The film is set in the quintessential American space: the interior of an automobile. Marlene Kos is seen sitting on the passenger side of the front seat (the “suicide” seat), while the camera views her from behind. This brings to mind “Jo in Wyoming,” a painting by Edward Hopper, who also sat in the back seat to paint his wife as she worked on a spectacular mountain landscape, which appears twice: seen through the windshield and again in her work. In the film, Marlene turns to the camera and explains that when she looks for it, the lightning doesn’t strike, but when she looks away, it does. And indeed, each time she turns to address the camera, a bolt of lightning flashes in the distance, but when she turns to look out the windshield, nothing happens. It’s a simple, repeating sequence, but its significance seems limitless. How often does something elude us, even tease us? How do we know what happens when we’re not looking, or where we cannot see? Does looking for something somehow prevent seeing it, or seeing it aright? How many disagreements spring from points of view: what one person experiences and the other does not? Is there always, or ever, a third, perhaps external POV, that objectively illuminates the confusion within?
Paul Kos has been making works like “Lightning” for 60 years. Technology is not only the way he makes them, but often their subject matter. Perhaps his best known piece, “The Sound of Ice Melting,” (not on view here), features an array of boom microphones and their stands that surround a 25-pound block of ice, invoking the struggle that surrounds a celebrity as numberless observers jostle each other in an effort to get the sight and sound of an event that is hidden behind them. From time to time, options arise for improved media, such as a video presentation instead of the original film. Then Kos has to make the most existential of choices: would changing the medium distort the work, the way a movie based on a book has to be a separate work?
One of Kos’s early shows, in 1969, was titled Participationkinetics. In 2003, his first retrospective was titled Every thing matters. Inclusion was an aesthetic principle for him before it became a cultural or political goal in society. Consider that one of the best kept secrets of artists is the versatility of the accordion, the closest thing to a complete orchestra that a solo musician can carry alone. The parodies of Weird Al Yankovic and the early “deep listening” and “sonic awareness” performances of Pauline Oliveros bookend a vast library of songs that rely on an often unnoticed accordion to deliver a unique sound. In Kos’ “Can’t Get It Right No Matter Where I Go,” a lone man carries the accordion like a backpack as he scales a field of boulder scree and sets his music stand in a field of snow, intercut with a hike along a railroad line to a tunnel, in each of which remote and unlikely locales he performs a tune that, if the title has it right, is still unsatisfactory. The chef who longs to cook the perfect dish, the writer who aches for a perfect sentence: in this lyrically cut succession of episodes, Kos captures a universal ambition: one that presumably includes this elaborate, yet simple song.

In an astonishing performance before the camera, Paul Kos writes “Symmetry is Nature’s way of seeing itself” with both hands at the same time.
Paul Kos has connections to most of the “new genres” that came about during his 80 years. If he’s not become a household name, it may be because he’s spent his career on the West Coast, which mainstream media tend to ignore, and made work that aims to connect him with his audience. Wikipedia objects that his page doesn’t have enough diversity of sources, which is a part of the vicious circle whereby if it happens in, say, New York, all the outlets compete to cover it, while if it doesn’t happen there, it doesn’t happen. One thing UMOCA does better than anyone else is track down pivotal figures from the rich, post-Modern burgeoning of art and bring them aboard. Most often, this happens in the immersive Codec Gallery, which ought to be a mandatory stop on any visit to the Museum.
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When I returned to UMOCA to take another look at the work of Paul Kos, I discovered that a mechanical glitch had prevented my seeing one of his films, which was meant to be projected on the rear wall of the Codec Gallery. Shot in a classic desert location, it features a man attempting to lasso a distant stone monument as though it were both a lot smaller and a good deal closer. The repeating image of his failure seems to epitomize the futility of human efforts, but in a larger way, it symbolizes the hubris of efforts to tame or control nature, which not only evades being harnessed but turns the tables on its soon-to-be-exhausted, would-be conquerors.
Paul Kos: Oracles, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through June 29
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
Paul Kos piece at Nora Eccles Museum in Logan
Quite right, George, and thanks for the suggestion. The piece, which along with everything at the Nora Eccles is well worth the trip, is called Mar Mar Mar. Kos tells the story at
https://www.vdb.org/titles/revolution-notes-invasion-mar-mar-march
and there’s a photo on line that can be found by a google search for Paul Kos Mar Mar Mar.
The video is not part of the collection at UMOCA, unfortunately. I’d check with the good folks at Nora Eccles before driving over, though there’s no way the trip could be a waste. It may just be the best collection of its kind in the USA.
Happy Hunting!