As Bay Area pioneer of conceptual art, Paul Kos helped define a West Coast approach to the form that emphasizes the elegant use of materials to explore issues of perception, social relations and life activities. In the Spark episode “Trailblazers,” audiences get a firsthand introduction to the artist, his fertile imagination and his 30-year body of humorous and provocative conceptual artwork. We examine individual works with the artist at his studio and the Berkeley Museum of Art, which has mounted the first major retrospective exhibition of Kos’s work, “Everything Matters.”
Kos relocated to San Francisco in 1967, arriving in the middle of a dynamic period in the history of the Bay Area characterized by cultural openness and curiosity and marked political activism. Already an important hub for artistic innovation, Kos and his peers experimented with new mediums through which to communicate contemporary ideas about the culture in which they lived. With the use of these new materials (most of them technologies designed for other purposes) as creative and expressive vehicles, over traditional artistic media such as drawing, painting, and sculpture, came the placement of concept as the driving force in artistic expression.
As a genre, conceptual art is art that aims to find its own definition by investigating the language of art and the system within which it exists. Conceptual artists question how we communicate by experimenting with different forms, thereby using the forms of visual phenomena to comment directly about how we engage with, apprehend and derive meaning from visual phenomena.
In his work, Kos has used a wide variety of media to explore a distinctive range of ideas, from the concept of time to the structure of the Catholic Church to the international divisions of global politics and cultural assumptions. Of primary concern to the artist is the employment of a unique language of art — finding the right combination of message and media that can transcend the limits of language and verbal communication.
Kos received both his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he has been a faculty member for the past 25 years. He has exhibited widely on the West and East coasts, has received numerous prestigious arts awards, including five National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. His work is also in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Holland.
More Paul Kos sound bites from the Spark interview:
“My feeling is, if an artist develops fairly rigorous formalism in their education … after that, one should be able to move from craft to craft.”
“All art should have good craft — that’s just an assumption. But good craft is not art. Art is that magic that happens somewhere between the viewer, the object and the artist. The artist initiating it, but the viewer being that receiver of that triangle.”
“In new genres, the craft is thinking on one’s feet. And being able to use a material based on a site, maybe the site determines what the material is. It tells you everything.”
“Often I think a conceptual artist, unlike the painter or sculptor begins with a concept. And then finds the material that best suits that concept, that somehow the concept has some indigenous qualities to it that tell the artist what to use.”
“I respect painting probably the most because they are to the arts like philosophy is to the humanities.”
“When I was young I really loved magic tricks. I loved the idea of doing … a piece could have an element in it which is a surprise.”
“When everything matters, essentially, every detail counts.”
“Work should not necessarily be read like language is — left to right top to bottom. Instead, the work has its own language system.”
“I’m trying to pare down and pare down — use less adjectives and less adverbs, trust the verb and some nouns.”
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