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Words are, by and large, pretty bad at instantiation. However, you might think that there could be no word more grounded, specifiable, identifiable – in sum instantiable – than “real.” Take this work, “Real.” It has been taken (we presume) from some (unacknowledged) dictionary. Or did the artist know the genre of dictionary well enough to write the definition? A Google search on combinations of words in this definition does not turn up a “real” source. However, it does turn up similarities in the definitions for “actual,” “pre-existing,” “synchronous,” “present,” and “potential.”

Also, the text in the work is white on black, not a practice of “real” dictionaries. Perhaps this is to unsettle our conventional images of dictionaries. And of course, it is bigger; we can read it from half a room away. “Unrealistically” too, there is no word before or word after. Then there are the six definitions offered for “real,” where the brevity deceives because the person in search of a meaning has to be acquainted with a whole universe of social practice to be able to know what it would be to be “not imaginary” in mathematics, or “merely phenomenal” in philosophy. This creates some almost insurmountable problems for the computability of language, which our Google search in this case showed. Not only could we not find the source. Reverse engineering the definition, we found the wrong words.

The curator’s blurb on the wall of the gallery starts out, “Kusuth argued that ideas alone could exist as art.” But what we learn – and this may or may not have been the artist’s intention – is that the sources of “real” are exceedingly complex, even elusive.

Because the meaning of “real” is so fraught, we are left with just two things that were indubitably real, instantiations in the multimodal grammar of modernity: “Joseph Kusuth ‘Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) [real],’ 1968” and “IMG_7177.JPG” on Bill’s iPhone. And now there is a third instantiation circling this work, this paragraph on this page in a book that has both an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). And of course there are countless other possible instantiations.

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⁵¹ Joseph Kusuth, ‘Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) [real]’, Mounted photograph, 1968.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 98-99. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Joseph Kusuth’s Real §MS1.1.1j