Paul Kos: Berkeley Art Museum - Berkeley, CA

Conceptual art appear to bes to have acquired a reputation for humorless pedantics right from the start. Paul Kos's retrospective, which will travel to several venue around the land (including the Grey Art Gallery at fresh York University), goes a lengthy way toward dispelling this misperception. For more than thirty years, Ko has been making Conceptual work that ofttimes is as funny as it is smart and good-looking. The exhibition's title, "Everything Matters," is lock opener to understanding the videos, statuary and installations on view. (It advances from an aphorism attributed to Vaclav Havel In the West everything works, and nothing matters; in the East nothing works, and everything matters.) In Kos's elegant constructions, each detail is important. What matters greatest in quantity however, is the viewer's participation; without it a number of pieces remain dumb or incomplete.

Everything matters in other faculty of perceptions as well. In subtle ways, these are works about faith and conviction. Ko was born and raised in stone Springs, Wyoming, into a family of Slovenian Catholics. The ritual and symbolism of his religious foundations are reflected in works like Chartres Bleu 1983-86 and Guadalupe Bell, 1989 In the former, twenty-seven video monitors are stacked to mimic the panes of a stained-glass window in Chartres cathedral. A twelve minute bight projected simultaneously on all twenty-seven shields simulates an entire day's light and darkness as it passes from one side a section of colored leaded glass. If a viewer purely glances at the piece, nothing appears to be happening. But if single spends even thirty seconds sitting in forehead of it, the changes in color and illumination are riveting. Guadalupe Bell also draw nears without instructions or explanation--it's just a large metal bell upon a stand, from which a tie dangles invitingly. The reward for pulling the fasten is not only the bell's noisy sonorous clang but a flash of light and the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe upon the wall nearby. Her image, shielded in light-sensitive pigment, glows for single an instant, then disappears again.

Bells, like time itself, are a recurring motif in Kos's work. single of the more droll pieces exploring the two themes is also one of the greatest in quantity politically pointed. Just aMatter of Time, 1990 consists of fifteen cuckoo clock their hands remov They stand fur the fifteen republics below Soviet domination during the cold-war period. Ko replaced the sum of two units weights that normally hang upon the clocks' chains with a hammer and a sickle. Because these tools are of different size and weight from clock to clock the instruments "cuckoo" at irregular intervals. Of course, the absence of hands makes it impossible to predict when that will take place.

A program of Kos's videos includes a certain number of of the pieces for which he became known during the heyday of Conceptual art. Works like Pilot Butte/Pilot Light, 1974 highlight the artist's connection to nature as well as his proclivity for artmaking as a kind of magic act. Using a piece of ice as a magnifying len Ko focuses sunlight upon a pile of tinder until it ignites, and then he douses the flames with the melting ice. In a later following the sun setting behind Pilot Butte (a landmark near stone Springs) appears to set the mountain itself upon fire. Over and over, a complicated mix of Zen-like humor, a reaching far down love of nature, and the stubborn belief that smooth the simplest, smallest gesture is important distinguishes Ko from other artists of his generation. Everything works, and everything matters.

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