JOSEPH KOSUTH
'GUESTS AND FOREIGNERS, A MEMORANDUM'

One never goes so far as when one doesn't know where one is going.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Letter to K. F. Zelter, 1812)

'GUESTS AND FOREIGNERS' as an installation is a bundle of components, an interface between interfaces. I can offer its discussion, theory, and explanation in the same way.
Here is one particular list and without a particular order:

> All the works in the series of installations of 'Guests and Foreigners'-- Norway, Ireland, Germany, Turkey, Japan, New Zealand and the United States share certain presentational aspects which generate the kinds of meanings which constructs the work's dynamic. These presentational devices are neither arbitrary nor decorative. They are comprised of the precise, functional components necessary to make the work.
The grounding of the play is provided by the texts which follow and articulate the arena of play of that architectural whole, the black or grey room. At the Schirn Kunsthalle, the concrete moment and organizing drive of the work is provided by the horizon of Goethe's Italian journey. In Istanbul, in the context of a music foundation and on a street assocated with foreigners, the work was anchored with Rossini's opera 'The Turk in Italy.'
All of the other texts are in play with this aspect and it frames the discourse which the combination of texts constitute. An important voice in this discourse, in several of the installations, is the writing of Walter Benjamin.

In the installation in Istanbul, the texts of the libretto of Rossini, in one key, and Benjamin in another, establish the perimeters (by circling the room) and by so doing are at once outside of the play of the other texts as they are also simultaneously a participating voice in the totality, even if contigent, of what is constructed.
They are the horizon off of which the other texts are put into play, and are seen in relation to. The textual room itself is a kind of super-paragraph, with the stolen paragraphs, sentences and images becoming the word-like units of its construction. The fractured and disruptive elements of architectural detail (doors, etc.) are reminders of the room's location in the world, and the history and culture of the life which takes place there.
In this way the installation shares similarities with earlier installation of mine such as ZERO & NOT, even if the kinds of meanings generated differ.

> There is the experience of the artist as 'guest', and the artist as 'foreigner', working with a language he/she does not speak nor read, yet 'speaking' with that language within another system (art) which has a cultural life within an international discourse. That discourse is a context without a border, a context to which anyone can be, at any moment or location, either a foreigner or a guest--the artist no more or less so than the viewer/reader.
There is the experience of the viewer/reader as both a guest of the museum and a foreigner to the discourse, there is the art student that can be a foreigner to the museum yet a guest of the discourse. One can be a celebrated cultural guest and have the socially foreign profession of the artist.
One can be the guest of the art market and equally easily its foreigner. One can be, as well, art history's guest as well as its foreigner. The artist works in an interface which is between the two. Being one makes the other all the more an organizing presence.

Sets of rules are metaphorically connected with one another, allow meaning to leak from one context to another along the formal similarities that they show. The barriers between fine provinces of meaning are always sapped either by the violent flooding through of social concerns or by the subtle economy which uses the same rule structure in each province.
Mary Douglas

The function of the representation of play is ultimately to establish, not just any movement whatsoever, but rather the movement of play determined in a specific way.
In the end, play is thus the self-representation of its own movement.
Hans-Georg Gadamer

> Architecture provides the possibility of a meta-text: the integrity of the perceived whole (of a room, a building) anchors the separate and fragmented texts into a systemic unit, with contradiction simply one form of articulation of that whole. In this way the work is a work on language but in terms of the interrelations of those various perceptions of a 'whole', since each individual fragment is itself a 'whole'.
In this sense my use of images and texts function with the same weight within each work as a play of language, and the use of borrowed images is as much a work on/with language as are the stolen texts.
The architecture provides the confines of the 'play' at the same time as it locates the work, and its meaning, in the world. Architecture, a space formed by a presumption of social use, describes as it prescribes a social meaning to its ceilings, walls, doors, windows, and floors and the psychological impact it constructs along with that use. In this way the role of architecture, as part of the play, enacts (as it represents) the world.
The position of the viewer/reader, located as they are at a remove by being within that social and psychologically constructed arena of architecture (standing in 'the world') are permitted a view of the total play of texts: the meta-text of the work itself.

> As a device to approach the work, one can say art has two faces, one can be nominated as its internal construction, that which could be called a 'subject' in another context, which, in 'Guests and Foreigners' provides a kind of organization and linkage by being an historical and social fact, of actual lives once lived.
It is the 'internal' putting into play of the outside world of facts and events, be they literary or historical.
(In Oslo we had Ludwig Wittgenstein in Norway and out of Austria, in Dublin we had James Joyce out of Ireland and Wittgenstein in Ireland, in Frankfurt we have Goethe out of Germany and in Italy, in Istanbul we have Rossini out of Italy and in Turkey, in Japan, the world outside of Japan, in New Zealand, the Maori and Europeans outside of each other, in New York, the foreigner inside of the body.)
The other face can be seen as its external play, and yet it organizes the work's syntax. It is built around and with the architecture, it's how the work works, yet this means it is also formed by its relation to the world, since the architecture concretizes, in a cultural form, the social world.
The play of the work is how these two faces mirror each other and become one thing.
Both sides of this mirror must reflect the world, as it is with any mirror or there would be nothing there to reflect, yet they are reflecting each other as the world, even if one experiences the reflection and not the world.
In this way, the work shows itself while being about more than just itself.

(Asmund Thorkildsen, Director of the Oslo Kunstnernes Hus, site of the first installation: "I sensed a visual deconstruction in your magnificently complicated installation here.
Deconstruction is one thing, beauty another. People here called the black room 'beautiful' and they meant it. To them it had aesthetic qualities of a traditional kind, since 'beauty' is a traditional, aesthetic concept.
Does beauty play a part in your recent work? Do you seek an overreaching unity in your large installation and it this unity conceptual or visual or both?")

> I cannot distinguish between 'visual' and 'conceptual' when the knowledge of a work's elements and its internal play is acquired visually. A concept must be communicated to be known. (In fact, eliminate the legacy of formalism, and the question becomes nonsense.)
The reading of the texts, the viewing of the images, and understanding the play between them, and between them and the architecture is all visually acquired, even if its meaning goes beyond simply that experience of the senses.
If the temporal aspect of an aural presentation didn't present a serious obstacle in relation to the need to present the interrelationship of elements, and its requirement of simultaneity, a similar work could be made of sound. (I could try it.) Whether the concept is communicated via the optic nerve or the inner ear really wouldn't, in principle, matter.
In any case, I certainly accept as a potential given all of the meanings and experiences which the work generates, including both 'beautiful' or 'ugly'.
However, I think to understand the work, in terms of its having a history and a context, is to comprehend the very limited role traditional esthetic reception has to its deeper meaning(s).
In other words, the extent of its role in the 'play' of the work is provided by the viewer/reader, and providing that probably risks blocking its appreciation. Still, esthetic responses to one's experiences, whatever they are, are hard to control or deny.
One can, however, more easily control the desire to theorize about those responses.

A text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning...but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.
Roland Barthes

> As artists we all begin to construct with what is given. We appropriate fragments of meaning from the detritus of culture and construct other meanings, our own.
In the same sense, all writers write with words invented by others. One uses words with prior meanings to make paragraphs which have a meaning of one's own.
It was clear by the mid-60's that the existing institutionalized form of art, the paradigm of painting and sculpture, could no longer itself constitute being "a paragraph of one's own." It had, for artists, become the sign and signage of the ideospace of modernism: an over-enriched context of historicized meaning signifying itself and collapsing new meanings under its own weight.
By reducing any ingredient of cultural prior meaning to being a smaller constructive element (a 'word' element) I could then construct other meanings on another level, producing "a paragraph of my own" and still remain within the context of art sufficiently to alter it.
This has been a basic aspect of my practice and has, for over thirty years, necessitated some form of appropriation, and it is evidenced throughout my work beginning with examples such as 'One and Three Chairs' (1965) through to 'The Play of the Unmentionable' at the Brooklyn Museum (1991) and, to the present work, 'Guests and Foreigners'.