"Al fin creí entender (Madrid) / Located Work": Joseph Kosuth

The work Al fin creí entender (Madrid) [At Last I Thought I Understood (Madrid)] is the latest in a series of large installations created by Joseph Kosuth (b. Toledo, Ohio, 1945) for venues around the world, including the iconic Villa Medici.

The installation consists of a series of luminous texts, selected excerpts from works by the Latin American authors Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Juan Carlos Onetti. The work has allowed Kosuth to continue his research into the production of meaning in artistic practice. The idea of being in two social, cultural and political places at once is a recurring theme in the artist's oeuvre, and the work of these authors, aside from their many other acknowledged merits, clearly meets that criterion.

The texts on the facade give way inside the building to Located Work (Madrid), another project developed by Kosuth in collaboration with six Latin American artists: Mario Aguirre, Alexander Apóstol, Busto Bocanegra, Sandra Gamarra, Hisae Ikenaga and Ximena Labra. Kosuth asked each artist to come up with an idea that another participant would have to materialise. The finishing touch to this exchange of ideas is supplied by each artist's analysis of what they hoped to convey through their work, both the version they conceived and the one ultimately produced. The idea behind this project is, once again, the idea of dual location, but it also proposes a radical dissection of the practice of art itself. Hence, the conception of an artwork and its subsequent production, undertaken separately, shed new light on important aspects of the internal processes involved in creating a work of art.