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Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.—Henri Poincaré

Modern culture’s most salient philosophical footing is skepticism. Modernism’s embrace of innovation, its insistence on creating the world anew, draws upon a profound distrust of the world as we find it. Postmodernism extends that doubt to the world as we perceive it.

Some of Paul Kos’s most authentic works, contrary to the cynical trend, are examinations of the human need to trust. The full range and richness of his interests—and the more than thirty-year span of his career—cannot be contained by consideration of a single theme, of course. But it is useful in understanding his working methods and concerns to look at some of the many instances in which he has raised such topics as religion or patriotism—or, more to the point, faith or loyalty.

Kos has made art that he views as at least partly political in intent. Sympathetic Vibrations (figs. 64, 92, 103), a 1986 performance at San Francisco’s Capp Street Project, is an example. For one month, Kos and a team of eleven specially trained bell ringers competed for aural dominance of a boisterous working-class Latino neighborhood by energetically ringing eight large, loud bells—ranging from twenty-five to a thousand pounds each—daily at noon.¹ Kos called the piece his first “social sculpture,” and has said that in the process of creating the work, “I realized that I could almost use art politically—that it had a political dynamic.”²

If Sympathetic Vibrations is a political work, it is so only in the broadest sense of “politics.” It is not polemical in any way, though it is fascinating as a rumination on polemics; nor, despite references to churches, is it religious, yet it reminds us of our impulse to embrace the sacred. It is, then, but one instance of Kos’s interest in the metaphysics of belief.

“Like the ghetto blasters especially popular in this neighborhood,” he told a reporter at the time, “the bells invade the surrounding space and mark out their own territory without asking permission.”³ On the basic level of “audio graffiti,” the work is a record of a petty struggle for a kind of cultural ascendancy. But as Stacey Moss has pointed out in a fine essay on Kos’s art, the daily bell-ringing ritual was also suggestive of such community functions as church services and calls to emergency action, or the public announcement of a birth, marriage, or death.⁴

The “sympathetic vibrations” of the work’s title carried these associations through the neighborhood, creating a kind of secular Angelus or perhaps a civic alert: a warning—but of what? Surely, some of those who heard these performances made the conscious connection to the religious and civic histories of the bell. More interesting is the subversive element of the piece: the fact that those histories were engaged to disrupt daily life with a high-decibel cacophony issued from a street-level belfry housed not in a church or public building, but in a simple modern residence-cum-art space. It’s a contest between the spiritual and the profane: the archetypal sound of the bell—the voice of God—heard in the barrio; the calling to assembly set against the urgency of unspecified alarm.

It is this element of uncertainty that stands out most clearly in Kos’s works that nominally deal with religious or political subjects. It is the form of belief, rather than the specifics of one conviction or another, that engages him. The product of a rigorous Catholic upbringing—his high school education was at a boarding school taught by Benedictine priests and brothers—Kos rattles off Latin phrases learned in childhood the way most people sing out the ABC Song. (“If they can’t sleep at night,” he says, “some people count sheep. I go, ‘Ad Deum qui laetificat, juventutem meam. Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea: quare me repulisti, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus?’ I recite those [Latin Mass] responses.”) Yet he speaks freely of his disaffection with a Church hierarchy that did away with centuries of tradition by translating the liturgy into English and making other changes. “In a way, the ritual is what gave it its magic, and that includes the incense, the Gregorian chant, and Latin,” he says. “What they did was lose their art …. They became ‘user-friendly,’ supposedly: they face the congregation; they do all these things that make it like education departments in museums get …. You go too far, and you lose the magic.”

That magic of belief lies at the heart of Guadalupe Bell (fig. 70), a work Kos produced in 1989. The piece is simple enough in its form: a large bell (reused from Sympathetic Vibrations) with a long rope tied to its tongue stands against an apparently blank wall. Ring the bell, however, and a vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe appears on the wall, glows briefly, then fades away. The metaphor is simple and profound: have faith (ring the bell), see the Mother of God. The fact that the image of the Virgin is painted in luminescent pigment on the wall, and that the sound of the bell activates a flash of light that temporarily charges the pigment, is merely the technical description—it cannot explain the mystery.

Chartres Bleu, 1983-86 86 (figs. 37, 63), examines other aspects of faith, including a culture’s shifting models of belief. The piece consists of stacked video monitors, each showing component pieces of a stained-glass window at the famous cathedral.⁵ Through this work, Kos effects a transubstantiation of the biblical story of the early life of Christ from medieval craft to twentieth-century electronic technology.

The stained-glass window of the thirteenth century, far more than a decoration, was a sacred text of images accessible to an illiterate audience. The Bible, interpreted through the teachings of Holy Mother Church, was both a code of behavior and the story of the world’s origins and history. Presented on a fifteen-foot tower of video monitors, these images have a different meaning for a viewer today. They do not represent our own history, or even the life of Christ, so much as the history of the story of Christ’s life. Over the centuries, our trust—both in images and in the official guardians of that story—has been sorely tested. All the same, today we grant a no less potent if different mystical power to the video image than that which people bestowed upon the windows nearly eight hundred years ago.

The idea of nationalism—religion in its secular form—has intermittently occupied Kos’s attention throughout his career. A world without loyalty to any cause or philosophy would be a pathetic place. However, the construct of the sovereign nation is primarily based, not on a need for communities that share principles, but on a kind of geographically based faith. Indeed, nations have often survived dramatic philosophical or political shifts without any effect on the willingness of its people to “die for their country.”

The soul-stirring rituals of blind nationalism are the focus of a 1973 installation titled rEVOLUTION: Notes for the Invasion: mar mar march (figs. 27, 68). A drum-like sound tunks out a military cadence, enlisting viewers to become participants in the work, tromping in time across a field of low obstacles in the gallery to reach a small video monitor. Ideology plays no part in this simple process—the manifesto being typed, which produces the sound, is nothing more than a string of commands to march ever further. Indeed, ideology would probably get in the way, for the marching is an end in itself: the band strikes up and we are stirred to an action that is its own end.

Reportage—the mere description of aspects of a national culture—apparently holds no interest for Kos. Rather, it is the stereotype that is most likely to end up as a subject of his work. A precisely engineered miniature train passes, on its regular and dependable schedule, through a long tunnel cut into a wheel of Swiss cheese, creating a simplistic portrait of Switzerland (Tunnel, 1995 [fig. 69]); a pair of pétanque balls, set beside a bottle of Pernod, becomes a symbol of French manhood (Zizi Va, 1994 [figs. 52, 53]). As if admitting the impossibility of ever truly knowing another culture, these works deal with the limitations of our own view of another way of life. They are about the idea of culture itself.

Around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Kos was invited to exhibit at an art museum satellite gallery in an upscale retail mall in Southern California.⁶ He decided to draw upon the remarkable story then unfolding to make a new body of work, to be presented with several earlier pieces. The show, titled BER LIN, is Kos’s most partisan critical statement. One work, Just a Matter of Time (fig. 71), consists of fifteen identical cuckoo clocks, their hands removed, cabinets painted gray, pairs of weights replaced in each case by a hammer and sickle. Because the hammers are of different weights, their cuckoos sound at varying times; because the hands are removed, we can’t predict when that will be.

“At its worst,” Kos now says of that sculpture, “it’s an illustration; at its best it’s a metaphor.” Of course, the piece can be read simplistically to mean that a particular ideology—communism—had met its inevitable fate. An interpretation more in keeping with the body of Kos’s work is that any political or ideological system will eventually pass, that what matters most is not the actual tenets of the belief held, but the simple fact of the existence of belief.

Even at a moment of high political excitement, Kos shows deeper interest in the universal elements of his art than in a narrowly defined message of political inevitability.” BER LIN includes every store and shop in South Coast Plaza,” he said at the time. “I am just providing the Eastern Sector.” Certainly, the comment refers to the disparity of wealth and the difference in political philosophy between West and East Germany. But the exhibition was about dualities of many sorts, as the title demonstrates: two syllables, independently sufficient, yet meaningful in combination. (The exhibition announcement, designed by Kos, presents the syllables on a card divided by a perforated line, further exaggerating the simultaneous unity and divisibility of the word.) “That interests me as much, if not more, than this whole content part of it,” says Kos. “It isn’t that they are divided—here’s the content, here’s the form—it’s that they’re so entwined. There is no separation of form and content when pieces are worked out in a certain way.” Yet, if we separate the form and content of belief, can the same be said?

One work made for the South Coast Plaza exhibition, a piece called Rift (fig. 73), is deceptively simple in its method. A two-foot-wide swath cut out of a wall-to-wall carpet became a substantial psychological barrier in the art gallery. Most viewers chose to inconveniently circle the exposed subsurface rather than walk across the tear. The tangibility and resonance of absence, so apparent Rift, is a recurring element in Kos’s work. It is a faith generated by absence: a kind of belief-in-negative. For a 1970 work, he attempted to record The Sound of Ice Melting (fig. 75), a theme he took up again in a new way when he carefully packaged (in the high Sierras) and sold (in San Francisco) an icicle in Container for an Icicle, 1982 (fig. 78). In Caucasus Carpet, 1995 (fig. 72), the pattern missing from a hole in a carpet is barely visible elsewhere, etched into the floor or wall of the gallery; in Memory Survives Silenced Tongues, 1989 (fig. 48), the shadow of a bell rings soundlessly.

These quietly enigmatic works, symbolic representations of the inscrutable core of faith, are among the most intriguing and, in the end, revealing aspects of Kos’s work. “Faith is… the lack of questioning the old things [we were] taught,” Kos says. Of course, it is much more than that. To fall for any old story is to be no more than a dupe. To be a believer is a choice. The work of Paul Kos taunts us with this modern dilemma: that belief depends upon the active acceptance as truth what the mind cannot encompass.

1. According to Kos, the bells for Sympathetic Vibrations came from the Verdin Bell Company, a prominent Cincinnati business for more than a century. Verdin worked with another major artist in 1991, when Donald Lipsky created an extraordinary suite of works at the Verdin factory for exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center. ↩︎
2. Unless otherwise noted, Paul Kos quotations are from an interview conducted by the author at Kos’s San Francisco home, April 15, 2002. ↩︎
3. Quoted in Christine Tamblyn, “A Ritual for Bells,” Artweek 17, no. 10 (March 15, 1986), p. 1. ↩︎
4. Stacey Moss, Paul Kos at the Wiegand Gallery (Belmont, Calif.: Wiegand Gallery, College of Notre Dame, 1994), p. 21. ↩︎
5. Moss (ibid., p. 19) describes the work in detail: “Kos bivouacked on [a] scaffold from dawn to dusk to shoot 35-millimeter slides of the medieval window’s twenty-seven panes as the quality of sunlight shining through the glass altered. Upon his return to the United States, he transferred each set of slides to a videotape, which condensed twenty-four hours into twelve minutes …. The artist then arranged the twenty-seven monitors in three vertical rows of nine monitors, rising 15.5 feet and duplicating the window.” ↩︎
6. The exhibition was organized by the author and presented at the Laguna Art Museum, Satellite at South Coast Plaza, January 11 through April 15, 1990. Paul Kos’s 1990 quotation is from the exhibition brochure. ↩︎