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

Art in America, April, 2004 by Jonathan Gilmore

Later works, particularly a series employing the figure of a chess pawn, revisit Kos's oppositional stance. In one of these, Pawn (1991), 2,500 red plastic magnetic chess pieces (which Kos has described as representing the military, church and state--there are no pawns among them) are arranged on a steel panel, leaning against a wall, to create an almost 10-foot-high image of a pawn. Although playfully absurd in its portentous magnitude, the work proposes a mordant view of what remains of individual freedom in the realms of institutional power.

The use of the audience as a constituent of Kos's art is exemplified in such works as Ramp (1980), documented by a video showing a wide, curving wooden ramp, spray-painted with the black-and-white flecked oven-coating Zolotone to resemble granite, installed in a long, narrow gallery and sloping upward toward a 17-foot-high ceiling. Kos invited viewers to try to ascend the construction, and, while the steep curve made their failure inevitable, the footprints and skid marks they left became part of the work. As Kos described it, the work testified to a universal human ambition, utopian in that it is at once idealistic and unrealizable. (Kos has frequently thematized efforts that can only fail: Roping Boar's Tusk, for example, filmed in 1971 in Wyoming, shows the artist as a cowboy futilely trying to lasso a butte several miles away.)

A collective dimension arises somewhat differently in the device of a bell, invoked for its function in calling for a community's assembly. In one aborted work of the late 1980s, Kos challenged the U.S. and Soviet governments to melt their missiles down, to be cast into bells placed near former weapons silos. In a piece on display, Guadalupe Bell (1989), a viewer's pull on the clapper triggers a strobe light that illuminates a faint phosphorescent image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the wall--an expression, as Kos has described it, of the aura and folk significance that art lost in exchange for its modernist autonomy.

Kos was raised as an observant Catholic, but such religious allusions in his work seem less about organized ritual than the desire to challenge the principle of the disenchantment of art. In his most famous work, Chartres Bleu (1983-86), re-created in the exhibition (the original is at the di Rosa Preserve in Napa), Kos monitored the passage of time in shots of a 27-panel stained-glass window in the choir ambulatory of the cathedral at Chartres. Each of 27 monitors, which are stacked in the shape of the window, shows a time-lapse video, condensed into a 12-minute sequence, of a different glass panel photographed regularly over the course of 24 hours. Evolving from an extremely bright, nearly illegible array of colors, to clearly defined narrative scenes of the Life of Mary, to almost complete darkness, the work offers a reflection on modes of temporal experience and represents an attempt to reinvest a debased modern technology with a 13th-century medium's charge of the divine.