Paul Kos

Last updated
Paul Kos
Born (1942-12-23) December 23, 1942 (age 81)
Rock Springs, Wyoming, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater San Francisco Art Institute
Known forConceptual art, video art, sculpture
Spouses
  • Isabelle Sorrell
Marlene Kos
​
(div. 1992)​
Website http://www.paulkos.net/Paul_Kos/home.html

Paul Joseph Kos (born December 23, 1942) is an American conceptual artist and educator, he is one of the founders of the Bay Area Conceptual Art movement in California. [1] Kos incorporates video, sound and interactivity into his sculptural installations. [2] Currently Kos lives and works in San Francisco.

Contents

Biography

Paul Kos was born December 23, 1942, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, to parents Bertha Kos and small-town doctor Paul A. Kos. [3] [4] He moved from Wyoming to San Francisco in the early 1960s. He received both his B.F.A degree in 1965 and M.F.A degree in 1967 from the San Francisco Art Institute. [5]

In 1969, Tom Marioni organized and curated Paul Kos' first solo exhibition, Participationkinetics, at the Richmond Art Center. [6]

Kos taught at San Francisco Art Institute for 30 years, starting in 1978 and he was influential in the development of the New Genres Department (previously named the Performance/Video Department). [1] [7] [8]

Besides his studio practice, Kos has made large scale public art installations including: Poetry Sculpture Garden with Poet Laureate, Bob Hass, at 199 Fremont Street, San Francisco and “Every thing matters” for the J. Michael Bishop Collection at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus. [9] [4]

The first major retrospective of his work “Everything Matters” (2003) was held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. [10] [8] A second major survey of the artist's work, "Equilibrium: A Paul Kos Survey" (2016) was held at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa. [11]

Collections

His work is included in many public museum collections including Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, [12] Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, [5] Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), [13] San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, [14] De Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, [15] Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, [16] Stedelijk Museum, [17] Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, [18] Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, [18] Everson Museum of Art, [18] Long Beach Museum of Art, [18] Wallraf-Richartz Museum, [18] Auckland Art Gallery, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, [19] amongst others.

Awards

Kos is the recipient of numerous awards, including Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (1985); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in video and audio (1990); multiple National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships; and Flintridge Foundation Fellowship award (1999). [5] [20] Kos held the Dodd Chair at the University of Georgia.

Work

The Sound of the Ice Melting, 1970 The Sound of the Ice Melting, 1970.jpeg
The Sound of the Ice Melting, 1970

In the mid-1960s he worked on abstract fiberglass sculptures, but he then turned away from those to more site-specific art. During the 1970s Kos collaborated with his former wife Marlene Kos, together they produced numerous videos and installations. [8] [21] His work has a strong connection to the natural world and often has a religious dimension. [11] [22] [23] He does not limit himself to one type of media, because his work is conceptual he will often pick the medium to best suit the concept. [8] He will often hire people to help with the technical aspects of the work, if need be. [8] He agrees to technological updates to his work (such as older video work) if they are needed, as long as the sensibility and feeling remains the same. [8]

The Sound of the Ice Melting (1970)

A conceptual art piece, first produced in 1970. [24] The work includes 10 boom microphones plugged into an active sound system recorded the sound of 25 pound blocks of ice melting in a metal pan on the floor. [24] The photographic image of the installation has an absurdity about it. [22] It asks the question, "what does ice sound like as it melts?" [25]

Chartres Bleu (1982–1986)

This piece is a video work, represents a full-scale recreation of a stained-glass stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral. [26] Twenty seven monitors, vertically stacked show the glass panels of the famous church over a period of twenty four hours, condensed into twelve minutes. [27] [8] Readability of represented narrative scenes changes, depending on the changes of the light. [27] The work is permanently on view at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa. [28]

Sand Piece (1971)

A two-story gallery was transformed into an hourglass shape of sand. [29] A ton of sand that was placed on the upper floor was sifting through a minute hole to the lower level, in the shape of a perfect cone. [30]

rEvolution: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar march (1972–1973)

Video installation work, the viewer must walk around narrow planks of wood to see a monitor that shows a small figure marching above typewriter keys that spell out, "mar mar march". Interesting correlation between the fiction and the reality and mechanical regularity of little man's steps and disposition of wooden planks. [31] This video work has a satire element, mocking militant nationalism with the marching sounds. [22]

Tower of Babel (1989)

Tower of Babel was created in 1989 and is an 20‐channel video installation, with a large, spiral‐ shaped metal armature (Vladimir Tatlin–inspired) the supported the monitors. [10] [32] On the monitors are 75 different people speaking in 50 different languages. [10] Cacophony seems indecipherable, unless a viewer comes closer to individual monitors. The work criticizes divisions between different cultures and advocates international understanding. This piece is inspired by a Biblical story of the Tower of Babel in which people used to speak only one language before they became too ambitious and tried to build a tower to the heavens, God made them speak different languages so that they could not understand each other. [10]

Pawn (1991)

The work Pawn was completed in 1991, and featured 2,500 plastic magnetic chess pieces, steel panel on the wall, and wood. [10] [32] The steel panel is on the wall, with the magnetic red chess (kings, queens, knights, bishops and castles) pieces forming the shape of a single chess pawn. [32] These pieces don't mimic pawn's symmetry but the illusion of light and shadow in bright red. This work is a metaphor for the relations between the world's powerful and the powerless. [32] The red pawn also presents a metaphor for life under Communism. [33]

Filmography

Select filmography
YearTitleType, materialsArtist(s)Notes
1970Hand TrapBlack and white, Silent, Super 8 Paul Kos [34]
1972rEVOLUTION: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar marchBlack and white, 1/2" open reel videoPaul Kos [35]
1976LightningBlack and white, 1/2" open reel videoPaul Kos, Marlene KosThe lightning bolt strikes every time Marlene looks away. [36] [37]
2003Spark, Trailblazers: Paul KosTelevisionPaul KosHe was featured on the television show Spark (episode 10, season 1), episode Trailblazers: Paul Kos. [1]
2017The Electric Mirror: Reflecting on Video Art in the 1970sTelevisionCompilation featuring Lynda Benglis, Keith Sonnier, Susan Mogul, William Wegman, Nancy Holt, John Baldessari, Simone Forti, Marlene Kos, Paul Kos, Barbara Aronofsky LathamA video catalogue of early experimentation with and in the closed circuit system. [38]

Bibliography

Books

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nam June Paik</span> Korean American video artist (1932–2006)

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jana Sterbak</span> Czech-Canadian artist

Jana Sterbak is a multidisciplinary artist of Czech origin.

Martha Rosler is an American artist. She is a conceptual artist who works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to places of passage and systems of transport.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence Weiner</span> American artist (1942–2021)

Lawrence Charles Weiner was an American conceptual artist. He was one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s. His work often took the form of typographic texts, a form of word art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pipilotti Rist</span> Swiss contemporary artist

Pipilotti Elisabeth Rist is a Swiss visual artist best known for creating experimental video art and installation art. Her work is often described as surreal, intimate, abstract art, having a preoccupation with the female body. Her artwork is often categorized as feminist art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Hamilton (artist)</span> American visual artist

Ann Hamilton is an American visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephanie Syjuco</span> Filipino-American conceptual artist and educator (born 1974)

Stephanie Syjuco, is a Filipino-American conceptual artist and educator. Born in the Philippines, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University in 2005, and BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. She currently lives and works in Oakland, California.

Bill Jones is a photographer, installation artist, performer and writer living in Los Angeles, CA. His work is concerned with light as both a physical phenomenon and a metaphorical figure. Jones was part of the Vancouver School of conceptual photography, along with such artists as Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall. Jones has three daughters; his youngest daughter is actress and screenwriter Zoe Lister-Jones. He is married to visual artist and writer Joy Garnett.

Terry Alan Fox was an American Conceptual artist known for his work in performance art, video, and sound. He was of the first generation conceptual artists and he was a central participant in the West Coast performance art, video and Conceptual Art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fox was active in San Francisco and in Europe, living in Europe in the latter portion of his life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William T. Wiley</span> American artist (1937–2021)

William Thomas Wiley was an American artist. His work spanned a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as funk art.

David Kenneth Ireland was an American sculptor, conceptual artist and Minimalist architect.

The history of art in the San Francisco Bay Area includes major contributions to contemporary art, including Abstract Expressionism. The area is known for its cross-disciplinary artists like Bruce Conner, Bruce Nauman, and Peter Voulkos as well as a large number of non-profit alternative art spaces including New Langton Arts, Intersection for the Arts, and Southern Exposure. San Francisco Bay Area Visual Arts has undergone many permutations paralleling innovation and hybridity in literature and theater.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alyson Shotz</span> American sculptor

Alyson Shotz is an American sculptor based in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for experiential, large-scale abstract sculptures and installations inspired by nature and scientific concepts, which manipulate light, shadow, space and gravity in order to investigate and complicate perception. Writers suggest her work challenges tenets of monumental, minimalist sculpture—traditionally welded, solid, heavy and static—through its accumulation of common materials in constructions that are often flexible, translucent, reflective, seemingly weightless, and responsive to changing conditions and basic forces. Sculpture critic Lilly Wei wrote, "In Shotz’s realizations, the definition of sculpture becomes increasingly expansive—each project, often in series, testing another proposition, another possibility, another permutation, while ignoring conventional boundaries."

Howard Fried is an American conceptual artist who became known in the 1970s for his pioneering work in video art, performance art, and installation art.

James C. Pomeroy was an American artist whose practice spanned a variety of media including performance art, sound art, photography, installation art, sculpture, and video art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennie C. Jones</span> American artist

Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.

Kevin Beasley is an American artist working in sculpture, performance art, and sound installation. He lives and works in New York City. Beasley was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial in 2014 and MoMA PS1's Greater New York exhibition in 2015.

Frank Gillette is an American video and installation artist. Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information. He has been described as a "pioneer in video research [...] with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments". His seminal work Wipe Cycle –co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1968– is considered one of the first video installations in art history. Gillette and Schneider exhibited this early "sculptural video installation" in TV as a Creative Medium, the first show in the United States devoted to Video Art. In October 1969, Frank Gillette and Michael Shamberg founded the Raindance Corporation, a "media think-tank [...] that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.

Ana Teresa Fernández is a Mexican performance artist and painter. She was born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, and currently lives and works in San Francisco. After migrating to the United States with her family at 11 years old, Fernández attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned bachelor's and master's of fine arts degrees. Fernández's pieces focus on "psychological, physical and sociopolitical" themes while analyzing "gender, race, and class" through her artwork.

Marlene Kos is an American visual artist known for video art and installations. She was primarily active during the 1970s, during which time she often collaborated with her then-husband, Paul Kos. She was born in Sacramento, California.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Paul Kos". Spark, KQED. 2003-07-23. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  2. ↑ "Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective". BAMPFA. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  3. ↑ "Paul Kos". Casper Star-Tribune Online.
  4. 1 2 "Paul Kos". UCSF Art Collection. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  5. 1 2 3 "Collection Online: Paul Kos". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  6. ↑ "PARTICIPATIONKINETICS". San Francisco Good Times. Vol. 2, no. 27. Waller Press. July 17, 1969. p. 18. Retrieved 2020-10-29– via Independent Voices. PARTICIPATION KINETICS! Paul Kos at the Richmond Art Center, Richmond. July 10- Aug. 10.
  7. ↑ "Paul Kos". Frieze magazine. Retrieved 2020-11-01. Kos was influential to many students at the SF Art Institute and was a core figure in its development, laying the groundwork for the SFAI program New Genres which spawned new generations of performance, video and conceptual artists.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Helfand, Glen (2003-04-03). "Shelf Life / Paul Kos' playful, political artwork endures despite shifting technologies". SFGATE. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  9. ↑ "San Francisco Art Institute guide" . Retrieved 2012-03-18.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 "SPARKed, Spark in education, educator guide" (PDF). KQED. 2003. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  11. 1 2 "Conceptual artist mixes Dada, dry wit". San Francisco Chronicle. 2016-07-20. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  12. ↑ "Guadalupe Bell". Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  13. ↑ "Paul Kos. Warlock(ing). 1971 | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  14. ↑ "Kos, Paul". SFMOMA. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  15. ↑ "Collection, New Media". de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University. Retrieved 2020-10-31. and commissions by artists who would later become key players in the field of film and video art, including Douglas Davis, Terry Fox, Paul Kos, and Bill Viola.
  16. ↑ "Collecting On The Edge". Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art - NEHMA, Utah State University. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  17. ↑ "Sirens - Paul Kos". Stedelijk.nl. Retrieved 2020-10-31.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 "Paul Kos Biography". Artnet.com. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  19. ↑ "Tour Collection Selections". di Rosa. Retrieved 2020-11-01. Paul Kos, Lot's Wife (Documentation - 3 Part),1969
  20. ↑ "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Paul Kos" . Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  21. ↑ "Marlene Kos". Video Data Bank. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
  22. 1 2 3 Stevens, Mark (2003-09-11). "New York Art Review, Everything Matters: Paul Kos". New York Magazine. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  23. ↑ Kimmelman, Michael (2003-09-12). "ART REVIEW; Wry Faith That's a Bit Slapstick (Published 2003)". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  24. 1 2 "Unintended Art of the Anthropocene: The Sound of Ice Melting". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  25. ↑ "What Is The Sound Of Ice Melting?". Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. 2004. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  26. ↑ "Paul Kos". AICHI TRIENNALE 2013. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  27. 1 2 Eggers, Ron (1986). Orange Coast Magazine. Emmis Communications. p. 157.
  28. ↑ "The Collection". dirosaart.org. Retrieved 2016-11-03.
  29. ↑ "Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective". Artdaily. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  30. ↑ "Paul Kos: From the Plains of Minimalism to Mountainous Conceptualism, March 03 —April 27, 2012". NYEHAUS. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  31. ↑ "SiteWorks: San Francisco performance 1969-85, Paul Kos". University of Exeter. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  32. 1 2 3 4 Baker, Kenneth (2003-05-08). "Going round and round with conceptualist Kos". SFGATE. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  33. ↑ "John Haber: Us and Them" . Retrieved 2012-03-18.
  34. ↑ "Hand Trap". Video Data Bank. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  35. ↑ "rEVOLUTION: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar march". Video Data Bank. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  36. ↑ "Lightning". Video Data Bank. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  37. ↑ "In Praise of the Strangest Painting I've Ever Seen". KQED. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  38. ↑ "The Electric Mirror: Reflecting on Video Art in the 1970s". Video Data Bank. Retrieved 2020-11-01.

Further reading

Articles

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.