Joseph Kosuth
[Artist and theorist, b. 1945, Toledo, Ohio, lives in New York and Rome.]
That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.
Making “something new to look at” is a futile and empty act if its only audience is the eyes.
Photography, as an invention, was both art and science. The view it gave us of the world was in some measure acceptable because it was a product of our vision of the world; and it did so as part of the same process which seemed to impart ‘truth’: science.
Seeing is not as simple as looking.
Unlike the marks of a painting, the photo seems to organize its ‘opinions’
in relation to the world; even when the photographs have clearly been manipulated, the ‘opinions’ seem to have all the more force, with the suggested ‘participation of the world’ articulating that ‘opinion’ as a difference.
