The world of Objects, Domain Ontology & Other Philosophical Inquiries.

Joseph Kossuth’s ‘One & Three Chairs’ is the most textbook–introductory–example to conceptual art, as it touches upon a number of characteristics that are definitive of conceptual art. Art that emphasises the concept above all other perceptual content, it is associated with a dematerialisation of art.
One & Three Chairs consists of some fairly obvious ingredients. Everything is in a one-to-one ratio here is a chair here is an image of a chair here is the written definition of a chair, and so you have three different representations of a chair. To substitute one chair with another would not diminish this work. This conceptual dematerialisation is often contextualised as a flight away from the commodity form. The work invites itself to be contextualised within various philosophical exercises, i.e. What is the concept of a chair? How does it include an image into its concept? How does it include the use value of a chair into the concept of what constitutes a chair? How language, art, and abstract concepts manifest in physical reality? What is the works' relationship to Platonic Forms? We can revisit Wittgenstein’s language and meaning, and challenge it against Hume's relations of ideas and matters of fact. And, of course, Kant’s critique of how the physical form of a chair conforms to our knowledge of how it can be used? Many of these questions within Western philosophical thought are thousands of years old.
Duchamp’s iconic exercise was about how the institution takes claim over meaning and thus makes the meaning itself. In the context of Kosuth’s chairs, the art institution instantiates the assembly as a work of art. It does so out of nothing, it renders the artists useless. The artist is unnecessary, because this act of assembling these representations is rather an act of curation. It curates representations of chairs, in this case.
Our expectation to see a work of art as an end in itself is an expectation of seeing an object that stands out from the world of objects, the world by access, as a means to another end. The way I access a chair to sit down, or the way I access a computer to look up art.
However, I believe a computer is no longer merely an object that provides an access, as a means to another end. Computational assembly of information, synthetic cognitive capacities of Ai, and logistics of planetary scale interconnectedness not only change the way we institute knowledge, understand agential relationship and how we make art, but it also affects the very ontology of concepts. I would like to exercise this idea through an oddly titled work, '1&∞🪑'.