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Joseph Kosuth relishes linguistic philosophy as I discussed in an interview on the occasion of his exhibition ' ''An Interpretation of This Title'' Nietzsche, Darwin and the Paradox of Content' at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney ...

Joseph Kosuth: I wanted to show that one could make a work that had a life in the culture as art which didn't constitute art simply by a priori established ideas of the authority of the form or the medium. Then, as art, it could be free to ask questions because its meaning wasn't constructed by citing its own authority as a form, like painting for instance. As an example, your aunt or uncle living just outside of Alice Springs doesn't know anything about art. But if they walk into someone's living room and they see a painting hanging on the wall, they know immediately that it's art. That baggage of prior meaning, that inherited valise of presumptions based on media and tradition eclipses the meaning that you want to assert as an individual artist.

NK: Is this why you chose to work in neon?

JK: In 1965 I wanted to make works which were tautological and self-referential that would bare the device of the system of art. Works like One and three chairs were one way I did it, but also neon was very useful for this because it references popular culture. One is familiar with it as signage, but it was not a fine-art material. There were also a lot of qualities I could separate and articulate as components - glass, electrical, letters, English - and I needed qualities, aspects, to unpack. An early example, One and eight - a description, 1965, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, purchased from Leo Castelli in 1974.

But it's necessary to get rid of this idea that I'm some sort of neon artist if you want to understand any of my work. Modernism taught us to see art as the limits of the medium, that being an artist was being a painter, a sculptor or even a photographer. Conceptual art introduced the idea that we were simply artists, and how you made work was at the service of why you made work. Our real material was meaning. In the 1960s I saw that these modernist issues alienated us from the world we lived in, that it led to formalism and formalism led to empty, meaningless decoration. Modernism suggests you work with a medium and the medium defines you. I've done a lot of neon work in the past decade or two because I began to be interested in public projects, and neon functions well in large-scale works, but half of my work isn't neon ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.