The Kosuth piece everyone and their cousin learns about in Contemporary Art History 101 is called One and Three Chairs, a presentation of one chair three different ways: actual chair, a photograph of the chair and a copy of the dictionary entry for the word “chair.” Object, image and language.

Trust me, when you’re a 20-year-old art student (the same age Kosuth was when he put this piece together), One and Three Chairs blows your mind.

Fast forward to 2019 and Kosuth is 74, still producing work—including plenty of public art—that addresses the basic concerns he raised in his college years. How does art create meaning? And how does language shape the world?

Cool, but what does it mean?

First off, W.F.T. is not, as my brain keeps telling me, a typo of W.T.F.

It stands for “Word Family Tree,” a style of mapping words and their etymologies that Kosuth has used for a number of years. Tracing the word “civic” back to its roots, we learn it comes from civicus, Latin for “of the community.” But it is also related to an Old English word for “family” and an Old High German word for “married couple.”

Here, the SFAC would like to point to Civic Center (specifically City Hall) as a site pivotal to the history of same-sex marriage. Also: a Latin word for “civil” is another another “civic” precursor.

Whether or not audiences take the extra leap to connect W.F.T. to San Francisco’s LGBT and Civil Rights movements is debatable, but Kosuth isn’t averse to a historical reading. “The basis of this project is language itself,” he says. “It is a work that is both a reflection on its own construction as well as on the history and culture of its own location.”

On the “auditorium” side of things, there’s a Latin word for that: auditorium. It means, “place for hearing,” but it’s also linked to a Greek word for “perceive” and a Proto-Indo-European word for “make clear.”

But don't take my word for it, all of this is spelled out, literally, in white neon.

Why is this art here, now?

The installation is a product of the Public Art Trust, an initiative launched by the SFAC in 2012 that provides an alternative destination for downtown developers’ 1%-for-art funds. Developers can either place artwork on-site (provided it’s publicly accessible), or they can deposit their requirement into the Public Art Trust, where it can be used to commission temporary art projects, fund capital improvements for nonprofit arts organizations, pay for restorations within the Civic Art Collection, or, in the case of Kosuth’s neon, pay for a new piece of permanent public art on a city-owned site.

This is the very first piece of public art to come out of the Public Art Trust endeavor.