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Very subtle. That is the best way to describe the work that the American artist Joseph Kosuth has created for the Council of State. On the garden side, at the very top of the facades, he has applied decorative handwritten texts in soft yellow neon. The Government Buildings Agency chose Kosuth for the art commission for the new Council of State because his entire oeuvre is about text, meaning and interpretation. And that is precisely the core of the work of this legal body.

With his texts, Kosuth forges together the diverse historical and new building blocks of the Council of State. Sometimes a word just turns a corner. The phrases he has chosen for the Council of State come from Spinoza's famous book Ethica. It is a series of seven irrefutable principles (axioms) that this 17th century philosopher said everyone could agree with.

Like Lawrence Weiner and Stanley Brouwn, Kosuth is a conceptual artist. During the 1960s, the idea, or rather the idea in a philosophical sense, behind a work of art became more important to them than its execution. Groundbreaking was one of Kosuth's first conceptual works of art: One and Three Chairs (1965). It shows a chair as an object, a print of the dictionary definition of a chair and a photographic image of a chair. The question is which chair is actually a chair?

Whereas in the 1960s Kosuth concentrated purely on the question of the meaning of art, from 1970 onwards he broadened his field of thought to include philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. In his view, artists are makers of meaning. In implementing his ideas, he limits himself to text in all kinds of forms. At the Council of State, these are graceful, handwritten letters in neon.

Axioms from Spinoza's Ethics:

1. All that is is in itself or in something else.
2. What one cannot understand through anything else, one must understand through oneself.
3. From a given cause, an effect necessarily follows and vice versa: without a given cause, the effect cannot possibly occur.
4. The knowledge of an effect depends on and includes the knowledge of the cause.
5. Things that have nothing in common cannot be understood apart either; in other words, the understanding of one does not include that of the other.
6. A true idea must correspond to the proposed object.
7. When a thing can be thought of as non-existent, its essence does not include its existence.