The title of the exhibition comes from the neon work 'C.S. #31', 1987, in which Kosuth appropriated a sentence from Anxiety and Instinctual Life, a lecture by Sigmund Freud published in 1933. In this work, Kosuth cancels Freud's sentence with a line, leading to what the artist called "a negated presence and positive absence."1 Kosuth's appropriation of Freud's sentence is part of a larger dialogue with Freud that the artist described "as a kind of conceptual 'architecture'- a ready-made order that, while anchored to the world, provides a theoretical object, a dynamic system.
