Paul Kos listens to ice melting and observes sand falling. He plays with cuckoo clocks, bells, brooms, and chess pieces.
"I use the ordinary to make the extraordinary," he says. "My broom is not for sweeping a floor and my bell doesn't just ring."
These are the everyday items that Kos transforms into memorable images in Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Center from June 12 through August 29.
Kos, a native of Wyoming, received his M.F.A. in 1967 from San Francisco Art Institute (where he has taught in the New Genres department for 25 years). His work evolved into video and sculptural installations where he allowed the action of natural materials to unfold. Examples of this include The Sound of Ice Melting (1970), in which ten state-of-the-art boom microphones recorded the "sound" of several large blocks of ice melting; and Sand Piece (1971), which transformed a two-story gallery into a giant hourglass. Sand Piece will be recreated in the CAC exhibition, requiring transport of a ton of sand into the museum. Ice Melting will be represented in photographs.
Kos was one of the major figures in the early Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He came of age as an artist in the San Francisco area as it became an important center for the revolutionary spirit in art and with it, the rise of the new genres of video, performance, and installation. Kos was among the first artists to incorporate video, as well as sound and interactivity, into sculptural installations.
In fact, Kos participated in the seminal exhibition Video Art, which was co-organized by the CAC and co-curated by CAC director Jack Boulton. Video Art was one of the first museum exhibitions to focus attention on the work of pioneering video artists such as Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman, Nam Jun Paik, and Bill Viola. The exhibition traveled to Brazil as the American entry to the 1975 Sao Paulo Biennial where it received critical praise even as it generated controversy due to the use of emergent video technology.
Kos says that this exhibition title, Everything Matters, came from Czech poet and former president Vaclav Havel, who said that in the West everything works and nothing matters, but in the East nothing works and everything matters.
"In many ways the title directly references the work, because everything does matter," he says of the exhibition. "It's critical to my exhibition that everything is relevant…all elements contribute to the work."
A good example of when everything matters, Kos says, is demonstrated in Guadalupe Bell (1989) where the Virgin appears, seemingly miraculously, after a bell is rung.
"It makes a difference in how someone experiences it because she only appears as long as the sound of the bell lasts," Kos explains. "It doesn't seem obvious, but it's all there."
Kos' conceptual art requires a level of participation whether physical (ringing a bell, walking into an architectural space, tripping a sound element) or intellectual.
Kos engages the viewer's intellect in Just a Matter of Time (1990), a series of fifteen cuckoo clocks. The clocks work mechanically, but their hands have been removed so that time cannot be read. The clocks cuckoo unexpectedly. Only the clock knows what time it is - and it doesn't necessarily agree with the other clocks. The clocks are meant to represent the republics under Soviet domination during the Cold War.
The most important part of any installation, Kos says, is that the viewer is able to experience it on some level.
"Conceptual work is difficult, but I would like my work to be accessible to everyone," he says. "I am interested in the viewer having a visual experience."
Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective is organized by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The exhibition is made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Agnes Bourne. Additional funding is provided by Paule Anglim, Ann Hatch, Joan Roebuck, and Jeanne Meyers.
