What is difference between Sol Lewitt and Joseph Kosuth?

Answer 1

Joseph Kosuth made things that articulated and played with ideas. Sol Lewitt made ideas that articulated and created things. Kosuth's things were objects, lights, boxes, utilitarian, iconic, resonant. Lewitt's things were lines on walls placed according to plans. Whether the lines were drawn or not the idea existed somewhere else. With Kosuth, the idea existed between the object and the viewer. With Lewitt the idea existed as knowing. Lewitt's artworks created a knowing of something. Kosuth's artwork created a reflection about something. And questions about knowing. Lewitt's something was knowing itself, and the enjoyement of objects with nothing to say but much to tell, but neither saying or telling had value in and of themselves. They were dumb, made plane, and standing thwarted in the light of some kind of absolute or supreme knowledge. And thus we experience in Lewitt the sublime. The sublime of Barnett Newman or Rothko, but not through expression or colour or composition or balance, but through knowledge of concept, execution and conceit -- transcended. In Kosuth saying and telling are contradicted and thus in an eternal infernal loop of transgression and cancellation and rebirth in reflection, and thus phoenix-like rising and returning to the impossibility of resolution that is at the heart of each of Kosuth's creations. So similarly Kosuth establishes in his work through the impossible resolution of intent in one place, in one location of beholding -- in the work, in the gallery space, in the catalogue notes, in our understanding of how he made these things, why and how, in our reflections, in the space of our own apprehension and apprehending (we are grasped by the works and we grasp them, we are seized by the experience but we cannot seize the experience(s) and take them away) -- a sense of the sublime. In Lewitt we witness and behold the sublime. In Kosuth we 'know' it. And the ideas? They are everything and nothing in both. It's conceptual art, both, not concepts, not conceptual alone. But art. They are art. By different lights and pathways. (Duncan Thompson, July 2013)