Joseph Kosuth – L'Essence de la rhétorique... sigmar polke and abstraction

and abstraction

and visual exactitude

weaves across the image in rhythmic

while the restrained palette and meticulous mark-making emphasize intimacy

and autonomy

Joseph Kosuth – L'Essence de la rhétorique... sigmar polke and abstractionIn Joseph Kosuth's L'Essence de la rhtorique est dans l'allgorie IV (1998), the artist presents three decisive quotations from Michel Foucault's essay Ceci n'est pas une pipe, isolating the paired terms imiter et signifier, montrer et nommer, and regarder et lire. These phrases articulate Foucault's distinction between rhetoric and the calligram, a distinction that is central to both Ren Magritte's Surrealist practice and Kosuth's own conceptual