Matthew Higgs | Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [After Kosuth]

Matthew Higgs
Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [After Kosuth] 
New York City, USA:Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2009
[unpaginated], 21 x 14.5 cm., softcover
Edition of 250

"The central orienting point for the show is an installation of books entitled 'Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [After Kosuth]'. This is a re-staging of a little known work by Joseph Kosuth from 1967 in which Kosuth took books chosen by Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt and others and presented them as an installation in the Lannis Gallery. By re-staging this pioneering piece of conceptual art (this time using books chosen by Wade Guyton, Adam McEwen, Richard Prince and others) Higgs is both calling attention to an overlooked piece of art history, and using it to signal toward the conceptual underpinnings of his own work. 'Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book [After Kosuth]' is a work of art but also an act of curation. It has not been made in the usual sense and so it blurs the line between the creative work of an artist and that of a curator. And, as a work after Kosuth, it makes no claim of originality but relies instead on an appropriated idea."- publisher's statement.

Other contributors include T.J. Wilcox, Nick Mauss, Rob Pruitt, Joseph Logan, Gavin Brown, Ken Okiishi, Clarissa Dalrymple, Kelley Walker, Jonathan Horowitz, Elizabeth Peyton, Pati Hertling and Higgs' partner Anne Collier.