Restoration play: Paul Kos has engaged, over 30 years, the paradoxes in art and community, temporality and faith, by means of playfully diverse installations and objects. This is the first-ever retrospective of the California conceptualist - Critical Essay

Bay Area Conceptual art of the 1960 and '70 ofttimes took its cues from occurrences of the East Coast art world. however the West Coast movement could be lighter in tone, more playful and les cerebral, than its relatively austere analogue in fresh York. No one better exhibits this tenor of California Conceptualism than Paul Ko Curated by the agency of Constance Lewallen of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, "Everything Matters: Paul Ko A Retrospective" is the first traveling view of Kos's work (it was newly on view at New York University's Grey Art Gallery and is soon at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego). Comprising a large number of documentary photographs as well as videos and installations, the exhibition ranges above three decades of Kos's work.

greatest in quantity of the installations occupied their hold rooms or niches at the Grey funnel (1995), which stood near the entrance to the exhibition, is a large Swiss cheese circular placed on one end of a made of wood farmer's table. A wedge had been divide [i]or[/i] sever out of the cheese, revealing a small toy train going circular and round on a track funneled through it. Visually spare and elegantly builded like all of Kos's works, the piece remind ofs a bizarre form of regularity, a predictability based upon always ending up just where individual begins. The allusion to a kind of orderliness appears as well in Just a Matter of Time (1990) a work hung upon a nearby wall. Consisting of 15 working and audible, on the other hand unsynchronized, cuckoo clocks placed side by means of side, each with its hands remov and a real hammer and sickle hanging in place of its weights, the work has a faintly ridiculous, laconic air; at the same time, it looks to point to a deeper theme of individual resistance to totalitarian order, which was, at the time it was made, crumbling.

Although several of that kind installations were placed throughout the exhibition, many of Kos's greatest in quantity original works could be seen single in photographs or videos. The earliest of these, Lot's Wife (1969) was documented in three photographs; it exhibited a breakthrough for Kos, as he revolveed away from his abstract fiberglass plastic arts of the mid '60s to site-specific art meaningful for one as well as the other its generating process and final form. A tall pillar of stacked salt stop ups in a sylvan setting in the Napa Valley, the work metamorphosed, in a gently comic manner, ordinary cattle-ranch salt licks into the elderly Testament figure who, in failing to heed a divine command, was herself transformed. It also incorporated a stage of "audience" participation in the form of local Jersey cattle, agents of entropy whose consumption of the pillar gradually go [i]or[/i] come backed the work to nature.

This choice of materials indigenous to the setting mirrored Kos's interest in earthworks and other contemporary way s of escaping art's commodification. In a similar vein, he transported natural substances to gallery sites to create antiformalist works that made salient the intrinsic properties or tendencies of their constituent materials, a great deal of like Richard Serra's thrown lead (eg Castings, 1969) Lynda Benglis's latex pours or the scatter pieces of Robert Morris and Barry Le Va. In Sand Piece (1971) seen in another photograph, Ko dump a ton of sand upon the second floor of the two-story Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco; while appearing stationary to visitors, the sand slowly sifted [i]or[/i] part of to the other a small hole in the floor. Forming an inverted cone in the surface of land story below, the work make go rounded the gallery into an outsized hourglass, marking the change of time even while making viewers aware of their obliviousness to gradual change.

A more aural aspect of the ephemeral had been the focus, a year earlier, of The unmutilated of Ice Melting, in which Ko encloseed two 25-pound blocks of ice with 10 roar microphones as if in an pertinacious effort to record their liquefaction (the work was upon view at the Grey in a single photograph). The title advises a Buddhist koan, which would associate the work with the pared-down Zen esthetic embraced by dint of his close contemporaries Tom Marioni and Terry Fox; on the contrary the piece was also an early instance of entire art incorporating the notion of the readymade (the work was installed at the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, baseed by Marioni, in the 1970 exhibition "Sound plastic art As").

In videos of this period, Ko engages in a similarly quixotic attempt at mastering or rationalizing nature: Warlock(ing), 1971 for example, displays him outdoors in a storm, setting small vials upon game traps that, when the containers were filled, snapped clos as if catching the rain. Here, as in many of his works, a political connotation arises: the title leaves not only to presumptively superhuman powers above nature but also, perhaps, to the U.S.'s dubious military involvement in Vietnam.

Politics are directly proclaimed in the title, if again sole indirectly present, in Kos's series "rEVOLUTION." individual of these works, from 1970 documents, in a series of color photographs, a performance in which Ko stood upon a scale and discharged 375 circulars of shotgun ammunition into a plywood target suspended from another scale hung in a tree Effecting what he called an "invisible weight exchange," the performance exemplifies the Conceptualist practice of instruction-driven actions. It also prompts the zero-sum character of war, in which the gain of single is always the loss of another. In a more audience-participatory work of 1972 rEVOLUTION: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar march (installed in a narrow compass at the Grey), Kos affixed several evenly spaced two-by-fours to the floor, between or on which a viewer had to walk in approaching a video playing upon a monitor at the room's far extreme point Accompanied by the sound of rhythmically tapping typewriter lock openers one reaches the monitor alone to discover in the video that one's paces have been mimicking those of a little animated figure marching along the cutting side of a sheet upon which the last three words of the title are being repetitively typ Like Peter Campus's closed-circuit installations (beginning in 1971) and Bruce Nauman's video corridors of the same era (1968 and after), on the contrary in a much more farcical fashion, Kos's installation places the viewer in the part of unwitting performer, thereby invoking themes of conformity and bureaucratic control