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A ROSE HAS NO TEETH: CONCEPTUAL ART AND PHILOSOPHY

Instructor: Bradshaw Stanley (bstanley@artic.edu) October 11, 2013


A distinctive preoccupation of conceptual art between roughly 1966 and 1972 was with what is known as analytic philosophy, which is concerned with relations between linguistic meaning, logic, and reality. For example, Bruce Nauman took a striking phrase from Ludwig Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations, A rose has no teeth, cast the phrase in lead, and exhibited it nailed to a tree in a garden. Wittgenstein offers the phrase as an example of a true statement (even obviously true!, Part II, xi), but the meaning of which is not clear. Naumans work is not an isolated phenomenon: Joseph Kosuth, drawing on arguments expounded in A. J. Ayers Language, Truth and Logic, argued that art, like logic, has no content, and produced photostats of dictionary entries of philosophically signicant words, like universal and meaning. And the British collective Art & Language argued, in the quasi-academic format of their journal Art-Language that the making of art and the making of a certain kind of art theory are often the same procedure. What is the signicance of Naumans appropriation of Wittgensteins obviously true sentence, Kosuths argument that art, like logic, is tautologous, and Art & Languages contention that art and a certain kind of theory are identical?

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