Fugues
MARGAR E T COGSWELL
R I V ER
M A RGA R ET COGSW EL L RIVER FUGUES
90000>
ISBN 978-0-692-19465-2
9 780692 194652
R I V ER
Fugues
M A RGA R ET COGSW EL L
Margaret
In his Musices poeticae praeceptiones of 1613, Johannes Nucius defined a fugue as the frequent and definite recurrence of the same theme in various parts which follow each other in spaced intervals.
Margaret
Copyright @ 2018 by Margaret Cogswell All works pictured in this publication copyright of the artist. All rights reserved. ISBN-13: 978-0-692-19465-2 All essays published with permission by the authors. Design by Charles Yuen Printed by Rolling Press, Brooklyn, New York This publication was made possible by a generous grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. www.margaretcogswell.net
8 Introduction & Interview: Lilly Wei 16 Acknowledgements
R iver Fug ues 88 Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues (Columbus State University, GA, 2018)
M I X ED M EDI A I NSTA L L AT IONS
24 Cuyahoga Fugues, 2003 | essay by Eleanor Heartney
94 Zhujiajiao River Poems, 2014 | essay by Wang Nanming
34 Cuyahoga Fugues Revisited, 2012 40 Hudson Weather Fugues, 2005
100 Moving the Water(s): Croton Fugues, 2017 | statement by Margaret Cogswell
42 Hudson River Fugues, 2009-2010 | Tang museum exhibition statement 46 Buffalo River Fugues, 2006 | essay by John Massier
ON PA PER
54 Melting Ice / A Hot Topic | Exhibition statement
110 Drawings/Prints | statement by Margaret Cogswell
56 Mississippi River Fugues, 2007 | essay by Tom Sleigh
110 New Mexico, 2017 118 Redhook Harbor Soundings, 2015
66 Wyoming River Fugues, 2012 | essay by Harvey Hix
130 Zhujiajiao Soundings, 2014
80 Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues (CUE, New York, NY 2014)
134 Ashokan Fugues, 2014 140 Wyoming River Fugues, 2011-12
84 Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues (Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY, 2016)
158 Cuyahoga Fugues, 2003
160 Biographical Narrative 161 Contributors 162 Selected Bibliography 163 Credits
INTRODUCTION
Autobiographies of Water BY LILLY WEI
Water, irreplaceable and essential for our existence, has long been the focus of Margaret Cogswell’s practice. Her 8|
work expresses the complex beauty of rivers at the same time it sounds an alarm over the sweeping environmental changes that have endangered our natural resources and destabilized our ecosystems and habitats. Once taken for granted and thought to be inexhaustible, water, our most vital resource, has been recklessly squandered and inadequately safeguarded. As we all know—or should know—without meaningful action to keep water clean, to protect the world’s aquifers, to offset global warming, and to thoughtfully monitor industrialization and control pop-
ulation growth, the world will face potentially disastrous water shortages. Since 1999, when the artist created Thirst, a site-specific mixed-media installation that included sound and video, water has been her central theme, believing that art can spur action that is meaningful. For twenty years, she has looked for ways to increase awareness of water’s precarious position and, since water affects us all, how urgently water-related issues need to be addressed. In Thirst, a video showing bare feet walking across parched ground in search of water was embedded in tiny monitors suspended like lead weights from the ends of a trio of fishing poles.
Ice in bucket shapes suspended above, melted on to heated steel discs below, each drip turning instantly into steam, no longer drinkable. Cogswell addressed the subject again two years later in Thirst (Elegy for Esther). Though a variant of the earlier work, the artist expanded the content: the video focused this time on the movement of hands—on Japanese tea ceremonies and dowsing rituals—rather than feet; the audio was given a more prominent role; and the dripping of water (not ice this time) came from a hose and made dissonant, but muted music. The sound of dripping established a rhythmic soundscape that enhanced the visual elements, adding another sensory layer as well as strengthening the evocation of water as a precious resource. In 2002, she began work on her widely shown multimedia River Fugues series, each individual project named for one of the great rivers across America that she explored through exhaustive geographical, historical and social research. The first, Cuyahoga Fugues, 2003, was created during a residency at SPACES, an experimental gallery in Cleveland, and subsequently shown there. Cogswell had come to explore the steel mills on the Cuyahoga River and to talk to the workers employed there and others whose livelihood depended upon the river. The concept of a fugue, characterized by repetition and variations on a musical theme, was suggested to her by a definition published by Johannes Nucius (1556-1620), a German composer and the-
orist. It offered her an organizing structure for her multipart project, which she presented in this venture as “three voices,” underscoring the interdependence of the river, the people, and industry. The concept of the fugue served to join together what would become an ongoing series, as it provided the template that was established in Cleveland: filming video interviews with the inhabitants, filming the locality, and collecting data about the site. This material would be edited and made into video projections with found sound to be shown in a constructed environment consisting of sculptural and other visual components that would later include drawings. Each iteration of a river fugue was unique, as they became more complex, then somewhat less so, always evolving. They were often imposing, like stage sets that allowed the audience to walk into them and become part of the play, outfitted with brawny steel pipes, great wheels, looming water towers, and other mechanical fixtures that often simulated a manufacturing complex but that were softened by the graceful arc of electrical wiring and the glow of the videos, with the volume turned down. What might have been raucous became more of a visual and aural tone poem, one that evoked the grandeur and power of industry and of nature, zooming in on the lives caught between them and negotiating both, touching on what has been gained and what has been lost, for better and for worse. Cogswell never simplifies but rather acknowledges the symbiosis.
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Closer to home, Cogswell’s next project was Hudson Weather Fugues, 2005, installed in three of the windows of the Glyndor Gallery overlooking the Hudson River at Wave Hill in Riverdale, New York. She projected a video onto two glass panes covered in plexiglass to make a screen, in which the actual image of the river is seen through the filmed version of it. At one point in the projection, droplets of moisture appear on the panes, merging illusion and reality so convincingly that it seemed to be raining outside. Recounting stories of fishermen, boat captains, and lighthouse keepers as well as climate histories and excerpts from the Hudson River Almanac, the audio was placed inside custom-built shutters that framed the windows, the volume low, the voices intimate. A third window was left without visuals or sound, but viewers had been prompted by what they had already heard. In front of this similarly shuttered window, Cogswell placed its own bench, hoping to encourage people to sit down, look out the window, and discover their own stories, a kind of participatory response that is integral to all the Fugues. Jumping ahead to “Lives of the Hudson,” a group exhibition at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York in 2009-2010, Cogswell’s Hudson River Fugues used a similar combination. It included footage from a 10-hour journey from Albany to Manhattan superimposed over windows framing the doors leading into the museum, the campus visible through it. The narrative was embedded and was a
blend of the present and the historical, juxtaposing stories from communities along the river with a tale about Henry Hudson and his profound disappointment in learning that the river he was sailing up was not a passage to China. Cogswell then cut a Native American prophecy into the mix. It proclaimed that when the great river that flowed two ways was discovered, the tribe that found it would dwell there in harmony and prosperity forever. Cogswell’s earlier Buffalo River Fugues, 2006, discusses how industry harnessed the power of Niagara Falls and surrounding rivers, the installation a semblance of an abandoned factory precinct, lighted by video images of emergency candles that burn out and then are relighted in an elegy to a time, a place, and all that changes. Other River Fugues followed. Cogswell consolidated one presentation from a larger project for an international traveling group show in 2007. For an artist, formal criteria are significant and the integrity of aesthetic resolutions is of paramount importance. That, however, does not preclude the adaptation of installations, which she does as part of her practice. Of equal importance is to reach as large an audience as possible to send a message that has incalculable global consequences. The following year, Cogswell created Mississippi River Fugues for the University of Memphis Art Museum. This was three years after Hurricane Katrina, but the devas-
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tation was still tragically evident throughout the Delta, making her project all the more pertinent. The entry of the museum was filled with the recorded voices of cotton farmers, river guides, levee supervisors, and others from a region historically dependent upon the cotton industry. It was lighted by projections of candles on the screens of portable DVD players inserted into hurricane lanterns that were hung throughout the space, a dramatic opening salvo. The dominant components of the installation, two enormous wheels, were inspired by an 18th century drawing of a “machine dredger,” powered by men running inside in squirrel wheel cages, like hamsters. She thought of it as a Sisyphean effort to control nature, to control the river, but it also paid tribute to the fierce desire to do so as instinctively human. Projected on her wheels was footage of a man running on a treadmill, which made it seem that he was causing them to turn while tall, rotating buoys with video projectors threw images around the walls, like shifting searchlights, the accompanying sounds — voices, the slap of water, the thrum, hum, blast of transport — brought the river and the lives it supported close. The seventh edition of her project was the Wyoming River Fugues, 2012, shown at the Art Museum of the University of Wyoming. As always, she traveled to the site to do research, winnowing through numerous encounters, impressions, and data of all kinds to capture what she believed was most characteristic of the relationship between
the river, the people, and industry in that specific locale. Her installation was lighted only by a “bucket of light” that moved almost unnoticed across the gallery and the illumination emanating from the videos, shown in a large, porthole-like format. Meant to slow the viewers down, it also made them feel “they were inside the piece,” Cogswell stated. The narratives were conveyed through a parallel installation of portable DVD players with headphones installed amid drawings of related rivers. Moving the Waters: Ashokan Fugues, 2014-18, and Croton Fugues, 2017, are the latest in this series of projects and explore the connection between the Catskills Watershed and New York City’s drinking water, the former supplying almost all of the latter for the past 100 years. For Ashokan Fugues, water towers were the first images that she thought of in assembling this project. Curious about what it might be like to see inside them, to see them in action over the course of a day, she constructed translucent tanks and projected videos in them of the water that filled and emptied out of the sink in her New York apartment building’s basement, coincidentally built about the same time as the aqueduct system. She included the pipes that linked the sink to the water system to underscore the connection. The green balls seen in the videos were added to chart the movement of the waters from the Ashokan Reservoir to New York City and serve as a visual link between the projections. This Fugue is particularly close to the artist’s heart because she
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has lived in West Shokan for over 30 years, dividing her time between there and New York City. West Shokan was one of the towns destroyed by the building of the Ashokan Reservoir and this Fugue is a tribute to all those whose lives were disrupted by its construction and who made sacrifices because of it.
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Cogswell’s singular achievement in her River Fugues was to create a hybrid form based on a musical composition that can be parsed in multiple ways: as staged installation; as three-dimensional objects; as film; as drawings; as spoken, allusive narrative fragments; as sound or music. It offers information about the actual river intertwined with evocations of the imagined river. It is a documentary about communities and a call to action. It is biography and memoir, poem and melody. It is literal and metaphoric. Above all, it is the story of water. Perhaps one day, the series will be experienced in its entirety, more opera, perhaps, than fugue. In the meantime, we should pause to consider its myriad implications as eulogy, elegy, prognostication, and prevention. It is not a myth, ultimately, that water confers immortality since without it, we cannot survive. II. INTERVIEW The following is an excerpted, edited conversation between Margaret Cogswell and critic and curator Lilly Wei on May 17, 2018, as the artist explains some of the ideas behind her epic River Fugues and its various modes of presentation.
Lilly Wei: Tell me a little more about how these projects started; you had mentioned W.B. Yeats and his Four Plays for Dancers as an influence. Margaret Cogswell: I grew up in Japan, returning to the United States when I was 13, and have an undergraduate degree in English literature so that led me to Yeats’ Four Plays for Dancers, which is written in the style of Noh drama and combines Irish and Japanese cultural traditions. It’s a combination that has great personal appeal to me. One of the plays, At the Hawk’s Well, explores the human longing for immortality and the search for the fountain of youth. In it, a hawk in the guise of a maiden guards a dried-up well, the waters of which are said to bring immortality to any who drink from it. LW: But that’s always the catch, isn’t it, that this kind of immortality is granted only to one person at a time—and such waters continue to elude us? MC: Yes, but I was intrigued by the idea that immortality was thought to be found in the waters of a particular place that required particular rituals that involved water. I thought of the Japanese tea ceremony and dowsing for water using divining rods. LW: Did that become the impetus for your Thirst projects, the first time I think you focused on the theme of water?
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MC: Yes, and that was when I introduced video and sound into my work. I embedded three very small video screens into portable monitors and suspended them from fishing poles like weights. The video was of bare feet walking across a sand-filled floor, suggesting a desert. I wanted the viewer to engage, to identify as a seeker of water, following the sound of it dripping onto heated steel disks. That water, like the waters of immortality, was also inaccessible, evaporating as soon as it made contact with the hot metal. LW: After Thirst, then, you started your series of River Fugues. It’s become like a saga—or perhaps an extended mini-series or even a contemporary opera—that’s engrossed you for over two decades now. Would you talk about its beginnings? MC: I did an artist’s residency in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2003. There, I was confronted with bodies of water so polluted that they had ignited three times. In 1969, the last fire on the river precipitated the Clean Water Act that remedied the situation somewhat, although the region still struggles with the aftermath. At first, I had no idea what to do with this information. But I was fascinated by the steel mills at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River; they were like man-made volcanoes and magnificent. I wanted to learn more, so I set out to explore and listen to generations of stories reflecting the lives of the people who lived there and whose survival and aspirations were determined by the steel mills, by the river. I decided to call it Cuyahoga Fugues.
LW: Would you talk a little about the notion of a fugue, a musical form, as the structural element for these projects? You said it came from reading Johannes Nucius and listening to a radio broadcast of Glenn Gould’s experimental “The Idea of the North,” in which he layered voices over each other to create a sonic experience somewhere between speech and music. MC: It was a challenge to structure multiple nonlinear videos that would play at the same time in one space and to incorporate actual language—people telling their stories— without having them become a documentary film. The contrapuntal composition of the fugue helped me organize and present my installations. Built on a theme that recurs frequently, although the musical lines can sound very differently from each other and move independently, they are harmonious when played simultaneously. The fugue was flexible as a conceptual framework. I often think of my multiple video components as individual instruments in a chamber music ensemble. LW: And you said you research most of your river projects in situ? MC: Yes, I record images and narratives on site and later edit them into “narrative fugues” and sculptural installations. My research road trips follow rivers, tracing the landscapes they cut through. I realize, like William Faulkner did in his time, that these landscapes hold the image
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INTRODUCTION
and memories of the people that inhabit our country. These are the landscapes of their histories, filled with sensuality, violence, beauty, and loss—and they are haunting. LW: Did you know that video would become such a major part of your practice?
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MC: No. I was initially resistant to using video because I thought without some manipulation it would be too much of a documentary and I was not interested in illustrating or documenting. Perhaps growing up bilingual in English and Japanese made me realize how much we trust words and assume understanding on the part of the listener and how much can be lost in translation, how words might be inadequate. That led me to start thinking about the relationship of image to language and to poetry. I began to explore more intently how poets juxtapose words in unexpected ways that can offer an entirely different perspective than that of a straightforward narrative. This is not to discount the poetics of narratives. But thinking this way freed me to edit video as though I were writing a poem. Rhythm, intervals, and timing all became critical and inevitably led to the exploration of musical structures in addition to the continued exploration of poetry. LW: So while you gather the material like a documentary filmmaker, your final production is quite different? And it’s only the form that’s manipulated, not the content.
MC: Yes, it’s not a documentary and doesn’t follow a linear narrative that’s descriptive but I don’t change what was said. I think about composers and poets whose use of intervals, sounds, images, and words create works I find provocative. These works ask questions rather than provide answers. Anne Carson and her prose poem The Anthropology of Water provided a source for the development of my own fugues, along with Gould’s The Idea of North. LW: I wondered about some of your visual solutions, such as showing the videos in a circular or oval format. Would you talk about that? MC: I began to use the circular image for my video projections because it alludes to so many aspects of seeing. It is about discovering an image as if through a telescope lens, a ship’s portal, a beam of light which, when raking a landscape at night, illuminates only that which it focuses on. In each case, what’s revealed is intentional and partial. The viewer is aware that there is much more outside the frame than within it. LW: And how has the series evolved? What do you consider some of the major shifts, conceptually and visually? MC: I’d say that one of the biggest changes is that I’m moving further away from built environmental/sculptural installations and focusing more on sound and video as well as works on paper, primarily drawings. With my interest in language and music, I’ve become intrigued with the wide
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range of conceptual possibilities video can offer and want to explore that more. Mentally, this is a shift from being a builder to being more of a composer and writer. Of course, I have much to learn—but that is the challenge, that there are many unknown elements and problems yet to be explored. Isn’t that what making art is about? LW: Your Ashokan Fugues, one of your most recent projects, still depends upon a setting, doesn’t it? MC: Yes, and I am still interested in the environment in which the viewer experiences the videos and how I can bring the viewer into the work as a kind of innocent participant. The most recent reinstallation of it, Ashokan Fugues in Columbus, Georgia (2018), was a perfect example of this. Instead of installing the tall water towers and multiple spiral steel pipes, this version of the installation consisted of 12 modestly sized green balls and eight black umbrellas suspended from the ceiling throughout the space, framing two corner wall projections of a “video-duet.” The floor was covered with pine needles, a bench placed on them as if on the edge of a forest clearing, inviting the viewer to sit and observe the view—the two video projections on the corner walls.
perience. The pine needle floor, however, transformed the venue, extending the visual and auditory experience to include the sense of touch and smell. The piles of pine needles covering the floor also altered the way that viewers walked through the space, slowing them down. Slowing the viewer down is always something I try to do and is one reason that I want the installation space to be dark—lit primarily by light from the video projections. LW: You said that conversations about water have changed since you began your first River Fugues in 2002. Would you elaborate? MC: Both conversations about water and my own awareness and commitment to expanding the conversation have changed. When I first began working on Cuyahoga Fugues in 2002, I had no agenda and certainly did not plan to create River Fugues for the rest of my life, or even for the next 15 years. However, through my travels and research in each place I was commissioned to create a new project, it became clear that water issues were becoming more and more critical, and the need to have conversations about water that would lead to action was becoming more and more urgent.
LW: You found this as effective?
LW: So it will be part of the rest of your life?
MC: Yes, the installation was simple, but I thought it was as powerful as my more complicated environments. The videos took center stage and controlled the space and ex-
MC: In one form or another, it seems likely.
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Acknowledgements My artistic journey has been very much like the focus of my work—a river. When I began my explorations of rivers in 2002, I had no map and had no idea where my river work would lead. There is still no map or any idea of how, when or where the work might end. But just as rivers have tributaries flowing into yet other rivers and larger bodies of water, so too have I learned that rivers have tributaries of another kind—they have histories running deep through the larger history of this country. They have connections to every aspect of the environment and are integral to the complex network of organisms that comprise our world. As River Fugues have evolved, they have become first and foremost about these relentlessly yet elegantly intertwined relationships. All along this odyssey the tributaries have only multiplied and led me to
incredible people and organizations that supported and encouraged me, and without whom the work could not have been done. First among them is the Pollock-Krasner Foundation who made this publication on the River Fugues projects possible with a generous grant in 2017. Their support early in my career (1987 and 1991) was crucial. Their support now, some thirty years later, brings documentation of fifteen years of River Fugues created around the country into one volume where they may be collectively explored. To the Pollock Krasner Foundation, I am deeply grateful. I am likewise indebted to a number of equally visionary foundations. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded me a generous fellowship in 2009 that supported ongoing research and development
for the exhibition of numerous River Fugues projects including Hudson River Fugues at the Tang Museum (2009– 10) and Wyoming River Fugues at the University of Wyoming Art Museum (2012). An Emergency Grant in 2014 from the Foundation for Contemporary Art rescued my solo exhibition, Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues at CUE Art Foundation in NYC. A 2007 grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts helped provide support for River Fugues to be developed and tour in the Melting Ice/ A Hot Topic exhibition presented at BOZAR in Brussels, Belgium, in 2007, and at the Ministry of Culture in Monaco and The Field Museum in Chicago in 2008. Travelling with the rivers, I have often thought of how it all began—again, with no map and no sense of any final destination. And yet there was
most certainly a beginning. Susan Channing was the Director of SPACES gallery in Cleveland, Ohio in 2002. It was on her recommendation that I became the first artist from the USA to participate in the SPACES World Art Program, which took me to Cleveland for the first time. It was there that I discovered the steel mills and the burning river history of the Cuyahoga River. It was there that I learned to listen to people in different communities along the Cuyahoga tell their stories about the river and how it impacted their lives. It was there that Cuyahoga Fugues was developed and exhibited in 2003 and became the first of what is now an ongoing series of River Fugues projects exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. It is Susan Channing, then, who led me to the river. Without her, the journey would not have begun. Along the way, I have been fortunate to benefit from the attention given to my work from curators and directors who subsequently invited me to create new
River Fugues projects for their respective museums and art centers. Since the exhibition of these projects comes only after years of research and development, the commitment on the part of the staff at each institution is critical. I received help with logistics, technology and, of course, fundraising for the necessary research and development that makes each River Fugue unique. I was given introductions to people I should meet and interview, taken on road trips following the course of rivers, and given places to stay, often for extended lengths of time, so that the projects would be based on sound research. My sincerest thanks go out to the following individuals: Jennifer McGregor, Director of Arts and Senior Curator at Wave Hill in Bronx, New York; John Massier, Visual Arts Curator for Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York; Randy Rosenberg, Founder, Executive Director and Curator of Art Works for Change; Ian Berry, the Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
in Saratoga Springs, New York; Leslie Luebbers, Director of the Art Museum of the University of Memphis in Tennessee; Susan Moldenhauer, Director of the Art Museum of the University of Wyoming in Laramie; artist and curator John Moore in New York City; Beatrice Wolert-Weese, Deputy Director of CUE Art Foundation in New York City; Wong Shun Kit, Director of the Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum in China; Jeremy Adams, Director of the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, New York; Florence Neal, Director of Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York; Arezoo Moseni, Curator of Art in the Corner Room Exhibition Series at the Mid-Manhattan Library in New York City; and Hannah Israel, Director of the Art Gallery and Visiting Artist and Scholar Program at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Many people shared time out of their lives with me to tell their stories about their river, their access to clean water,
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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and how they have been impacted by various water issues including drought, floods, and pollution, or diversions of water for coal mining, fracking or the building of reservoirs. Their oral histories contribute to a kaleidoscopic history of a place, of people living with rivers and the many issues surrounding water and its necessity for sustaining life. Participating individuals have included environmentalists, climate historians, the Army Core of Engineers, steel workers, fishermen, regional historians, ranchers, cotton farmers, poets, musicians, composers, and coal mine administrators. Some, like John Ruskey of the Quapaw Canoe Company in Jackson, Mississippi, took me down the Mississippi River in one of his hand-hewn canoes. An Adirondack schooner captain and crew told stories as they took me down the Hudson River. At the Mohonk Mountain House outside New Paltz, New York, Paul C. Huth (a botanist turned naturalist), taught me about “doing the weather” as part of his research at the Daniel Smiley Research Center. These kinds of records made
each day around the country have become important data in following climate change. Great appreciation goes to local and regional historians William Busta of Cleveland who took me to trace the Cuyahoga River from its source to its mouth at Lake Erie, and Diane Galusha whose book, Liquid Assets: A History of New York City’s Water System, was an invaluable resource for Ashokan Fugues and Croton Fugues. Local storyteller in the Catskills, Buddy Eckhert, who lived off the grid and knew the history of the Ashokan Reservoir like the back of his hand, shared stories as he manned a stand selling his handmade deerskin moccasins and honey at the local farmers’ markets. From Frank Parslow, a shad fisherman from Port Ewen, New York, I learned how three years of notations on index cards provided the necessary evidentiary records to help win one of the Hudson Riverkeeper’s important cases against Exxon. As a fisherman who carefully observed the river wa-
ters daily, it was Frank’s observations and records that noted the dates and names of each empty Exxon oil tanker that stopped in front of his house to clean out its bilge in the Hudson River and then fill up with river water to take to the Exxon oil refineries in Aruba and sell whatever was left for drinking water! I am also incredibly appreciative for all that Jill Morrison, an environmentalist and organizer with the Powder River Basin Resource Council, taught me about water issues in Wyoming. Most memorable was a daylong exploration of sites devastated by the discharge of coalbed methane-produced water into the ephemeral streams and rivers in the Powder River Basin. To Mark Soldier Wolf, an Arapaho Tribal Elder on the Wind River Reservation, goes enormous gratitude for all he taught me. He honored me with his trust, welcoming me into his home where I shared meals with his family. Over many hours of storytelling, he guided me in my understanding of his
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
family and tribe’s experiences in relation to their lives on the Wind River Reservation, including open-pit uranium mining and the pollution of their land and waters. I am also greatly indebted to Northern Arapaho Tribal leaders Gary Collins and Sergio Maldonado, Sr., both of whom spent many hours talking with me and providing insight into the complex and troubled history of access to clean water on their lands. During an immensely productive residency at Ucross in Wyoming, I had the privilege of meeting Mike Latham, whose ranch was adjacent to Ucross. It was Mike who introduced me to “moving the water” for flood irrigation using an orange tarp. As the orange tarp was furled and unfurled, blocking and then releasing the water, it was reminiscent of a magician’s cape and subsequently became a central focus in both my drawings and video components for Wyoming River Fugues. Then, one day in Central Park, I actually chanced upon a magician, Robert
Kaldenbach, whose performance of magic tricks with empty cups became the vehicle in my videos for referencing the “sleight of hand” in the disappearing acts of moving rivers for mining, or for the flooding of valleys for reservoirs. To Robert I am ever so grateful, for his is a star performance in Wyoming River Fugues, as well as in Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues and Croton Fugues. A very special thanks to both Susan Moldenhauer and Wendy E. Bredehoft at the Art Museum of University of Wyoming not only for taking me on a four-day research road trip around Wyoming to follow rivers at work supporting power plants, oil refineries, reservoirs, irrigation, and mining endeavors, but also for organizing a two-day symposium in conjunction with my Wyoming River Fugues exhibition in fall of 2012. Never Drink Downstream: Factual Tales and Artful Musings on Wyoming’s Water brought together individuals whom I had interviewed from all over the state, as
well as scholars and students at the university whose research focused on various aspects of water and its use. Inspired by the success of the Wyoming symposium, in 2016 I organized two panel presentations at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, New York, in conjunction with my solo exhibition there, Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues. The two panel events, Is Good Water a Common Good? and We All Live Downstream, included Kathleen Nolan, MD, MSL, and Senior Research Director of Catskill Mountainkeeper; Rebecca Martin, co-founder of KingstonCitizens.org; Aidan Ferris, co-founder of the first New York Chapter of Earth Guardians; Vin Coluccio, an environmental health specialist and former Interim Chief of New York City Drinking Water Quality; M. Elias Dueker, Assistant Professor of Environmental and Urban Studies and Biology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and Diane Galusha, Communications Director and Education Coordinator at Catskill
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Watershed Corporation, and author of Liquid Assets: A History of New York City’s Water System. These panel events brought together people from both New York City and the Catskills to explore the history and current concerns regarding water quality and sustainability in these inextricably linked New York communities. I am grateful to each of these dedicated individuals who shared of their time and specialized knowledge to both inform and inspire our communities. Research requires travel and getting a deeper understanding of a place requires time. People who invited me into their homes made having more time in various places possible. Without the generosity of Carol DeForest in Memphis, Tennessee, and Nicole Ballenger and Paul Heimer in Laramie, Wyoming, Mississippi River Fugues and Wyoming River Fugues could never have been realized. These special people shared their homes with me for several months while I conducted research and fabricated my work. A
weekend at Pat and Sharon O’Toole’s family ranch in Wyoming gave me the opportunity to learn about their water restoration and preservation projects, as well as to have the intense experience of witnessing (and documenting, of course) a calf-branding roundup. Extended stays in the artist/writer’s cottage of writer/environmental activist Anne Goette in Eggleston, Virginia, supported the development of a series of drawings for an exhibition in 2015 at Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, as well as ongoing research for a project still in progress on the New River. While New River Fugues has yet to be fully realized, I am most grateful to Linda Hayes, former proprietor of The Inn at Riverbend, who was instrumental in hosting and introducing me to many people throughout the hills and valleys along the New River in southwest Virginia while I conducted my research and interviews. Residencies in the spring of 2017 in San Cristobal, New Mexico (via the generosity of Sar-
ah Stitt) and in Sante Fe at the Santa Fe Art Institute supported the creation of a new body of works on paper while beginning research and development of a new project focusing on the acequia water-sharing irrigation system which was brought to the Americas by the Spaniards and is still in operation throughout New Mexico today. I am appreciative of the many artists with projects of their own who nonetheless made the time to contribute to River Fugues. Mississippi River Fugues could not have been fabricated in the few months that we had without great help from graduate students in the sculpture department at the University of Memphis. I am indebted to artists Michael Cassilli, Joseph Silovsky, and Stefanie Koseff for their technology expertise that played a critical role in Wyoming River Fugues and Ashokan Fugues, and to Benny Mouthon, who was responsible for post-production of the audio component for the videos in these same projects. Yet another wonderful artist, Katy Martin, made
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the beautiful archival digital prints on canvas and paper for Croton Fugues with meticulous care and great skill. The book you hold in your hand is a beautiful object in its own right, made so by the imaginative and experienced designer, Charles Yuen, who is yet another generous artist sharing his time and expertise. I thank him for his patience and guiding hand. This volume offers insights, too, insights that artists may often miss, obsessed as we are with our own vision. My deepest gratitude goes to Eleanor Heartney, Harvey Hixs, John Massier, Wang Nanming, Tom Sleigh, and Lilly Wei for the essays compiled here. Their thoughtful criticism expands the dialogue and provides a needed context for River Fugues. I am humbled and honored to have their voices engaged with the Fugues. Finally, I am forever grateful for the continuing support of my husband, Terry Kolb, who not only always encourages me to dream, but also to persevere in what may often evolve into
outrageous projects — of my own making! Together, we have collaborated on fabricating sculptural components that only he could so beautifully produce due to the fortuitous combination of his skills as an artist, sculptor, and woodworker with his intimate knowledge of the Fugues. It is his work that created the window shutters housing the audio speakers for Hudson Weather Fugues and Hudson River Fugues, as well as the tripods for the surveyor’s transits in Wyoming River Fugues, and the water towers in Ashokan Fugues. All of these individuals and organizations, all so important and so generous, made the River Fugues what they have become. Their invaluable presence is in the work, including those unnamed here who silently passed through the Fugues and left a trace. There are many voices now in this ever-growing conversation that surrounds rivers and water, voices carried along in the many tributaries that flow through all of us in this world we share.
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introduction
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mixed media installations
M I X ED M EDI A I NSTA L L AT IONS | 23
CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
Margaret Cogswell:
Cuyahoga Fugues AN ESSAY BY ELEANOR HEARTNEY
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“The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our landscapes.” —Robert Smithson It is rare for an artist today to dwell on images of industry. From the perspective of contemporary art, it is as if the factory, the steel mill and the oil refinery do not exist, or have been relegated to that portion of consciousness where unwelcome realities are entombed and repressed. Yet this was not always so. The history of art and literature since the Industrial Revolution are full of depictions of the world of smoke stacks and factories. Sometimes these are presented as metaphors for lost innocence, as when Mil-
ton serves up the “great furnace flam’d” with its “adamantine chains and penal fire” as the image of hell in Paradise Lost, or DH Lawrence conjures the coal mine to suggest the blighted landscape of modernity. But for others, industry is a symbol of progress and hope. Carl Sandburg’s Chicago is the “City of the Big Shoulders” personified thus: “Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth, Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs...”
CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
Charles Sheeler’s sleek precisionist factories and Joseph Stella’s cathedral-like suspension bridges are the visual equivalent of this optimistic vision. Whatever their particular position, such artists draw on the great shaping tension of the modern world brought about by the intrusion, in Leo Marx’s apt phrase, of “the Machine in the Garden.” Nostalgia for an imagined pastoral past mingles with recognition of the transformative power of industry to create an almost schizophrenic sense of reality. As Leo Marx notes, our national myths are rural but our reality is urban. Margaret Cogswell’s Cuyahoga Fugues is a rare artistic exploration of this complex terrain. She has taken as her subject the Cuyahoga River, which winds along a 120-mile journey through Ohio to Cleveland before emptying into Lake Erie. Known by the native inhabitants of the area as the “crooked river,” the Cuyahoga gained notoriety in 1969 when its surface caught fire, a disaster which helped spark the passage of the Clean Water Act. Cogswell was struck by the multiple roles which the river plays in the lives of those who live along its shores. It offers recreation, glimpses of natural beauty, and for many
inhabitants, a means of livelihood. Without the river, and the trade routes it provided, Cleveland would never have grown into a major city. Nor would the Republic Steel Corporation and Jones and Laughlin steel mills, which at one time employed 3,400, have ensconced themselves there. Today the mills are only a shadow of their former selves. Most of the blast furnaces, basic oxygen furnaces, continuous slab caster, hot mills, and finishing divisions have been abandoned. Their empty shells lie crumbling throughout the Flats, like ruins of an ancient city left to the elements. However, Cogswell discovered that there is still a functioning blast furnace where molten iron is made from coke, iron ore, and limestone. Cuyahoga Fugues is just that — an installation which weaves together voices, the sounds of river and steel mill, and video images of nature and industry to convey a sense of the overlapping realities that find their center in the Cuyahoga River. To create this work, Cogswell traveled the length of the river during the winter of 2003, videoing the landscape and its inhabitants. She gained entry into the working blast furnace and recorded its sights and sounds. And she interviewed the river’s residents — steel workers,
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CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
children, environmentalists, fishermen, city planners, and a local social and cultural historian.
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The resulting installation brings all these elements together in a darkened gallery whose windows have been closed off by sheets of the same steel made at the mill. Dominating the gallery are two large steel pipes of the sort used for conducting the wind from the power house to the blast furnaces to feed the fires. These become literal conduits for the sounds and images of river and industry. Coiling from the back corner is a pipe which has been partially cut away and covered with plexiglass, which creates a screen on which an interior projector casts images of the Cuyahoga River. Distorted from the oblique angle of the projection, we see the reflected landscape of the river as it moves from its rural source to its industrial mouth at Lake Erie. The indigenous sounds of “civilization” along the way belie the beauty of the landscape. At one point, a siren warns of an approaching train and ghostly reflections of ducks in the water float by. At another, the shadowy figure of an ice fisherman perched atop a cooler appears. The sounds of the river mix together — mingling birds chirping, rushing water, sirens, a symphony of car horns. The film carries us from the relative purity of the upper river to the densely
populated industrial section below. Meanwhile, the circular opening of the pipe distorts the images in another way, abstracting them to create a whirlpool effect. The other pipe is suspended in the middle of the room, making a right angle whose intersection is also filled with a video screen. Here, the sounds of the mills dominate, filling the air with whistles, sirens, and the harmonic sounds of the wind rushing through pipes to feed the blast furnaces. The images projected on the screen are equally dramatic — we see the fire radiating from the mill, rolling steam from the cooling process, the flatbed railroad cars carrying hot slabs from the continuous slab caster to be rolled into sheets at the hot mills, billows of smoke from the basic oxygen furnaces, an eerie tour of an abandoned mill, and finally the rushing of river water used as a coolant throughout the mills. Placed between the two pipes is a mini-installation inspired by the ice fishermen Cogswell encountered on her trip upriver. A small monitor which proffers a blurry video of a man ice fishing sits atop a cooler of the sort they carried onto the ice. A fishing rod is propped against a small log. A small transistor radio has been outfitted to project a series
CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
Site-Specific Installation SPACES World Artist Program SPACES Gallery
of conversations with river denizens. A woman talks about the way her husband courted her on the river, a man recalls the long history of the river, and children discuss the color of water and where it comes from. These voices mingle with others which emanate from the transistor radio, a portable item hardwired with electrical conduits to the thermos and portable TV. The second set of voices belongs to former and present mill workers who talk about the river and the mills, as well as the dangers and exertions of the job. Together, the visual and aural elements of Cuyahoga Fugues form a story that is at once celebratory and elegiac. It reflects a set of relationships among people, nature, and industry which is changing and a way of life which is ending. But it also acknowledges the intense bond between the river and the people who live on its banks. The river, both eternal and ever in flux, becomes a metaphor for life itself. Originally published in Margaret Cogswell: Cuyahoga Fugues solo exhibition catalogue brochure for SPACES World Artist Program, Cleveland, Ohio. September, 2003.
Susan Channing, Director Cleveland, Ohio MIXED-MEDIA INSTALLATION IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Rear-projected
video inside both translucent polyurethane pipe and steel pipes playing visual fugues relating to river and steel mills respectively; narrative fugues playing in radio and wall vents; video of man ice-fishing playing on TV on top of cooler. MEDIA: 24
in. diameter spiral steel pipes; sheet metal window plenums; electrical conduit and fixtures; translucent polyurethane pipe with steel fittings; portable TV retrofitted with video; ice cooler; transistor radio retrofitted with audio speakers; ice-fishing pole; video projectors; venting pipes installed in walls with CD players and audio speakers; electric light bulbs.
DIMENSIONS:
Installation components - variable.
INSTALLATION -
14 ft. x 20 ft. x 40 ft.
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CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
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CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
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CUYAHOGA FUGUES, 2003
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CUYAHOGA FUGUES REVISITED, 2012
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SPACES World Artists Program 10th Anniversary Exhibition SPACES Gallery Cleveland, Ohio ENTRY GALLERY:
River Fugues Installation
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Five DVD players are installed amid wall drawings of river maps relating to respective projects.
Portable DVD players are playing video documentation and excerpts from 10 years of River Fugues projects. MEDIA: Five portable DVD players with headphones. DIMENSIONS: Installation
12 ft. h x 10 ft. x 12 ft.
MAIN GALLERY: Cuyahoga
Fugues Revisited
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A “bucket of light” moved slowly back and forth along a 40 ft. steel track with cables cutting diagonally through the gallery space. The impetus for this bucket came from video footage I shot one night at
the steel mills of a steel bucket hauling coal from outside the blast furnace. Brightly lit by the steel mills’ yellow lights as it moved through a fog of smoke and steam, this bucket glowed like a ball of fire in the black night sky. Harnessing the power of this mysterious presence, I created a moving “bucket of light” which served as a physical link between the two main walls of video projections – one of which explores the steel mills and the other the Cuyahoga River. MEDIA: Two
video projectors with audio speakers; CD player with audio speakers for narrative fugues; steel rods, cables, electrical conduit; one motorized “bucket of light” constructed of translucent polyurethane sheets and aluminum with LED light inside.
DIMENSIONS:
Installation - 14 ft. x 30 ft. x 50 ft.
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CUYAHOGA FUGUES REVISED, 2012
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CUYAHOGA FUGUES REVISED, 2012
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HUDSON WEATHER FUGUES, 2005
Meteorologic Phenomena exhibition Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill Bronx, New York Curated by Jennifer McGregor, Director of Arts MIXED-MEDIA INSTALLATION IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Because
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of the fact that to “check the weather,” one usually goes to the window, benches were placed in front of each window to lure the viewer to linger, look out at the layered landscape, and “eavesdrop” on the river’s weather stories emerging from the shutters. Video footage was shot from the Saugerties Lighthouse and on a 10-hour journey down the Hudson River from Albany to Manhattan on the Adirondack Schooner. Narratives collected include those from fishermen, lighthouse keepers, boat captains, regional historians, climate historians, and observations recorded in the Hudson River Almanac published weekly by the New York State Department of Conservation. Both narratives and video were woven together to form a narrative and visual fugue composition. The third window, though treated visually the same with bench and shutters, had no video or audio intervention. The viewer, in anticipation of someone else’s narratives, instead fills the silence with his/her own stories while visually exploring the landscape and river beyond. Media: Custom-made wood window sills and shutters with audio speakers inside; three wooden benches; two video projectors; two DVD players; two plexiglass video screens inserted over window panes. DIMENSIONS: Variable
HUDSON RIVER FUGUES, 2009-2010
Lives of the Hudson July 18th 2009 - March 14th 2010
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Lives of the Hudson explores the long history of one of America’s greatest rivers. Four themes have guided the organization of this exhibition: the natural river, the imagined river, the human river, and the working river. Along with important works by Hudson River School painters, Lives of the Hudson presents objects of material culture, science, and recent art by Bob Braine and Leslie Reed, Matthew Buckingham, Margaret Cogswell, Maxine Henryson, Yvonne Jacquette, Kysa Johnson, Michael Light, Annea Lockwood, Alan Michelson, Jason Middlebrook, and An My-Lê.
Information about the river from physical descriptions to the human effects of tourism and industry has been combined with provocative images by contemporary artists who ask us to reconsider our use of the river and our relationships with nature and history. The exhibition’s focus is the last two hundred years and thus presents an intersection of contrasting and varied stories – environmental, historical, and individual – whose journeys all lead back to the Hudson itself. The stories told here raise numerous questions about the Hudson’s many lives. Ian Berry, Susan Rabinowitz Malloy ’45 Curator, and Tom Lewis, Professor of English, Skidmore College
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery Skidmore College Saratoga Springs, NY Co-curated by Ian Berry and Tom Lewis MIXED-MEDIA INSTALLATION IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Sited
in the entrance to the Tang Museum, video was projected onto windows on either side of the entry doors. Window shutters housed speakers from which the narrative fugues emerged juxtaposing contemporary stories from people along the Hudson River with the story of Henry Hudson’s disillusionment in not finding a short passage to China. These narratives also contrast Henry Hudson’s journey with the tragedy of the Native Americans whose ancient prophecy
promised that their nomadic journeys would end in peace and prosperity when they found a great stream whose waters flowed two ways. Collectively, these stories explore parallel narratives, contrasting expectations with disillusionment and loss in relation to the Hudson River. Media: Custom-made wood window shutters with audio speakers inside; two wood benches; two video projectors; two DVD players; two sets audio speakers; two plexiglass video screens inserted over window panes. DIMENSIONS:
Variable
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HUDSON FUGUES, VIDEO STILLS
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Buffalo River Fugues, 2006
BUFFALO RIVER FUGUES, 2006
Margaret Cogswell:
Buffalo River Fugues BY JOHN MASSIER
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Margaret Cogswell’s site-specific installation Buffalo River Fugues belies its own reality of hard, emphatic industrial materials with a lyrical eloquence that is almost tender in its application. It is as though the remnants of industrial ghosts past to which Cogswell is alluding surface as lines of melody realized in a gallery space. Ductwork and conduit are drawn three-dimensionally throughout the space, and the multiple allusions to heavy industry emanate with reverent lightness. Experientially, Cogswell’s installation is striking in its unavoidable contrasts. The gargantuan forms of industry diminish us when they loom before and over us—paradoxically, in much the same way that natural forms such as mountains, canyons, and rivers diminish and humble
us. Cogswell uses our familiarity with this relationship to her advantage and great effect. Though her installation is succinct and concise, the physical presence of enormous ductwork in the gallery is nonetheless startling by its allusion to an omnivorous scale. Undercutting the weighty presence of the ductwork, electrical conduit snakes about with a serene grace, punctuated at specific points with lantern boxes, housing the looped images of white candles, burning down and then burning up again. The conduit, in particular, elaborates the sensation that the installation has been drawn in space. It all looks convincingly functional (and some of the conduit does, in fact, power specific elements in the exhibition), while simultaneously reading as what it is: a purposely
Buffalo River Fugues, 2006
aesthetic realization, both a sculptural installation and a drawing rendered with galvanized steel and electricity. Industrial calligraphy. The scale and materials set us up with certain expectations of volume and noise and cacophony and yet almost everything else in the installation cuts against the grain of this expectation. The environment is astonishingly serene and the sounds that are heard reach us not through an abrasive dissonance but at levels so intimate they almost whisper. A lone radio beside some abandoned toolboxes emits a remix fugue of aspirations and lost dreams: fragments of songs, evangelical prophecies, and tourists exclaiming the wonder of Niagara Falls. Cogswell’s audio elements are sentiments with no place to go and enhance the notion of abandonment within the space, particularly the sounds of an old steel mill like a labored exhausted breath. Fugue is a double-edged reference that Cogswell utilizes with maximum flexibility. It is a musical reference relating to the repetition of a particular theme with variations within the repeated lines. It also refers to a disordered state of mind, specifically when one has wandered from home and experiences a memory loss related to the environment that has been rejected and left. Taken together, one could surmise a hauntingly elegant cycle of lostness, fueled perpetually by a forgetfulness as to the nature of the loss. Buffalo River Fugues is the third in a series of River Fugues, in which Cogswell has explored the complex and still-changing relationship among humans, industry, and
river systems—not merely in an elegiac manner, but in consideration of multiple layers of meaning within these relationships. She does not simplify the equation and lionize the natural world at the expense of industry, as though the latter’s contribution were merely degradation and environmental havoc. The elegance with which the installation is realized extends to each component and not merely the sense of loss. Industry too has a certain irrefutable magnificence about it, and it is impossible not to recognize this in Cogswell’s treatment of her industrial materials and components, and the undeniably hypnotic—one might almost say romantic— footage of hot steel running through a mill. In some sense, that is beauty incarnate. Her use of ductwork reflects a thicker brushstroke, but one equally compelling and valid as the lines of conduit or the delicate flicker of a candle. Industry is not a villain; it is an equal partner, a co-conspirator, and enabler of progress. It feeds us, fuels us, burns us, scars us. It’s beautiful and horrible. It makes our lives better, easier, and it devastates the natural world. Like a musical composition, Buffalo River Fugues is constructed from fragmented parts because only a collection of elegant fragments suffices to reference the complex interdependence we share with the natural world we subsume and the industry that enables us to do so. Originally published in Margaret Cogswell: Buffalo River Fugues solo exhibition catalogue brochure for Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York. November 2006.
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BUFFALO RIVER FUGUES, 2006
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center Buffalo, New York Curated by John Massier, Hallwalls Visual Arts Curator MIXED-MEDIA INSTALLATION: IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Rear-projected
video of steel mills playing in continuous loop in spiral steel pipe; radio retrofitted with audio speakers to play narrative fugues of stories in Buffalo; portable TV retrofitted to play video of Niagra Falls in continuous loop; sheet metal boxes playing video of emergency candle with flame burning and then going out, then reigniting in continuous loop.
MEDIA: Spiral
steel pipe; electrical conduit; video projectors and audio speakers; five sheet metal boxes with portal DVD players and video of emergency candle, tool box, radio, TV, and cooler.
DIMENSIONS: 24
in. diameter spiral steel pipe at variable heights and lengths up to 14 ft.; sheet metal boxes dimensions variable from 8 in. x 10 in. to 16 in. x 20 in.
INSTALLATION -
16 ft. x 40 ft. x 20 ft.
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BUFFALO RIVER FUGUES, 2006
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RIVER FUGUES, 2007-2008
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Melting Ice / A Hot Topic GROUP SHOW, EXHIBITION VENUES:
BOZAR | Brussels, Belgium, 2007 Ministry of Culture | Monaco, 2008 The Field Museum | Chicago, Illinois, 2008 The Melting Ice / A Hot Topic exhibition was curated by Randy Jayne Rosenberg of Art Works for Change. Rosenberg asked 40 artists from around the world to explore the many aspects and meanings of climate change for this traveling exhibition.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Two rear-projected 12 min. video loops—one in translucent polyurethane pipe and the other in standing steel pipe playing visual fugues relating to river and steel mills respectively. MEDIA: 24
in. diameter spiral steel pipes and fittings; 24 in. diameter translucent polyurethane pipe with steel fittings.
DIMENSIONS: Installation components - variable Installation - 10 ft. x 40 ft. x 20 ft.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER FUGUES, 2008
MISSISSIPPI RIVER FUGUES, 2008
Margaret Cogswell:
Mississippi River Fugues BY TOM SLEIGH
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Margaret Cogswell, a student in 1968 at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, has just been to hear Martin Luther King speak in support of the sanitation workers’ strike; she’s elated by King’s oratory, his passionate conviction that he’s “been to the mountaintop”—and though he understands that “I may not get there with you,” he knows “that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land.” The next day she is climbing the steps to her dorm, her foot “raised in mid-air like a freeze-frame in my mind,” when she hears the news that he’s been murdered. The power goes out, tanks roll onto campus, she hears sniper fire around the dorms; devastated by fear, grief, and anger, she eventually decides to leave the South. But that isn’t so easy. Born in Memphis (though raised in Japan), she is and is not a Southerner: King Cotton, slavery, Civil Rights, the mystique and myth of the agrarian South, these are all part of her cultural inheritance.
But after she graduates, Margaret Cogswell does indeed leave the South for New York City, where she makes sculpture, then installation work. Over the years, her artistic explorations show her to be a polymath, one of those quiet visionaries who aspire to the complexity that Nathaniel Hawthorne once defined as happiness: the ability to live as deeply as possible in all our faculties. In the last five years, Margaret Cogswell has focused her faculties on exploring the ever-shifting banks and waters of American rivers—and produced a series of installations that are among the most original in contemporary art. Like Thomas Cole before her, she’s captured, in a fugue of voices and video, the Hudson River Valley, though she’s tempered Cole’s mystical effects of light and shadow with the river’s diesel-powered clang and thrum. And her fugues on the Buffalo and Cuyahoga Rivers transform Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” into an empathetic understanding of the steel mill workers and the peculiar poetry of their daily work lives. Now, perhaps inevitably, given her Southern roots, King Cotton and the Mississippi have woven themselves back into her life. In keeping with Hawthorne’s dictum, she has paddled down the river with a canoe builder in his handhewn pirogue, talked to the Army Corps of Engineers, African American art historians, the Yazoo Levee Board, cotton growers, gin owners, earth science geologists, cotton journalists, a levee inspector and former barge-hand/ state
MISSISSIPPI RIVER FUGUES, 2008
trooper (who does a mean “cow in distress” imitation), and the only African American riverboat captain on the Mississippi who is piloting the Memphis Queen. In the ante-room to the installation, these voices resonate from hurricane lanterns that Cogswell has fabricated from copper and sheet metal. In each lantern, she has installed a video screen and a DVD player. Suspended at different heights, the lanterns house these disembodied voices, each voice accompanied by the projection of a candle coming alight, until the voice falls silent and the flame flickers out. A sense of elegy and ghostly presence pervades this part of the installation, the voices interweaving with the river’s ambient sounds: whistles, pulse of engines, rush of water. In the main gallery hall, Cogswell surrounds us with buoylike structures that serve as swiveling projectors casting images of cotton production on the walls: a huge mound of cotton lint is scooped up by a caterpillar tractor’s jaws; a presser tamps the cotton down into huge bales; or a crop duster flies low over the cotton bolls, covering them in spray, while cows in a neighboring field look on and the sound of water rising fills the air; or we see the fields on fire, the revolving stainless-steel teeth of a cotton harvester, the strangely unsettling vision of the sun rising through mist or the full moon pulsating above the fields. Underneath all this, you hear the sound of treading feet ominously flooding the room and reinforcing the installation’s most spectacular elements: two large paddle wheellike forms that double as projection screens and a con-
struction based on a drawing of a pre-steam 18 th century dredger powered by men who walk round and round in enormous squirrel wheels. Cogswell’s dredger, looking a little like a medieval weapon, projects a hint of threat and menace. This is in radiant contrast to the projections in the paddle wheels which show the ghostly figure of a man walking round and round in the soft blue light emanating from the circular screens. It’s hard not to think of the collapsing levees on the Mississippi, of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, of the industrial and agricultural pollution fostered by our need for King Cotton, and of Martin Luther King quoting the prophet Amos in his Memphis speech, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” And yet the installation, whose apocalyptic overtones are unmistakable, never succumbs to an oversimplified view of the consequences of global capitalism, in which Memphis still figures as one of the largest cotton brokers in Africa. Instead, Cogswell presents us with the irreducible and unforgettable details of the Mississippi River valley’s cotton fields. Human transience and the ghosts that press around us may be at the heart of this vision, but in her life-long commitment as an artist to the clear expression of mixed emotions, she demonstrates how the waters that may cover us over can also buoy us up. Originally published in Margaret Cogswell: Mississippi River Fugues solo exhibition catalogue brochure for University of Memphis Art Museum, Memphis, Tennessee. September, 2008.
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MISSISSIPPI RIVER FUGUES, 2008
Art Museum of the University of Memphis Memphis, Tennessee Curated by Leslie Luebbers, Director MUSEUM ENTRANCE
DIMENSIONS:
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Lanterns playing narrative fugues composed from people’s stories who live and work along the Mississippi River.
Nine lanterns with video and audio, portable DVD players, copper, galvanized pipe, steel rods. MEDIA:
DIMENSIONS: Lanterns
- 18 in. h x 12 in. diameter.
Installation dimensions - 12 ft. x 16 ft. x 12 ft. MAIN GALLERY
Mixed-Media Installation DIMENSIONS:
20 ft. h x 66 ft. x 33 ft.
TWO GIANT WHEELS WITH DREDGER: IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In
middle of two giant wheels are video projections of a man running endlessly, seemingly powering the dredger’s wheels. MEDIA: Steel, translucent polyurethane sheets for video screens, video projections with audio, electrical conduit, 24 in. diameter spiral steel pipe, garden spades, copper.
Large wheel - 20 ft. h x 14 ft. diameter x
4 ft. deep Small wheel - 15 ft. h x 8 ft. diameter x 4 ft. deep Dredger - 24 in. diameter x 6 ft. long FIVE BUOY STRUCTURES: IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Three of the five buoys house an oscillating motor and video projector in the top section. Oscillating 90 degrees, projected video images move across the surrounding walls and form a visual fugue exploring the haunting history, poignant beauty, and delicate balance found in the interdependence of the lives of people in the Delta, the cotton industry, and the Mississippi River. MEDIA: Spiral
steel pipes, electrical conduits, copper, mirrors, oscillating motor and video projectors in top of each buoy, audio speakers, DVD players.
DIMENSIONS: Five
buoys range in height from 6 ft. to 14 ft. and each at 24 in. diameter.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2012
WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2012
Moving Water:
Margaret Cogswell’s Wyoming River Fugues BY HARVEY L. HIX 66 |
WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2012
It has been ever wise to listen to rivers.
To what will we listen, if not to rivers?
The wisest of our ancestors listened. Heraclitus, for instance, one of those Greeks who in philosophy — the love of wisdom — preceded even Socrates, tenders us the insight that “One cannot step twice into the same river.” Or again, the traditional wisdom from the Far East assembled in W. S. Merwin’s Asian Figures includes this riverine verity, which, though ancient in origin, would serve Wyoming well as a guiding truth today:
What is Wyoming’s most precious resource? By the criterion of price (what of our state do we in Wyoming forfeit to others these days in exchange for cash?) the answer must be fuels: coal, oil, natural gas. By the criterion of pricelessness (what of our state can we in Wyoming not live without?) the answer is water. Humans lived here, in what we now call Wyoming, for millennia before the first lump of its coal was sold. Those persons’ lives were just as full then of sorrows and joys, hardship and grace, as our lives are now. No human, though, has ever lived in this place — nothing at all could live here — without water. One of the Wyoming voices to whom Margaret Cogswell listens in one of her narrative fugues says it well. Standing next to a river, he says to her, and says for all of us who live here, “You’re lookin’ at my lifeblood.”
rivers go on mountains go on The wise among the moderns, too, listened to rivers, as exemplified by Langston Hughes’ hearing “the singing of the Mississippi,” and so do our wise contemporaries, among whom her River Fugues place Margaret Cogswell. It takes will matched by patience to listen to rivers. There’s blame to be assigned, we say, for the urban child who does know that hamburgers come from fast-food restaurants, but doesn’t know they come first from cows. Yet how much like such a child are we in relation to water? I know water comes from my kitchen faucet, from the soda aisle at the grocery store, from the fountain down the hall from my office at work, but how much do I know beyond that? Precious little. Margaret Cogswell has taken the time, and gone to the trouble, to find out. Her fugues offer the fruits of her labors, but also invite us into those labors.
It would be wise to wait, and listen. By analogy with the musical form of the fugue, Margaret Cogswell has sought to give her installation layers, to make it not one- or two-dimensional, but multi-dimensional. “I want the piece to be explored,” she says. “I want it to be about a process of discovery.” Toward making possible such discovery, the exhibition’s elements are multiple: drawings and digital prints of video stills line one wall, and moving images are projected onto other walls; objects — real stock tanks and stylized surveyor’s transits — inhabit the space; a “bucket of light” like a mechanical moon moves slowly overhead; recorded voices fill the room. Why
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so much material, offered the viewer by such varied means? So that we may — even must — make, each of us, our own way through the accumulation, so that we may make of it our own sense, rather than taking the artist’s word for it, or anyone else’s. So that, after the viewer’s initial visceral response, the work may invite also her cognitive response, her reflections and questions.
Margaret Cogswell’s fixation on rivers amounts to more than merely a private, peculiar obsession. For all of us, our need for water exceeds our understanding of it. We all of us know thirst better than we know the substance that alone can satisfy it. Charles Fishman’s laconic statement of that fact also stands as validation of Cogswell’s work. “Water is as potent in our daily lives as gravity, but also as mysterious.”
Cogswell says she wants the work to have layers, as a poem has layers: something to offer the viewer the first time through, and something else the second.
That thirst, though, the distance between our physiological need for water and our want of knowledge about water, is not our only thirst. There is a distance, too, one with economic, political, and ecological consequences, between the amount of fresh water on earth, which is not increasing, and the number of humans, which is. We might name this need, as Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke do, “water productivity.” We would do well, following Barlow and Clarke, to recognize it as an imperative to thrift in the face of scarcity, as a call to double the benefit we currently get “from each liter of water we remove from rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers if we are to have any hope of providing water for the 8 to 9 billion people who will need it in the next several decades.”
One who listens for wisdom may hear it as music. If melody propels us forward, harmony draws us down. The sonata progresses, the fugue ruminates. The one is purposeful, the other profound; the one advances, the other waits. 68 |
Homophony promises money in the bank, polyphony fabricates substance in the soul. Mozart is sudden and swift, Bach solid and strong; Mozart whistles, Bach prays. By organizing her installation in the form of fugues, Margaret Cogswell declares a preference for depth over speed. As a Bach fugue states its theme, then mirrors and manipulates it, creating counterpoint and voicings, so Cogswell mirrors and manipulates her theme into a contrapuntal and polyphonic work. The fugue first offers her, the maker, and then also offers us, the viewers, a flexible conceptual framework and a patient mode of investigation. Rivers figure wisdom, and our want of it.
Our thirst, though, also shows itself in, and shows itself as, artistic and cultural expression. To this thirst David Clarke testifies, implicitly affirming Cogswell’s choice of subject when he attributes to water a thematic prominence in art that, in Europe, starts with Leonardo, and that has special cogency today. “If artistic and cultural meanings in general have tended to become more evanes-
WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2012
cent, more mutable and difficult to pin down in the modern period,” then water, he proposes, “as a substance which is itself without fixed form, may have found a particular relevance for our era of fluidity and dissolution.” We learn from one song to listen to another. Margaret Cogswell insists that “my mentors are poets and composers.” How well she practices what her preceptors preach may be seen by the fit, for instance, between Cogswell’s Wyoming River Fugues and these words of poet Muriel Rukeyser: “… all we can be sure of is the profound flow of our living tides of meaning, the river meeting the sea in eternal relationship, in a dance of power, in a dance of love.” Sureness, Rukeyser suggests, does not secure but is secured by what is profound, and what is profound is flow. To listen to rivers is to look, and to look is to look again.
have for it, to leave it to our children whole. For that we must see also what Margaret Cogswell sees, must see also as she sees: Two boots, waders with their tops turned down, stand astride a stone. Two hands lift the stone from shallow water in a concrete irrigation channel and set it down again, now atop the corner of an orange tarp. Two trout swim in place, now synchronized, now not, against the current of a stream, the way two crows might for a moment fly in place in the face of a Wyoming wind. Cows lumber in an awkward line toward a stock tank. Cows convened around a stock tank bellow. A ghostly snowplow floats along a highway, its lights softened by a scrim of the very snow that makes this first pass futile and necessitates the next.
It’s not that the standard images of Wyoming water are wrong, exactly. Sometimes a lone human figure does stand in a winding stream casting a fly against a placid backdrop of mountains outlined by crepuscular light and matched by scattered clouds purple for purple. There are waterfalls here that tourists may frame with trees for snapshots sure to win the oohs and ahs of their friends back home.
Those boots, the waders, walk now through prairie grass.
It’s not that such clichés are wrong. It’s just that what we want others to see of this our home, what we ourselves may wish to think of it, is not all we need to know to honor the place, to make our lives prove the respect we say we
cumference of a prayer wheel.
A dead fish floats on its side near a shore, animated by waves, measured by a horsefly. Shallow water flows, given contour in its rushing by the very stones that insistent rushing has smoothed. Prayer flags assent to the sacredness observed by the cir-
Water surges from the sluice gate of a dam. A loose grid of cracks crazes a close-up of parched ground.
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That orange tarp, now draped across a pole, carried behind those boots, asserts that the one who holds the deed may claim the land, but the one who moves the water owns it.
metonym, and the basic responsibility is to listen. Which makes Margaret Cogswell’s artistic process an emblem, and an instance, of democracy at work.
A sprinkler head sprays water in persistent, rapid, metronomic bursts.
To listen wisely is to listen for voices, to listen to voices.
A junked truck immersed in what looks like a quarry, its cab above the surface, invites first target practice, then rust to emphasize the bullet holes. To hear the river, listen to the people.
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An art that listens is a democratic art. “What I want in my work,” Margaret Cogswell avers, “is to bring disparate voices together.” She wants the work to record and facilitate conversation. She wants it, in other words, to fulfill the most fundamental principle of democracy, which, if Amartya Sen is right, is not only “the institutions that formally exist” but more importantly “the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard.” Democracy, Sen asserts, is not realized by voting alone, which, as proven by, say, North Korea, can be corrupted, but by voting undergirded by “what goes with balloting, such as free speech, access to information and freedom of dissent.” If democracy is not only voting, but also and more crucially the exercise of public reason, then the basic right is the right to speak, for which the right to vote is merely
Ours may be an age of information, but what information informs is voice. When Margaret Cogswell describes the process of creating her fugues, she does not speak of gathering information but of gathering stories. Her narrative fugues include information, but they do so because they create a chorus, because, in other words, they assemble voices. A river bears a name because it has a voice, because it is a voice. One measure of my prior inattentiveness to rivers, the inattentiveness Margaret Cogswell’s fugues mitigate against, is how few of Wyoming’s rivers I could have named, out of the countless flows, ephemeral to mighty, that vein the state, translating seasonal snowmelt and occasional storms into lasting sustenance. North Platte, yes, and Yellowstone, Laramie and Wind, Powder and Snake. But what of the rest? Crazy Woman Creek, Bald Mountain Creek, Hoback River, Sourdough Creek, Wagon Box Creek, Tongue River, Paint Rock Creek, Pole Creek, Porcupine. Shoshone River, Encampment River, Little Popo Agie River, Greys River, Gros Ventre, Bighorn, Salt, Greybull, Sweet-
WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2012
University of Wyoming Art Museum
water. Cold Springs Creek, Tensleep Creek, Blue Creek, Clear Creek, Rock Creek, Shell Creek, Trout Creek. Pass Creek, French Creek, La Bonte, Babione. Old King Ditch, Oasis Ditch, Chugwater Creek. Porter Draw, Antelope Draw, Chivington Draw, Stinking Water Creek. Big Sandy River, Killpecker Creek, Potash Wash, Ninemile Wash, Greasewood Wash. Stratton Draw, Eagles Nest Draw, Battle Spring Draw, Laundry Draw, Junk Creek. Sand Creek, Bone Creek, Difficulty Creek, Red Cloud Slough. That each has a name indicates it has spoken to someone before, and suggests it would speak now to any of us who proved, like Margaret Cogswell, willing to listen. Originally published in Margaret Cogswell: Wyoming River Fugues solo exhibition catalogue for University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, Wyoming. September, 2012. Works Cited Barlow, Maude, and Tony Clarke. Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. The New Press, 2002.
Laramie, Wyoming Curated by Susan Moldenhauer, Director and Chief Curator MAIN GALLERY
Mixed-Media Installation DIMENSIONS: 16
ft. X 64 ft. x 37 ft.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Research
in Wyoming led to the introduction to flood irrigation and the use of an orange tarp to “move the water.” Concealing and revealing, much like the cape of a magician, the orange tarp and a magician were subsequently incorporated into the installation videos. Their presence became a means to reference the diversions of waters by irrigation, mining, the creation of reservoirs, dams, and other efforts. Surveyor’s transits, normally used to survey land and thereby provide access to water, served in this installation as the means by which video exploring Wyoming’s history and landscape is projected from across the walls.
Hughes, Langston. Collected Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
surveyor’s transits: wood, steel, plumb bob, video projectors, mirrors, copper, duct pipes, electrical conduits, chain, 90-degree oscillating motors, audio speakers; two steel stock tanks: one tank with six- min. continuous loop video projection onto floor of tank; one motorized “bucket of light” with translucent polyurethane sheets, aluminum and steel bars, cable, LED lights, and motor.
Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979.
DIMENSIONS: Three
Clarke, David. Water and Art: A Cross-cultural Study of Water as Subject and Medium in Modern and Contemporary Art Practice. Reaktion Books, 2010. Fishman, Charles. The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. Free Press, 2011.
Merwin, W. S. Asian Figures. Atheneum, 1973. Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Paris Press, 1996. Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Harvard Univ. Press, 2009.
MEDIA: Three
surveyor’s transits at 6 ft., 9 ft., and 11 ft. h; two steel stock tanks at 5 ft. and 8 ft. diameters; bucket of light at 40 in. x 30 in. x 50 in.; steel structure for bucket spans 50 ft. across gallery. Bucket traveling speed: 8 ½ mins. per length.
NARRATIVE FUGUES INSTALLATION IMAGE DESCRIPTION: DVD
players are playing narrative fugues composed from stories gathered from individuals from all over Wyoming. Participants included Arapaho and Shoshone elders, botanists, composers, archaeologists, ecologists, hydrologists, philosophers, ranchers, environmentalists, historians, poets, and scientists with the extraction industries. MEDIA: Five
portable DVD players with headphones installed on four walls amidst drawings of Wyoming river maps.
DIMENSIONS: Installation - four walls each 10 ft. x 10 ft. x 10 ft. DRAWING/PRINT INSTALLATION MEDIA: Four
archival digital prints of video stills on paper and six water color and colored pencil drawings on paper.
DIMENSIONS: All
drawings and archival digital prints are 30 in. x 22 in. or 22 in. x 30 in.
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MOVING THE WATER(S): ASHOKAN FUGUES, 2014
CUE Art Foundation
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New York, New York Mixed-media Installation IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Imagining what it would be like to see inside the NYC water towers and watch the rise and fall with daily usage of the water coming from the Catskills, I used an underwater camera to shoot a video of water filling up and emptying out of an industrial sink of a building completed soon after the NYC aqueduct system. A green ball animates the water currents and becomes the visual thread linking the movement of water from the Catskills down to NYC. This video was then rear-projected onto the translucent tank walls of the two water towers. MEDIA: Wood,
steel, translucent polyurethane sheets, copper, video, audio speakers, computers, video projectors.
DIMENSIONS: Two
water towers - 15 ft. x 4 ft. x 4 ft.; one surveyor’s transit - 9 ft. x 4 ft. base; three videos each @ 16-min. continuous loops.
INSTALLATION DIMENSIONS -
15 ft. x 13 ft. x 15 ft.
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MOVING THE WATER(S): ASHOKAN FUGUES, 2016
Kleinert/James Center for the Arts Woodstock, New York Curated by Jeremy Adams, Director MIXED-MEDIA INSTALLATION IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Installation
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was expanded to include three steel pipes with narrative fugues which emerged from portable DVD players embedded in steel boxes on the sides of the steel pipes. These narrative fugues were created from stories about NYC’s water supply and the history of the Ashokan reservoir collected from people both in NYC and the Catskill Watershed. Green balls, previously appearing only in the videos, took on a physical manifestation and, along with 11 large black umbrellas, were suspended from the ceiling throughout the installation space. MEDIA: Water
towers with steel, translucent polyurethane sheets; rear-projected video and audio; five steel pipes, three with portable DVD players and headphones; green beach balls and black umbrellas suspended from ceiling with steel rods; two video projections on walls.
DIMENSIONS: Two
water towers at 12 ft. x 4 ft. x 4 ft.; two water tower videos each at 16-min. loops; two wall video projections each at six- min. loops; five steel pipes at 24 in. diameter and heights ranging from 6 ft. -10 ft.; installation dimensions variable.
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MOVING THE WATER(S): ASHOKAN FUGUES, 2018
ART LAB Gallery Columbus State University Columbus, Georgia Curated by Hannah Israel, Gallery Director MIXED-MEDIA INSTALLATION
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IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Narrative
fugues emerged from three portable DVD players installed amid wall drawings of New York state river maps. These narrative fugues were created from stories about NYC’s water supply and the history of the Ashokan Reservoir collected from people both in NYC and the Catskill Watershed. Green balls, appearing also in the videos, were suspended from the ceiling throughout the installation space along with large black umbrellas. The gallery floor is covered with pine straw linking the forest floor of the Ashokan Reservoir with pine forests in the environs of Columbus, Georgia. MEDIA: One
wooden bench; three portable DVD players and headphones; 11 green beach balls and six black umbrellas suspended from ceiling with steel rods; two video projections on walls; pine straw covering floor; two wall video projections each at six-min. continuous loops.
DIMENSIONS: 10
ft. x 19 ft. x 22 ft.
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ZHUJIAJIAO RIVER POEMS, 2014
Water Soundings:
Conversation with Margaret Cogswell BY WANG NANMING
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In 2014, New York artist Margaret Cogswell had a residency at Zhujiajiao Art Museum and a solo exhibition entitled Water Sounding. Although I was the curator of that show, my role is more accurately described as an artist engaged in dialogue with her. Between 2013 and 2014, we had many exchanges in New York on the theme of ecology and contemporary art. That is because Margaret has spent a decade making work about water resources and environmental issues. In fact, my thinking about ecology in the late 1990s, as well as two already-realized projects, Taihu Lake and Tayin Drought, which were respectively about water pollution and water resources, were already in conversation with Margaret’s work. To complement Margaret’s residency and exhibition in Shanghai, the Himalayas Museum organized a panel discussion in which Margaret, in addition to introducing her work and creative process, paid close attention to the discussion of local politics. During the talk, an audience member asked, “As an artist dealing with American ecology and environment, how do you see China’s social problems?” Margaret answered, “Every country has its own share of social problems, but to respond to these problems, one has to have a deep understanding of this particular society. Therefore, it is best for artists to speak about the society that they live in and have experienced.” What Margaret’s response actually touches upon is that political art needs to overcome grand narratives. Although grand narratives
appear to be universal statements, they tend to ignore real problems or reduce the ability to discover problems in the first place. Particularly against a cross-national backdrop, present-day political art indulges in an attitude of looking on from afar, and seems to create a separate category of “naive international politics” under politics itself. Yet Margaret’s attitude toward political art and her practice precisely constitute an oppositional movement to such “naive international politics.” As early as 2003, Margaret started creating work about water pollution and water resources in Cleveland, Ohio. Cuyahoga Fugues, the first work in this series, is also the beginning of Margaret’s series of projects concerning rivers across the US. A mixed-media installation, the work weaves together narratives on the Cuyahoga River and steel plants in Cleveland, Ohio, built along the river. Here, Margaret started realizing the interdependence between lives that intersect with the river, be it residents who live alongside it or industrial production that relies upon it. Their survival and development truly depend on each other. Of course, the examination of the subject of water seems to be the most sensitive and pervasive in Margaret’s practice. Before Cuyahoga Fugues, Margaret made a work called Thirst, which takes the form of a mixed-media installation. Also about the subject of water, the work uses ice, steam, and thermal energy to metaphysically dissect its nature
ZHUJIAJIAO RIVER POEMS, 2014
through sound and video. In the installation, ice is molded into bucket shapes and suspended in air. When ice water drips onto the three heated steel plates directly beneath the it, the water immediately evaporates. As a result, it leaves no traces of drinking water. Margaret has gone on to expand on this poetic theme. At the Islip Art Museum in East Islip, New York, in 2001, the theme of thirst reappeared. The mixed-media installation further explores various rituals related to water, as well as the fundamental metaphysical or materialistic desires motivating the search for water. The exhibition was designed as follows: upon entering the dark room, water slowly, undetectably drips onto heated steel discs, transforming and extending the viewers’ perception of time on site. Suspended in mid-air, fishing rods serve as metaphors for various types of expectations and desires, while a small hanging monitor plays a video related to dowsing for ground-water, like a bait attached to the fishing rod. Margaret’s 2008 work, Mississippi Fugues, was exhibited at the University of Memphis Art Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. It was inspired by an 18th-century drawing that illustrated a river machine dredger powered by manual labor and which suggested to the artist that humans were willing to do anything to transform and control nature. The artist hoped that viewers, having stepped into the dark exhibition space, could experience a feeling of walking into the river, rather than taking a stroll alongside it.
When visitors occupied the center of the museum space, it was as though they were standing in the middle of the Mississippi River, flanked by two giant squirrel wheels and five buoys. Videos depicting a person running nonstop on a treadmill, as if to provide infinite power for the wheels, were projected at the center of the wheels. Other videos were projected onto the wall through the tops of buoys. In everyday usage, buoys often flash on and off emitting strong light, and function as navigation aids by marking ships’ passageways. However, in this installation, the artist uses the buoy-projected videos to reference historical landscapes in the southern Mississippi delta. This kind of humanist excavation becomes a sort of methodology in Margaret’s work. From 2012 to 2014, her work Wyoming River Fugues was shown at the University of Wyoming’s Art Museum in Laramie, Wyoming, as well as New York City’s Cue Art Foundation. The work aims to explore the complex relationship between Wyoming’s beautiful natural scenery and the industrial production that supports the local economy. The artist was particularly drawn to issues relating to local water resources, including the utilization of river water, river water irrigation, and farm production, as well as mining excavation. In this installation, projectors were placed inside the tops of three surveyor’s transits which oscillated and projected the video onto the wall. A barrel-shaped object connected to a power source was suspended in mid-air, shuttling back and forth
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in the gallery along a 50-foot-long rail. As the barrel moved farther away from the wall, its brightness increased; as it approached the wall, its brightness decreased, forming a hazy effect that vacillated between sudden luminosity and obscurity. As surveyor’s transits function to measure and ascertain the partition between land and water, the artist hoped to use the instrument and its video-projection in the installation to explore Wyoming’s local history and cultural landscape.
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In Margaret’s own narrative, she stresses the symbiosis between art and social research. Since the 1990s, the subject of water has been the focal point of her various mixed-media installations. Entitled River Fugues, this series of work is based on her field investigation projects in various locales. The reason she chose “fugue” as part of the title is that she uses the structural framework of fugues as the organizational principle in editing the video works in this series. These projects aim to explore the complex, symbiotic relationships between residents who build their lives around the river and local industrial production. From initial planning to the final exhibition, each project generally takes two to five years to implement. When beginning each project, the artist does her best to avoid having a preconceived notion of what form it might take. Conversely, she seeks to deepen her understanding of specific places by listening to the local residents’ stories and anecdotes, perusing related documents, conducting interviews, and making drawings
and videos. Even though she plays the role of a documentary filmmaker in the planning stage of her projects, she takes inspiration from souls of poets and composers when editing the footage in her studio for the final work. The way that poets are adept at using text to create poetry inspires Margaret to adopt the same method to create her own poetry, in the form of visual media. In polyphonic music, the structure of a fugue has been defined as “a fixed mode of composition, the most distinguishing characteristic of which is that parts that imitate each other enter at different pitches and intervals, and are organized according to contrapuntal principles.” The main structure of a fugue is as follows: “A musical theme is introduced in one key, followed by the introduction of another theme in a different key, then the key playing the theme starts to respond to and interact with corresponding verses in the new key. In general, while scores in fugues and contrapuntal music appear to be different and independent from one another, when performed together, they find themselves to be in perfect harmony with each other.” Margaret has stated that the reason she uses fugues in editing her work is “because of its versatility in terms of conceptual application, particularly in that it could be applied to any combination of music, sound, language or images.” Created in 2014, Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues is one of Margaret’s most recent works. With its more overtly political content, it was exhibited at CUE Art Foundation
ZHUJIAJIAO RIVER POEMS,
in New York, and aims to address the relationship between New York City’s water supply system and the Catskill Watershed. It is also a bleak elegy that tells the story of the Catskill denizens who lost their land and homes to the building of the Ashokan Reservoir in order to supply drinking water for New York City residents through its aqueduct system. This work is also based on local research. By including visual-auditory media to depict the local waters, watersheds, and reservoir, as well as interviews documented with both Catskill and New York City residents about the reservoir and its historical development, the artist pays tribute to the history of the Catskill region, its residents, and the sacrifices they had to make. As artists, Margaret and I share a common interest in the subject of “water,” whereby we are both engaged in a site-specific critique and pay special attention to interrelated social issues. In May of 2014, I saw her solo exhibition Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues at CUE Art Foundation in New York. This work not only showcases Margaret’s observation of social phenomena, but also reminds New Yorkers of a long-neglected subject, that is that rarely do they care about or think about where New York’s drinking water comes from, or how local residents feel about a reservoir being built in the area where they live. In fact, the Catskill residents’ feelings of discontent rarely find their way to New Yorkers. In this sense, Margaret’s
work is a means of bringing to the fore those residents’ right to discourse. In October of 2014, a group of works from Margaret’s River Fugues series was exhibited at Himalayas Museum’s Zhujiajiao Art Space. It was a small exhibition that removed the work’s physical installation components from when it was shown in New York and instead used only video projection to show what the River Fugues were about. In addition to the specific local perspective and critical approach in her work, moving the exhibition to Shanghai generated a valuable dialogue with Chinese political art that is in the process of developing. Questions of how art could become political and how to discern this kind of political art are becoming a central topic of debate in contemporary Chinese art and theory since the 2000’s. As someone at the forefront of building this line of work in China and writing countless articles to defend this type of art, I believe that Margaret’s Fugues, coming from New York to be shown to audiences in Shanghai, could potentially re-stimulate the subject of political art and call forth artists’ roles as political beings in contemporary life. Originally published in Art Observation, China Academic Electronic Publishing House. October, 2015
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Curated by Wang Nanming Zendai Zhujiajiao Art Museum Zhujiajiao, China VIDEO INSTALLATION IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Living and working in a Ming Dynasty building on the Cao Gong River with all the overlays of both ancient history and contemporary life offered a unique experience for a newcomer to China and rare opportunity to observe its relationship to its water and its rivers. Watching the river while working in my studio or taking long walks through the town, I looked for links to China’s history and culture through the details of objects, food, music, and movements in daily life or rituals. I began to notice the reoccurring movements in different activities – like the rowing of the boats, the movement of a Taiji master’s hands, the motions of harvesting snails with long bamboo poles, the movement of the water after a passing boat. These observations formed a point of departure for both my drawings and video as I strove to capture the essence of this experience along the river and compose a visual poem. The installation includes two projections each of two videos—one video is in black and white and a rectangular format, while the other is in color and an oval format. MEDIA: Installation
of four video projections with video projectors and audio speakers.
DIMENSIONS: 12-min.
continuous loop videos.
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MOVING THE WATER(S): CROTON FUGUES 2017
Art in the Corner Room Mid-Manhattan Library New York, New York Curated by Arezoo Moseni MOVING THE WATERS: CROTON FUGUES is the third in a series of research-based projects that focus on New York City’s water supply system and the sacrifices people in the Catskills have made over the years to ensure that New York City has the water it needs.
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CROTON FUGUES was inspired by the 2017 celebration of the centennial anniversary of New York City’s aqueduct system, and the location of the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street from the site of the former Croton Distribution Reservoir, the first reservoir in New York City. When that reservoir became inadequate for supplying New York City with water for its growing population, the City looked north to the Catskills for its water. The Croton Distribution Reservoir was then destroyed and the current New York City Public Library was built over the site instead. The layers of this history were reflected in the windows of the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street. This project seeks to entice the viewer into imagining and investigating the history of New York City’s water supply system through the accumulated layering of the experience of exploring these windows. Focusing on the Croton Reservoir, photographs and video stills from my onsite research and documentation were layered with archival images from the NYPL digital files to form large panels of archival prints on canvas and paper. Inspired by paintings of India’s Deccan Court in the 16th and 17th centuries, these panels break down images into sections of narratives, abstractions, and repetitive patterns. Panels of large archival prints on canvas were suspended in the street-level windows of the Mid-Manhattan Library’s Corner Room on Fifth Avenue and East 40th Street, with different views to the inside and out. Additional prints on paper were installed in glass cabinets and vitrines inside the Corner Room. Additional window texts referred viewers to weblinks for videos, extending their experience in yet another dimension.
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MOVING THE WATER(S): CROTON FUGUES
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on paper
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NEW MEXICO 2017
My drawings are the result of many months of walking, exploring, photographing, and filming the landscape of an area I am researching for the development of each of my River Fugues projects. Much like an archaeologist or geologist, I may search for clues to the history of a river, a people, or a place in the enigmatic remnants of their past. While researching Red Hook Harbor Soundings, I became intrigued with the fragmented remains of infrastructure and industry emerging from the Red Hook harbor where the tidal waters of both the Hudson and East 110 |
Rivers alternately reveal and then conceal the histories of these ruins. Similarly, walks along the Ashokan Reservoir evoked musings about the submerged towns, their memories now held silently in the surrounding mountains. Hikes through desert landscapes in New Mexico and Wyoming, wanderings along the Cao Gong River in the ancient water town of Zhujiajiao, China, and hushed ventures through abandoned steel mills in Cleveland all led to drawings which are often acknowledging loss and paying homage to the defiant traces of a people, their lives embedded in a place — in a landscape — literally, metaphorically, or metaphysically.
Kasha-Katuwe #01, 2017 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 12 ¼ in. x 22 in.
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NEW MEXICO 2017 upper right: Kasha-Katuwe #02, 2017 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 15 in. x 25 ½ in.
NEW MEXICO 2007
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NEW MEXICO 2017 Kasha-Katuwe #03, 2017 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 15 in. x 40 in.
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NEW MEXICO 2017 left: San Cristobal #01, 2017 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 15 in. x 12 in.
right: San Cristobal #02, 2017 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 30 in. x 26 in.
RED HOOK 2015
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Red Hook Harbor Soundings #20, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 15 in. x 44 in.
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RED HOOK 2015 Red Hook Harbor Soundings #19, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 15 in. x 30 in.
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RED HOOK 2015 left: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #26, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 15 in. x 22 ¼ in.
right: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #21, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 16 in. x 29 in.
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RED HOOK 2015 left: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #32, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 22 in. x 18 in.
right: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #04, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 13 in. diameter
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RED HOOK 2015 left: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #09, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 9 ½ in. diameter
right: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #33, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 15 in. x 13 ½ in.
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RED HOOK 2015 left: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #11, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 9 ½ in. diameter
right: Red Hook Harbor Soundings #34, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 14 ½ in. x 15 in.
ZHUJIAJIAO SOUNDINGS 2014
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RED HOOK 2015
Zhujiajiao Soundings #1, 2014 Watercolor, colored pencil, collage, Chinese red ink, and stamps on handmade paper 13 in. x 48 in.
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next page top: Zhujiajiao Soundings #2, 2014 Watercolor, colored pencil, collage, Chinese red ink, and stamps on handmade paper 13 in. x 48 in.
next page bottom: Zhujiajiao Soundings #3, 2014 Watercolor, colored pencil, collage, Chinese red ink, and stamps on handmade paper 13 in. x 48 in.
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ASHOKAN DRAWINGS 2013-14
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Light in Winter, 2010 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 4 in. x 6 in.
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ASHOKAN DRAWINGS, 2013-14 left: Winter Lifting, 2010 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 4 in. x 6 in. right: Defiant Landscape, 2010 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 4 in. x 6 in.
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ASHOKAN DRAWINGS, 2013-14
top: Dawn, 2013 Watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper 7 ½ in. x 22 in. bottom: Dusk, 2013 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 7 ½ in. x 22 in.
WYOMING RIVER FUGUES 2011-12
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Creek Shallows: Embankment, 2011 Watercolor colored pencil, and graphite on paper 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES 2011-12
Moving the Water: Orange Tarp Set #3, 2011 Watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2011-12
August/ Dry Embankment, 2011 Watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES 2011-12
After the Rain, 2011 Watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES 2011-12
Creek Shallows: Embankment #2, 2011 Watercolor, colored pencil, and graphite on paper 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2011-12
Head-gate & Orange Tarp, 2012 Archival digital print on paper from video stills 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2011-12
Creek Shallows, 2012 Archival digital print on paper from video stills 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2011-12
Imagining Chinese Painting, 2012 Archival digital print on paper from video stills 30 in. x 22 in.
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WYOMING RIVER FUGUES, 2011-12
Dad’s, 2012 Archival digital print on paper from video stills 30 in. x 22 in.
CUYAHOGA DRAWING 2003:
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Dead Blast Furnace, 2003 Watercolor and color pencil on paper Dimensions: 22” x 30”
BIOGR A PH ICA L NA RR AT I V E Margaret Cogswell was born in Memphis, Tennessee, though raised in Japan until a teenager. It was there, steeped in a culture profoundly attuned to both the sensuality and spirituality of nature, that her own artistic identity was formed. Back in the United States, she received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee followed by a Master in Fine Arts in Sculpture from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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The centrality of nature to Cogswell’s aesthetic was present in her earliest work and has remained a constant. In 1980, she created a sculptural installation entitled Bridging Passages in the Raritan River in Clinton, New Jersey, a project that established her life-long fascination with rivers and the stories that could be told through them. Passages was followed in 1984 with A Bend in the River, a one-person show at the Art Gallery of the University of Hawaii-at-Manoa in Honolulu, Hawaii. For this, the artist created a site-specific installation that integrated the interior space of the gallery with the landscape surrounding it, touching holistically on environmental concerns that would continue to characterize her vision. Other early site-specific installations include Inside Yoknapatawpha that was created in 1992 for a 4-story atrium space at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 1993, the artist returned to the land that had done so much to form her philosophical sensibilities—Japan. There, she installed Memento Mori inside the main hall of an abandoned temple on Utatsuyama in Kanaza-
wa, Japan. This conceptual project explored the artist’s memories of Japan, contrasting personal emotions with photographic documentation and the unexpected revelations of such non-literal introspection. This project was re-constructed in 1995 for the exhibition, In Three Dimensions: Women Sculptors of the ‘90’s, at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, New York. The year 1995 found her collaborating with artist/brother James Cogswell on the creation of The Parthenon and Other Mythologies, a mixed-media installation in the fullscale replica of The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Margaret by then was no stranger to collaboration, which has always been an aspect of her personality and her production. At the outset of her career, in 1981, she worked with Merce Cunningham-dancer Lisa Fox on an installation for the production of Floored at The Kitchen, in New York City. In 1998, Cogswell’s focus shifted firmly to an emphasis on water with the creation of Thirst, an installation including ice and steam in the pit of an old syrup factory in Kansas City, Missouri. In 2001, this project took on a new form as Thirst (Elegy for Esther) at The Carriage House of The Islip Museum in East Islip, Long Island, and included video references to dowsing and the Japanese tea ceremony—both rituals focused on the search for water or transcendent powers of water. Cogswell’s ongoing series of River Fugues projects began in 2003 in Cleveland, Ohio, with Cuyahoga Fugues, a mixed-media installation inspired by and incorporating generations of stories reflecting the life and
dreams embodied in the Cuyahoga River. River Fugues projects have since been commissioned by museums and art centers for exhibitions nationally and internationally. From 2014 to 2018, these projects have focused on the New York City aqueduct system. In 2017, Moving the Water(s): Croton Fugues was created for the Mid-Manhattan Library in celebration of the centennial anniversary of New York City’s aqueduct system, and inspired by the location of the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street from the former site of the Croton Distribution Reservoir, one of the first reservoirs in New York City. Another fugue project, Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues was first created for a solo exhibition in 2014 at the CUE Art Foundation in New York City. This project focused on the Ashokan Reservoir, and in 2016 it was expanded to include narratives from the Catskills area and presented as a solo exhibition at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock, NY. In 2018, another iteration of this mixed-media installation was presented in a solo exhibition at the ART Lab Gallery of Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Cogswell’s professional career has included teaching studio art at Purchase College School of Art and Design of the State University of New York; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri; Parsons School of Design in New York and Kanazawa, Japan; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Middlebury College, Vermont; The College of Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, and the University of Hawaii-at-Ma-
noa, Honolulu. From 1999-2011, Cogswell was Program Officer for the Visual Arts with the Asian Cultural Council in New York City. Her numerous awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2017, 1991, and 1987), New York Foundation for the Arts (2007, 1993); and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2014). Margaret Cogswell lives in New York City and West Shokan, New York where she continues her work. For more information, please visit: www. margaretcogswell.net CON T RI BU TORS Eleanor Heartney is an author and Contributing Editor to Art in America and art press. Among her books are Art and Today, Postmodernism, and Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art and The Reckoning: Women Artists in the New Millennium. Heartney is a past president of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. Her awards include the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award and the French government’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. H. L. Hix’s recent books include poetry collections, American Anger and Rain Inscription, an art/poetry anthology, Ley Lines, and a volume of selected poems by Estonian peasant poet Juhan Liiv, Snow Drifts, I Sing, translated in collaboration with Jüri Talvet.
His day job is teaching philosophy at a university in the mountain west. He writes early in the morning in a converted barn, so he can hear the mice in the walls and the raccoons trundling across the roof. John Massier is the Visual Arts Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York. He is an art administrator, writer, and artist. Born in Canada in 1963, he received his degree from the University of Toronto. In 2000, he moved from Toronto to Buffalo, NY, to become a curator at Hallwalls. He has written extensively about artists from Western New York, Canada, and elsewhere in catalog essays and other print and online publications. In 2011, the Birch Libralato Gallery in Toronto presented an exhibition of his photographs, Kingdom: Selections from the Early 21st Century. Tom Sleigh’s many books include Station Zed, Army Cats (John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters), and Space Walk (Kingsley Tufts Award). He teaches at Hunter College and works as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. His most recent books, published as companion pieces, are The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees, and a volume of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin, both published by Graywolf in 2018. Sleigh has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, VQR, APR, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere, and has been widely anthologized in publications such as the Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and the Best American Travel Writing.
Wang Nanming is an independent curator and artist residing in Shanghai. Regarded as one of the most influential critics in the field of Chinese contemporary art, he is a crucial advocate of “avant-garde,” “post-avant-garde,” and “metavant-garde” within a Chinese context. Wang is the author of numerous publications including Understanding Modern Calligraphy: Artistic Transformation of Modern and Avant-Garde; Art Must Die: From Chinese Painting to Modern Ink Painting; After Concept: Art and Criticism; The Rise of Critical Art: Chinese Problem Situations and Theories of Liberal Society; Modern Art and Avant-garde: Interface of Clement Greenberg’s Critical Theory; Art, System and Legislation: China’s International Exchange; A Post-Colonial Honor: The Chinese-ness of Art and the Chinese Identity of Artists, and Obstacles of Calligraphy: Neo-classical Calligraphy, Popular Calligraphic Style, Modern Calligraphy and Other Issues. Lilly Wei (b. Chengdu, China) is a New York-based independent curator, critic, and journalist whose area of interest is global contemporary art and, in particular, art by emerging artists. Her writings have appeared in dozens of publications world-wide and she is a longtime contributor to Art in America and a contributing editor at ARTnews in the United States. The author of numerous catalogues and monographs, she has curated exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Wei lectures frequently on critical and curatorial practices and sits on the board of several not-for-profit art institutions and organizations. She has an MA in art history from Columbia University in New York.
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SEL ECT ED BI BL IOGR A PH Y Arellano, Juan Estevan. Enduring Acequias: Wisdom of the Land, Knowledge of the Water. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Barry, John M. The Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1997. Barthes, Roland. Translated by Richard Howard. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
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Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1970. Carson, Anne. Plainwater: Essays and Poetry. New York: Knopf, 1995. Chetham, D. The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Clay, Floyd M. A Century on the Mississippi: A History of the Memphis District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1876-1981. Memphis: U.S. Army Core of Engineers, Memphis District, 1986. Galusha, Diane. Liquid Assets: A History of New York City’s Water System. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, Ltd., 2002. Gould, Glen. Part 01, “The Idea of the North.” Solitude Trilogies: Three Sound Documentaries. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1967.
Heaney, Seamus. “Keeping Going.” The Spirit Level. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Hessler, Peter. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1995. Lake, Tom, ed. The Hudson River Almanac. New York: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 2005. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. McMillin, T. S. The Meaning of Rivers: Flow and Reflection in American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. McPhee, John. Rising from the Plains. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Mylod, John. Biography of a River: The People and Legends of the Hudson Valley. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969. Dai Qing. John G. Thibodeau and Phillip Williams, eds. The River Dragon Has Come: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People. New York: Routledge, 1998. Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert. New York: Viking Press, 1986.
Patt, Lise and Dillbohner, Christel, eds. Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007. Rodriquez, Sylvia. Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity and Place. Sante Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2006. Sebald, W.G. Translated by Michael Hulse. The Rings of Saturn. London: The Harvill Press, 1998. Soll, David. Empire of Water: An Environmental and Political History of the New York City Water Supply. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013. Steuding, Bob. The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, Ltd., 1989. Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi (1883). New York: Penguin, 1984. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson (Revised Edition). New York: New Directions, 1995. Winchester, Simon. The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze and Back in Chinese Time. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996. Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
CREDI TS Proofreading: Amanda Church; Susan Hamburger Photographs: Front cover upper right by Etienne Frossard; lower left by Jerry Mann; Back cover middle by Dennis Cowley; Dennis Cowley pp. 46-53; 59, 61-65; Michael Duva pp. 80-83; Etienne Frossard pp. 18 top right, 100-107, 161 top left;
Curtis Hamilton pp. 141-149; 158-159; Becket Logan pp. 40, 41; Jerry Mann pp. 20 lower right, 28, 30-31, 33-39; Susan Moldenhauer pp. 66 lower right, 67 lower left, 72-73, 75-77; Paul Takeuchi pp. 110-139; Image courtesy of the Art Museum, University of Memphis, Tennessee pp. 15, 56 lower left; Image
courtesy of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York pp. 42, 43; Image courtesy of Clay, Floyd M., Ph.D p. 58 All other photographs and video stills by Margaret Cogswell
Fugues
MARGAR E T COGSWELL
R I V ER
M A RGA R ET COGSW EL L RIVER FUGUES
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ISBN 978-0-692-19465-2
9 780692 194652