La sedia davanti alla porta, Joseph Kosuth, 1999

Joseph Kosuth was invited by the curators Florian Matzner and Angela Vettese on the occasion of the IV edition of Arte all’Arte and created a work for the Loggia del Podestà in San Gimignano.

"Joseph Kosuth chose to intervene in the Loggia del Podestà in San Gimignano, the place where the city's power resided for centuries and where today it is mostly the elderly citizens who gather. The site, rich in historical and human connotations, suggested to the artist to highlight a text written about San Gimignano by Walter Benjamin in his Images of Cities (1925), in which he discusses the local tradition of sitting on the doorstep and generally outdoors.

Indeed, this is a salient point of Italian life, a behavior made possible by climatic conditions that require having a home—since it would be too cold for a completely nomadic life—but that allow for spending long periods of time outdoors. The architecture of central and southern Italy has always taken this attitude into account, giving enormous importance to the balcony, the patio, and every extended form of that threshold between inside and outside which we could define as a “soglia.”

The quote by Benjamin was engraved in pietra serena and arranged like a ribbon inside the loggia, which, due to its central location and the fact that it is one of the few places usually occupied by citizens who sit to chat and comment, represents a sort of threshold of the city between its human “interior” and its touristic “exterior.”

The work, as a whole, also seems to bear witness to a metaphorical as well as a real “return to Tuscany”: Kosuth and Benjamin are just two examples of a pilgrimage that brings many intellectuals back to Tuscany, one of the main cradles where modern Western culture was born and inevitably one of the places where its crisis is unfolding. The work thus aims to connect the thinking of a contemporary visual artist with that of a theorist from the early 20th century; the present culture with the past one; a specific place, which today has lost its original function to become little more than an attraction, with the international culture it once inspired."

Florian Matzner e Angela Vettese, Arte all’Arte IV, 1999