery this summer.