EDUCATOR GUIDE Story Theme: Trailblazers Subject: Paul Kos Discipline: Visual Arts SECTION I - OVERVIEW ......................................................................................................................2 SECTION II – CONTENT/CONTEXT ..................................................................................................3 SECTION III– RESOURCES ..................................................................................................................6 SECTION IV – VOCABULARY .........................................................................................................10 SECTION V – ENGAGING WITH SPARK........................................................................................ 11 Conceptual artist Paul Kos demonstrating Guadalupe Bell (1989). Still image from SPARK story, February 2004. SECTION I - OVERVIEW EPISODE THEME INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES Trailblazers Group oral discussion, review and analysis, including peer review and aesthetic valuing as a SUBJECT group Paul Kos Teacher‐guided instruction, including demonstration and guidance GRADE RANGES Hands‐on individual projects in which students K‐12 & Post‐secondary work independently Hands‐on group projects in which students assist CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS and support one another Visual Arts & Language Arts Critical reflection on personal expressions and how they are seen and received by others OBJECTIVES Understand the development of personal works of art and their relationship to broader social EQUIPMENT NEEDED themes and ideas, abstract concepts, and the TV & VCR with SPARK story “Trailblazers” about history of art conceptual artist Paul Kos. Develop basic conceptual ideation skills Computer with Internet access, navigation software, Develop visual, written, listening and speaking speakers and a sounds card, printer skills through looking at, creating and talking Cassette player, CD player, or computer audio about art program STORY SYNOPSIS A pioneer of Conceptual Art in the early 1970s, Paul MATERIALS NEEDED Kos helped define a Bay Area approach to the form Access to libraries with up‐to‐date collections of that emphasizes the elegant use of materials to periodicals, books, and research papers explore issues of perception, social relations, and life Pencils, pens, and paper activities. SPARK gets a first‐hand introduction to the artist, his fertile imagination, and his 30‐year body of provocative and humorous work on the INTELLIGENCES ADDRESSED occasion of the first major retrospective exhibition of Bodily‐Kinesthetic ‐ control of oneʹs own body, his work ‐ “Everything Matters”‐ at the Berkeley control in handling objects Museum of Art. Interpersonal ‐ awareness of othersʹ feelings, emotions, goals, motivations Intrapersonal ‐ awareness of oneʹs own feelings, INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES emotions, goals, motivations To introduce students to the role of concept in Spatial ‐ ability to manipulate and create mental artmaking and other activities images in order to solve problems To provide context for the understanding how Logical‐Mathematical ‐ ability to detect patterns, concept determines form reason deductively, think logically To inspire students to explore conceptual ideas in art See more information on Multiple Intelligences at www.kqed.org/spark/education. SPARK Educator Guide – Paul Kos 2 SECTION II – CONTENT/CONTEXT CONTENT OVERVIEW As a pioneer of Conceptual Art in the early 1970s, In Paul Kos’s 1990 installation Tower of Babel, Paul Kos helped define a Bay Area approach to the featured in the Berkeley retrospective, a large, spiral‐ form that emphasizes the elegant use of materials to shaped metal armature supports 20 video monitors explore issues of perception, social relations, and the that simultaneously screen videos of 75 different activities of everyday life. SPARK gets a first‐hand people speaking in 50 different languages. The introduction to the artist, his fertile imagination, and person seen on the first monitor relates the Biblical his 30‐year body of humorous and provocative work story of the Tower of Babel, which seeks to explain on the occasion of the first major retrospective the diversity of languages across the world. The exhibition of Kos’s work, “Everything Matters,” at story relates that first there was only one language, the Berkeley Museum of Art. but that when people became too ambitious and tried to build a spiraling tower to the heavens, God Paul Kos moved to San Francisco in 1967 to attend made people speak different languages so that they the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received would not understand each other. The rest of the both his BFA and MFA. Kos arrived in the middle monitors feature people speaking in different of a dynamic period in the history of the Bay Area, languages, relating information of their choosing. characterized by cultural curiosity and exploration As a viewer enters into the spiral, he or she as well as marked political activism. Already an encounters layers of different languages, important hub for artistic innovation, Kos and his culminating in a cacophony of indecipherable peers experimented with new ideas and media that speech. better enabled them to communicate contemporary ideas about the culture in which they lived. In making Conceptual art, Kos focused on ideas as the driving force behind artistic expression, rather than traditional artistic media such as drawing, painting, and sculpture. As a genre, Conceptual art is a form of visual work that aims to investigate linguistic and social systems in order to better understand structures that define art. Conceptual artists experiment with different forms, using their work to comment directly upon how we engage with, apprehend, and derive Paul Kos standing in front of his work Tower of Babel during meaning from the world around us. Final products his retrospective exhibition Everything Matters, at the such as Kos’s artworks seen in the SPARK story, Berkeley Art Museum. Still image from SPARK story, June take many different non‐traditional forms, including 2003. installations, audio recordings, video recordings, LED displays, assembled groupings of objects, written documentation, research findings, recorded commentary, documentary photographs, websites and webcasts, statistics, and printed data. SPARK Educator Guide – Paul Kos 3 CONTENT OVERVIEW (continued) THE BIG PICTURE (continued) One way to interpret Tower of Babel is as an Rather than make a work of art through traditional experience of being overwhelmed by language. means, Duchamp purchased a mass produced Because we cannot understand what is being said in urinal, turned it upside down and called it Fountain all the monitors simultaneously, ultimately the (see photo). So as not to be recognized by the language is meaningless. It is an experience akin to exhibition officials, he signed the work “R. Mutt,” a the bombardment of messages that most people face comical reference to the then popular “Mutt and daily‐‐through the television, the internet, the radio, Jeff” daily cartoon. The signature, visible on the billboards, magazines, and other advertising media. lower left hand side, is the only modification The piece also returns beholders to the myth, Duchamp made to the urinal, which is otherwise, an whereby language, traditionally thought of as a object out of the context in which it is used and medium of communication, is rendered into its placed into a fine art context (an exhibition). opposite, a medium that confuses, frustrating and impairing meaningful interaction. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, replica Kos has been a faculty member at the San Francisco 1964. Porcelain; Art Institute for the past 25 years. He has exhibited unconfirmed: 360 x 480 x widely on both the West and East coasts, and has 610 mm sculpture. Purchased with assistance received numerous prestigious awards, including from the Friends of the five National Endowment for the Arts fellowships Tate Gallery, 1999. Tate and the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. His Gallery of Art, London. work can be found in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Duchamp’s submission and the ensuing scandal Modern Art (New York), and the Stedelijk Museum sparked a passionate conversation that still in Amsterdam. continues today ‐ what makes something art? How can an object be called a work of art? Is it something inherent to the object? Is it when an artist declares it THE BIG PICTURE as art? Is art defined by an object’s placement in a Conceptual Art is a term that encompasses a broad collection or institution, like a gallery or museum? range of artistic activities sharing a common belief More than 50 years later, we are still asking these that the idea behind a work of art takes precedence questions. Several artists and critics associated with over an art object. For Conceptual Artists, any Conceptual Art have said that at some level, material artwork is merely the result of the art, not Conceptual Art always questions the nature of art the art itself. This is not to say that Conceptual itself. Artists do not make objects, as is popularly believed. In fact, a single idea may produce many objects, In the early 1960s, many artists became frustrated whether in the form of the result of a set of with the way that art had become a commodity to be instructions, or in materials related to the planning bought and sold. They rejected traditional forms of and documentation of a performance or action. But