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rEVOLUTION: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar march

Paul Kos

1972 00:02:10 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Humor , Language , Performance , War

Description

"A major influence for generating ideas for me was not what I could contrive on my desktop, but being open and receptive to “accident”. For instance, one evening in 1972 while typing a syllabus for a class on my old Smith Corona typewriter, I happened to see on the TV a documentary by Leni Riefenstahl. German troops were marching, and I found that I could duplicate the “ta ta tum, ta ta tum, ta ta tum tum tum” of the drumbeat by typing “mar mar march mar mar march.“ Had not the broadcast of this film taken place while I was typing, I would never have thought of this concept. What I like most about the piece is that it is an onomatopoeia: it sounds like it looks and looks like it sounds."

— Paul Kos

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

About Paul Kos

Paul Kos has been an artist and teacher for 35 years. He responds to simple, humble materials and the indigenous elements of specific sites, which he mines for their physical properties and metaphoric possibilities. Everything Matters, a traveling retrospective of his work, was organized by the University of California Berkeley Art Museum in 2003. Kos's installations and videos have also been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Capp Street Project, San Francisco; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco. 

The Spanish "aqui, aca, alli, alla", meaning "right here, here, there, over there," describes his work. Here, there, everywhere. Rather than having a signature or trademark, his work is linked conceptually. The concepts are often generated by life style events. For example, in jest, the author of a survival book on fire making said, as a last resort, if no matches, use a magnifying lens, if no lens, make one out of ice. So, Paul Kos did!

When Super Bowl Sunday's halftime commercials started influencing his video students with their 1,000 edits a minute pace, Kos stacked 27 video monitors, 9 high and 3 wide, to comprise a contemplative, architectural, 27 channel, stained glass window, CHARTRES BLEU, with no edits and time slowed down.

Kos opts for, but never expects, partly cloudy becoming mostly sunny.

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