Emboss III

source: guggenheimorg

Paul Kos was born in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1942. He received a BFA (1965) and an MFA (1967), both in painting, from the San Francisco Art Institute. From the late 1960s to the 1970s, Kos was a leading figure of the early Bay Area Conceptual art movement, which experimented with performance, new media, and installation, emphasizing ideas over form and employing a minimal aesthetic. He helped define a West Coast approach to form that privileged the use of materials to examine perception, social relations, and daily life. Like many Bay Area artists, Kos was influenced by the tide of interest in Buddhist culture prevalent within Northern California.

Kos’s early works explore the synchronous relationship among materials, events, and active viewer participation. Lot’s Wife (1969) marked an important shift in his practice, from working with toxic materials, including fiberglass, resin, and automotive wax, to using natural materials. For this work, referencing the biblical story of Lot, whose wife looks back at Sodom and Gomorrah and turns to salt, drilled salt blocks were stacked on a pole, which local cattle proceeded to lick away. This work initiated Kos’s site-specific approach and the incorporation of indigenous materials with an emphasis on the presence of nature. For Sound of Ice Melting (1970), Kos installed eight boom microphones, hooked up to amplifiers and speakers, to record the sound of two 25-pound blocks of ice melting in real time. Such works were inspired by an interest in probing the action and visceral qualities of natural materials, typical of Bay Area Conceptual art. Environmental art and Arte Povera influenced such works as Sand Piece (1971), which transformed a two-story gallery into an hourglass, as sand sifted slowly through a hole in the upper floor to form a cone on the floor below.

Looking toward experimental video, Kos was among the first wave of artists to work sound, video, and interactivity into sculptural installations. Chartres Bleu (1983–86), one of his best-known works, re-creates to scale a stained-glass window from Chartres Cathedral using 27 vertically stacked video monitors, each duplicating an individual glass panel of the original. Merging form and content with social concerns, many of Kos’s later works question conflicts born from national divisions and subtly advocate for cross-cultural human understanding. In Tower of Babel (1989), 20 video monitors, each showing a person speaking a different language, are installed on a spiral ramp. The sound is cacophonic and indeterminable from afar; viewers can only decipher what is being said once they closely approach a monitor. Combining his lifelong interests in the natural landscape and humanitarian matters, Kos has participated in a number of material-based conceptual and participatory public art projects.

Kos is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in the visual arts (1974, 1976, 1982, 1993); National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts Grant (1986); Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (1985); and Flintridge Foundation Fellowship award (1999). His work has been installed in multiple solo presentations, including those at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1987); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1987); Berkeley Art Museum, University of California (2003); and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) (2003). His work has been shown in group exhibitions at a range of international institutions: Palais des beaux-arts, Charleroi, Belgium (1983); MCASD (1996); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984, 1985, 1997); Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2001); and Getty Research Institute and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2008). Kos lives and works in San Francisco.
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source: slash-paris

Before the inauguration of his solo show at Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois by Paul Kos, this Californian artist has been known in France essentially through a few emblematic pieces seen in group shows, and because of his presence in collections such as the Fondation Kadist and the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Lorraine. In Europe he is perhaps best known for his influence on the Bay Area conceptual scene, as observed by those who travelled to San Francisco, and for his contribution to American conceptual art in general, as well as through the considerable critical literature that has grown up around his work since the beginning of his career in the late 1960s.

The catalogue of his major retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2003 makes clear the important role played by Kos in relation to other artists of his generation, to whom he was close (Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Bas Jan Ader, Joseph Kosuth, Larry Bell, to name but a few), and to younger artists who now recognise him as one of the most influential teachers on the West Coast over the last three decades. Among them we find Julien Berthier, who took his
classes, and who is taking over the Project Room in parallel to Kos’ exhibition.
Kos has a historical role, too, by virtue of his close involvement in the creation of MoCA Los Angeles by Tom Marioni as an independent exhibition space, and also in that of the legendary magazine Avalanches.

This is the first time viewers in France will be able to properly experience Kos’ work. The show features a truly representative selection of his art from 1968 to 2012. It will articulate both the contextual forces in play (at the centre of which, of course, is the artist) and the paradoxes on which the work is founded. By way of an introduction, we might somewhat arbitrarily begin with the antitheses East/West, Ying/Yang,

The important thing to understand is that this notion of paradox is used for its dynamic properties. It is by juggling with such antitheses that the artist can hope to find equilibrium.
In Kos, this may take the form of the serious or joking defiance of universal laws, whether physical (for example, the Equilibre series very openly subverts gravity), chemical (Kinetic Ice Block) acoustic (The Sound of Ice Melting), or all those things combined.
Manifested in the form of performance, installation and video, Kos’ works are not about making objects. Their common theme, broadly, could be the concerns of sculpture. Each piece poetically and humorously attacks and dwells on the elements and data that may constitute sculpture: materials, objects, processes, actions, duration, symbolism and even ritual.
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source: actuartorg

né en 1942, Rock Springs, Wyoming (USA)
Vit et travail à San Francisco, CA (USA)

Jusqu’à ce jour, et l’inauguration de l’exposition personnelle que consacre la galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois à Paul Kos , l’œuvre de l’artiste californien a sensiblement résonné en France au travers de quelques œuvres emblématiques visibles à l’occasion d’expositions collectives, ainsi que par sa présence dans des collections telles la Fondation Kadist ou le Fonds régional d’art contemporain Lorraine.

Mais c’est surtout par ceux qui ont pu témoigner, sur place, en Californie, de la vivacité de l’influence de Paul Kos sur l’art conceptuel de la Baie de San Francisco – et, par contraste avec la scène New-Yorkaise, de sa contribution à l’art conceptuel américain tout entier, ainsi que par la notable documentation critique qui s’est adossée à son œuvre depuis les débuts de sa carrière (à la fin des années 1960) que le travail de Paul Kos a pu être appréhendé en Europe.

Le catalogue de la rétrospective majeure qui lui a été consacrée en 2003 au Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive indique bien la figure charnière qu’incarne Paul Kos au regard des artistes de sa génération dont il a été très proche (Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Bas Jan Ader, Joseph Kosuth, Larry Bell, pour ne citer qu’eux) et de plus jeunes artistes qui le reconnaissent aujourd’hui comme l’un des enseignants les plus influents de ces trente dernières années sur la côte Ouest ; parmi eux, on retrouve d’ailleurs Julien Berthier, qui a suivi ses cours et qui investira le Project Room parallèlement à cette exposition. 
Figure charnière, Kos l’est également pour avoir assisté de près – si ce n’est participé – à la création du MOCA par Tom Marioni en tant que lieu d’exposition indépendant, ou encore à celle du mythique magazine Avalanches. 
Pour la première fois en France, le public aura l’occasion de découvrir le travail de Paul Kos, de l’expérimenter véritablement au travers d’un corpus d’œuvres très représentatives de sa pratique et qui courent de 1968 à 2012.

Ces oeuvres mettent en lumière les forces paradoxales sur lesquelles l’œuvre de Kos est fondée. En guise d’introduction, nous pourrions arbitrairement donner comme exemple les oppositions Est/Ouest, Ying/Yang, Donneur/Receveur, Forme/Contenu, Sérieux/Humour, Ephémère/Permanent, Ordinaire/Extraordinaire. 


Ce qu’il est important de noter, c’est que cette notion paradoxe est employée pour ses propriétés dynamiques, car c’est en jonglant avec elle que l’artiste peut prétendre à la recherche d’un équilibre. 
Cela peut se traduire chez Kos par la défiance sérieuse ou amusée de lois universelles qu’elles relèvent de la physique (comme c’est le cas pour la série d’œuvres intitulées Equilibre qui, sans équivoque aucune, déjouent la gravité), de la chimie (Kinetic Ice Block), de l’acoustique (The Sound of Ice Melting), ou de tout cela à la fois.

Si elles trouvent leur forme dans la performance, l’installation, la vidéo, les œuvres de Paul Kos n’ont pas pour fin la production d’objets. Leur point de rencontre serait plutôt lié aux préoccupations de la sculpture : chacune s’attardant, s’attaquant avec poésie et dérision aux éléments ou données qui peuvent constituer la sculpture. Entrent ainsi en jeu les matériaux ou les objets, le processus, le geste, la durée, ou encore la dimension symbolique, voire même rituelle, de l’Art.
Leslie Compan