Artist: Joseph Kosuth
Title: Located World, 2019
Medium: Neon
Location: Miami Beach Convention Center, West Lobby
Located World, Miami Beach, is part of a series of works that Joseph Kosuth has also made in Europe and Japan that signify a sense of place through the abstractions of quantified meaning and query the impulse of the ‘will to know’ specifically where we are. In a sense the work is about how a community defines itself both within and without borders.
The work is configured in its geographic relation to the rest of the world. Its specific location determines the size of the lettering of the place names represented in the work, whose graphic configuration is scaled in direct proportion to their distance from this global location; the closer a location is-in this case to Miami Beach-the larger it is graphically.
This ‘map of the world’, consisting of signposts of cities and towns both arbitrarily chosen and purposefully included, becomes an alternative global network, reordering geopolitical privilege and prominence by flattening all difference to a matter of proximity versus distance, which is itself an unsatisfactory way of making meaning but one that reveals the constructed nature of our sense of place and belonging, all the more so due to the arbitrary basis of its inclusive procedure.
