Joseph Kosuth
Taxonomy Applied # 2

Joseph Kosuth filled the wall of the waiting room in Ommen’s train station with the names of philosophers who have, in his opinion, played an important role in world history. He did this in conjunction with the Kunstlijn, a series of public art works that were realized along the railway line that runs between Zwolle and Emmen. Greek and Oriental philosophers mingle with western sages, all originating from different centuries and disciplines. Catherina van Siena is surrounded by Habermas, Hobbes, Marx and Aristoteles and Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag and Sigmund Freud are also part of the crowd. The work is titled “Taxonomy Applied # 2�, which suggests a classification according to scientific principles.

Joseph Kosuth (1945) is known as one of the most important representatives of conceptual art. He aims to call into question the way in which arts creates meaning. To achieve this, he first concentrated exclusively on linguistic and semantic systems. In the course of the 1970s, he included other systems of meaning such as sociology, politics and psychology. As a result the context in which the work was being made became of crucial importance.