Articles

May 14, 2020
Eileen Cowin: ‘A culture of anxiety’
Precisely Visualized Narratives
by Jody Zellen

Eileen Cowin was preparing for her May exhibition at as-is.la which has been postponed due to Covid-19. In many ways, the work for that show encapsulates our global uncertainty and the new fear that this pandemic has unleashed. We are all very much like Cowin’s “Deer in headlights” — innocents caught by surprise and immobilized, not sure whether to move forward or to stay put. In Cowin’s image, a young deer stares out at the viewer; completely out of place in a back alley, removed somehow from its natural habitat.

Cowin is a master at weaving narratives from disparate elements. She is a voracious reader of dystopian novels and often begins with a story, transforming the nuances of those written words into carefully composed images and videos that shed light on unseen aspects of the authors prose, as filtered through Cowin’s world view. Two short video diptychs, The Pedestrian and Insomnia present an aura of loneliness and unsettlement. The Pedestrian is a two-channel video that uses Ray Bradbury‘s short story as a point of departure. In Cowin’s footage, she narrates a lone man’s desire to walk, filming him as he ambles at dusk, through eerily silent and vacant spaces. He imagines the conversations and goings on in homes as he passes them, unable to cross the physical and emotion barriers between outside and in. His aimless wanderings feel melancholic, familiar and relevant.

Insomnia begins with imagery of wolves charging through the landscape, then shifts to interior scenes, each focusing on an isolated individual suffering from sleeplessness and the different ways they cope with their insomnia. Filmed in subtle and disquieting light, the narratives present the idiosyncratic struggles and frustrations of not being able to achieve peaceful slumber. As the camera oscillates between close-ups, details and medium- ranged shots, the light shifts from night to dawn, suggesting the disruption of time that affects the insomniac.

Though created before Covid-19, the multi-panel photographic strip Now You know speaks to the longing and isolation that currently pervades. The elegantly photographed and beautifully lit sequence begins with a close-up of the side of a man’s face, shot from behind, focusing on the graceful curve of his neck. We ask: Who is this figure— the one with three perfectly pressed white dress shirts hanging in his closet, who is perhaps in agony, alone in an apartment with evenly spaced windows and air conditioners and a brick facade. This is a narrative of stasis, until uncertainty sets in— unknown markings on a cinderblock wall in a dimly lit gated interior. What lurks beyond? Is it inviting or menacing? Cowin shifts the sequence to images of nature: trails damaged by heat and drought, and the entanglement of branches offers little solace. The final photograph closely crops the hidden eyes of a man adjusting his gas mask and poses the questions we all now face: Is it safe to venture out? Will this protection work? Cowin’s haunting sequence elegantly presents the inner turmoil of the present.

Whether working on an intimate or architectural scale, Cowin’s images get under the skin and unnerve. They are precisely visualized narratives that reflect the current political and social climate, exploring as Cowin remarks, a “culture of anxiety.”

https://artnowla.com/2020/05/14/eileen-cowin-a-culture-of-anxiety

The Anti-Hollywood
Boca Raton Magazine, Nov 13th 2013
By John Thomason

Artist Eileen Cowin unveiled her video installation “It’s So Good to See You,” part of the Norton Museum of Art’s new “L.A. Stories” exhibition, back in 1999, a year after “The Truman Show” was released. That movie’s prescience in communicating our nascent obsession with reality stars and its evocation of a world, simulated or otherwise, under constant surveillance has made it a modern classic and even a real-life mental-health landmark.

The Truman Show Delusion has since been accepted by much of the psychiatric community to describe individuals who believe they are being secretly filmed in a reality series, and the faces captured in “It’s So Good to See You” seem like prime candidates for such a diagnosis – self-actualizing prisoners in a post-“Truman” world. The installation features four old boxy televisions propped on industrial stands and VCRs each playing a different looped video shot by Cowin. The images are as commonplace and static as Andy Warhol’s deliberately banal shorts: A man showers, a woman sleeps, a girl brushes her teeth, and a couple kisses. But the longer Cowin films, the more they seem to register their awareness of her camera – staring into it, through it and through us, perhaps. They begin as ciphers and gradually become our violated friends and neighbors. The more penetrating their stare, the more shameful we feel watching their private lives.

“It’s So Good to See You” is the most compelling video piece in this small but illuminating exhibition, but why? What is it about these mundane images that so transfixes us? Is it just because they are televised, and we’re programmed to treat them as entertainment? These are uncomfortable questions, and the artists in “L.A. Stories” leave it up to us to come up with the answers. While it’s nice that a mainstream movie like “The Truman Show” broached topics like these, they find a snug and appropriate home in the context of an art museum, mostly conveying their messages in bursts of footage running no longer than 10 minutes.

Cowin’s second piece in the exhibition, titled “Pants on Fire,” uses the medium of video to right a personal four-decade-long wrong: The artist documents a phone call to her high-school art teacher in which she confesses that a drawing she had said was inspired by family portraits was instead a copy of Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph, “Migrant Mother.” Cowin’s reasons for co-opting the photo, for lying about her drawing’s provenance, and for admitting her indiscretion 40 years later are as enigmatic as “Migrant Mother” itself, but they speaks to the transcendent allure of photography – the desire to escape into others’ lives, which remains the appeal of many moving pictures since the invention of the Kinetoscope.

Other works in the exhibition cover wide thematic terrain. Julie Orser’s “Double Bind” follows a perfect ‘50s housewife in her perfectly color-coded home – her apron even matches the yellow walls of her kitchen – whose life is a cycle of domestic drudgery. She becomes obsessed with another woman – perhaps her in another reality – who lives in a mysteriously monochrome universe as a femme fatale. Orser uses editing wipes to oscillate between these two lifetimes, offering a feminist appraisal of common female archetypes in cinema.

In his text accompanying the exhibition, curator Tim Wride mentions the influences of filmmakers Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock on Orser’s work. Both are accurate – especially the latter’s dark fever dream “Marnie” – but so are Chantal Akerman’s domestic polemic “Jeanne Dielman” and David Lynch’s dually existential “Mulholland Dr.,” an L.A. story if there ever was one. “Double Bind” is an amazing piece of cinephilic referentiality that is seemingly without beginning and without end; join the loop at any time.

If “Double Bind” plays like an endless reel, Judy Fiskin’s “The End of Photography” captures the end of reels altogether. The video shows ancient black-and-white footage of buildings and cityscapes, while Fiskin’s voice-over catalogs the extinction of so many image-making accoutrements, one element at a time: film canisters, darkrooms, black-and-white negatives, and so forth. Even the footage Fiskin employed for this movie was originally shot on Super-8 film and had to be converted to digital video.
Of course, it’s only natural; if we’re going to watch and be watched 24/7, who has the time and ability to process film?

Double Take: Narrative Interventions in Photography
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 25, 2011–March 11, 2012
Afterimage, March 2012
by Jody Zellen

“An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it, its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object—it creates a vision of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it.”
—Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

Making strange, a term associated with Russian formalism, refers to the idea of seeing anew. Viktor Shklovsky coined the term, calling it defamiliarization, and describes it as “the technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar.”1 In “Narrative Interventions in Photography,” Eileen Cowin, Simryn Gill, and Carrie Mae Weems create photographic interventions in received narratives so the images can be seen in a new way. An intervention into a narrative could be thought of as a disruption of its flow that changes the way it is read. All three artists employ language as part of their interventions, although the way they use it—integrated into the image or as caption—differs greatly. Cowin, Gill, and Weems intervene in received narratives to change perceptions of history, nature, and truth.

Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” (1995–96) is a series of thirty-three photographic enlargements (seventeen of which are on view at the Getty) of African Americans throughout the history of photography. Weems levels the originals, which were made for different reasons and at different times, unifying their presentation by making them consistent. She tints the images red and vignettes them to reference a camera lens. Etched into the glass atop each photograph is a text that gives voice to a subject who historically was denied a voice. Her intention was to simultaneously speak to the image and have the subject of the image speak to the viewer. The series unfolds like a film and can be read linearly. The opening image is tinted blue rather than red and is a picture of an African woman gazing across the rest of the sequence. Weems’s text begins with: “From Here I Saw What Happened.” She makes this statement to ask what happened to Africans and African Americans historically and culturally as a way to undermine their stereotypical representation. And what happened? “You Became A Scientific Profile,” “A Negroid Type,” “An Anthropological Debate,” “& A Photographic Subject,” “You Became Playmate To The Patriarch,” “And Their Daughter,” “You Became Boots, Spades & Coons.” The sequence concludes with a repetition of the first image, this time looking back with the words: “And I cried.” Weems’s textual intervention is poetic and, when read, has a rhythmic cadence. Weems speaks through the men and women depicted. Because of the sensitivity of her intervention, she gives them humanity. Weems speaks about “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” as one of her more painful works. She diverts the reading of this collection of images she has amassed from myriad sources and institutions, injecting the narrative with an emotional sensitivity and new purpose. Her intervention is meant to recontextualize these images, to rewrite history in order to change how images like these are interpreted.

Gill’s “Forest” series (1996–98) is comprised of large black-and-white photographs taken in garden settings near where she grew up in Malaysia and Singapore. Gill looked for settings where “tamed nature” was becoming unruly. Roaming through these gardens with tubes of glue, Gill would remove leaves from trees and tendrils from flowers, replacing them with torn and crinkled pages from myriad books. Because of the construction of the images, the actual text is less important than the texture of the words on the page. Often these additions blend into the landscape and could be mistaken for natural elements. In one image, single lines of type parallel the splintering pattern of vein-like branches clinging to a concrete wall. In another, ripped sections of a book replace sections of bark, spiraling up a tree trunk. Confetti-like clusters of text hang from a roof alongside dangling vines. Gill’s interventions into man-made landscapes that nature is reclaiming are simultaneously aggressive and subtle. The works affirm life as a process of decay, since Gill’s additions will deteriorate as part of the natural process. The photographs function as documentation of a private performance—one that is labor-intensive and personal. Gill’s interventions are meant to transform how one experiences a sense of place. Inherent in her works are unanswered questions about culture, memory, and language. What would happen if a book grew from the ground like a flower on a stem? If leaves were vehicles for textual communication? In Gill’s work, unfortunately, words are just textures that reference storytelling, yet no story is actually being told. Her work would be strengthened if the choice of text augmented the image in a more purposeful way by being legible and specific.

Cowin evokes stories in her large-scale color photographs. In each of the four diptychs from the series “I See What You’re Saying” (2002), a photograph of an altered book is juxtaposed with a close-up of a male or female face. The relationship between the images on the left and right begins with formal similarities that expand into more conceptual mappings. How do the folds in a tablecloth relate to the lines in a woman’s forehead? Do the graphs in the book on the table somehow relate to the folds of eyelashes? An open book reveals cut and crumpled pages that parallel the shape of the fork pressed against the woman’s tongue. Is the woman experiencing pleasure or pain? What was in the book that caused someone to damage its pages like that? A mustached man bites into a frosted cupcake. How is this gesture akin to the shapes of watermarks in an open book of fairy tales on a field of green grass? As the words on these pages bleed together, the book is rendered unreadable. In this particular work the language becomes a reference to the fictional world of fairy tales. Bits and pieces of words come off the page in ways that suggest the fluttering of a woman’s eyelashes. Where is she looking? What is she thinking about? Cowin uses gestures and innuendo to construct a narrative that migrates from the concrete of printed pages and readable words to the ambiguity of human emotions. Her dream-like images are constructed truths that are simultaneously fantasy, fact, and fiction. The series’ title, “I See What You’re Saying” references these unknowns. She asks, Do you see what I am saying? Do you see what my picture says? Can you ever really know?

Cowin, Gill, and Weems employ language to alter the stories images tell. Weems rewrites the history of African and African American people in preserved photographic images taken for various reasons, but never allowed to speak for themselves. These images culled from archives and collections are presented as a revisionist text so that their subjects’ plight can be seen in a new light. Gill’s “Forest” is a forest of words, conflating the natural and the man-made and allowing words to become the shapes of nature. Her interventions into the landscape suggest that words have a fragility and impermanence on par with the natural cycle of growth and decay. Cowin fabricates modern fairy tales through the juxtaposition of images of books and faces. While images of eyes and mouths may suggest sight and taste, Cowin looks beyond the obvious. She explores the emotional implications of a common gesture and asserts that meaning lies beyond what is seen or even read. These three artists begin with a given and make it into something more. They create a special perception of these objects, defamiliarizing them by intervening into the narrative structures of history, nature, and fantasy.

jody zellen is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles.
NOTE 1. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917) sited on the website-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization

Eileen Cowin
Art Papers April 2007
by Eve Wood

Eileen Cowin is an artist who sees living as a means to break boundaries, and psychology as a way to confront us with strange attitudes or to implicate us in seemingly self-imposed spatial confinements. Lessons,her most recent solo exhibition, comprises two video installations (Fringe Exhibitions; November 18- December 16, 2006). In the first space, Your Whole Body is a Target, 2006, documents a series of lessons to tackle issues of fear, longing, and self-preservation. In this installation as in her previous endeavors, Cowin gives vision and form to the ache of human existence.

For this work, Cowin hired experts to teach her several new skills. She informs us that "according to learning surveys: 95% of people think learning about new things boosts your confidence. Seven in ten adults think that learning can lead to a better quality of life. 85% of us believe learning will become more important in the new millennium." Armed with this information, Cowin worked closely with a self-defense expert to learn various methods of protection, including inflicting pain on your assailant, walking away, and cultivating the element of surprise. Cowin's earlier works dealt with humankind's degeneration, and with ideas of fate, fear, chance and objectivity. Your Whole Body is a Target pursues this inquiry into the human condition by asking specific questions. How does one appropriate a gesture-be it threatening or empty-to make it one's own? How can anyone living in the twenty-first century claim a communal space? Are our bodies the temples in which we live? Are they scared for the simple reason that we exist at all? Or are we only hiding deep in our skins?

Cowin makes no attempt to answer these questions for the viewer, or for herself. Instead, it is the experience of living that empowers her work and makes her vision so unique. There are no loose ends to tie up here. Nor are there any apologies. Each and every one of us experiences the breath of our lives differently. We are also always at risk in some way-from the literal risk of being accosted when crossing the street to the more diffuse but equally threatening risk of self-alienation.

Cowin plays both roles, embodying the empowered and the disempowered, enacting assault and defense. This video presents disarmingly specific images. In this, it invites us to prepare ourselves to learn our lessons. It also teaches us to fully embrace our lives, to seek out alternative lessons, and ways of being and, more importantly, to live fearlessly and never to cease to ask questions.

In the lower gallery, Cowin's other video It's Chinatown, 2006, investigates the relationship between Chinatown's residents and the ever-shifting demographics of their neighborhood. In this series of series of interviews, Cowin pursues her merciless exploration of human truth as multiple versions of variegated, elusive, and shifting human experiences. Focusing on this neighborhood, she presents a narrative that is ambiguous at times, yet real enough. Any good detective operating in the world of crime will tell you that, if six different people witness the same crime, the details of each story will be completely different. Cowin knows this instinctively. Despite our crimes, be they innocent or deliberate, she makes allowances for our humanity to shine through.

REVEALING MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2000 Art Review
by Christopher Knight

In today’s dot-com world, when Mom-and-Pop stores have gone digital and adults regularly turn to teenagers to answer their most vexing computer queries, it’s increasingly difficult to recall the time when the budding technology revolution felt just that way: revolutionary.

Twenty-five years ago you could see it coming, off in the distance, if only in things like the sudden proliferation of Polaroid cameras and the arrival of portable video systems. Technology hitherto restricted to corporate and industrial titans was starting to become available to you and me. Artists got excited.

Something of that hazily remembered 1970s ethos lurks inside the small survey of camera work by Eileen Cowin, newly opened at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts. Cowin’s photographs evince a quality that might be called do-it-yourself Hollywood. Her single-image photographs and multipanel works are threaded through with narratives of quietly charged domestic drama, once familiar from B-movies but long since transformed into genres like television movies of the week and afternoon soaps.

Take “Family Docudrama” (1980-83), an eight-part grid of pictures. Each photograph shows an independent scene, which is connected to the others mostly by the repetition of characters. Individual photographs portray a surreptitious phone call made in a bedroom; a stolen embrace out in the garage; a petulant girl (daughter?) scowling at a woman (mother?); a grim-lipped lovers’ quarrel, and more.

These scenes tell no linear tale. The quarrel seems to be between lovers because elsewhere, in other pictures, the man and woman turn up in bed.

You don’t read Cowin’s pictures in sequence, from upper left to lower right, in order to find out what happens in the story. “What happens” happens in each separate image: The photograph, like a Baroque painting of a classical myth whose long-forgotten story you do not know, offers up recognizable people doing familiar things—characters onto whom you begin to impose your own ideas.

Those imposed ideas are an amalgam mixed from personal experience and memories of stories absorbed through mass media. Cowin declares as much by occasionally revealing, rather than always hiding, the lights, camera, tripod and other paraphernalia used to make her pictures.

When, for example, she shows a distracted couple lying in bed and surrounded by an elaborate camera setup, as if waiting for a director to holler, “Action!,” a discomfiting aura of loosely illicit voyeurism is ratcheted up a notch. (Does this make Cowin the unseen director? Or is it us, as viewers, who propel this scene into action?) At the same time, the photograph suggests the degree to which life in an era dominated by mass media is not simply lived, but also gets subtly acted out.

Natural experience gets shaped by a variety of scripts, personal and intimate, as well as anonymous and socially constructed. We may not even be aware of them. But this peculiar modern condition of enactment is a territory that has been of interest to a variety of gifted artists since the late 1970s and 1980s. They range from the collages and installations of Alexis Smith to the photographs of Nic Nicosia, Cindy Sherman and many others.

Cowin’s work is an integral part of a photographic genre that emerged full force in the 1980s. It was once succinctly described as pictures “fabricated to be photographed,” rather than captured from the flow of daily life. The genre has numerous descendants today, including currently popular European artists such as Thomas Demand and Oliver Boberg.

The Armory exhibition, organized by guest curator Sue Spaid, includes 48 photographic works dating from 1971 to the present, as well as two recent installations mixing still photographs with projected video. Because the show is not chronological it can be a bit confusing to try to follow Cowin’s trajectory. But the nonlinear narrative of the installation does underscore a critical feature of Cowin’s own approach, while the Armory’s gallery is small enough to make sorting out the chronology a finally undemanding task.

Cowin’s earliest photographs, which incorporate layered transparencies in plexiglass shadowboxes, introduce the domestic subject matter that dominates her work. Next, around 1973 and 1974, come pale, washed-out images that tamp down a distinctly sexual current, as if pointedly playing against the sensationalism usually encountered in erotic pictures. Reflecting concerns from feminist art of the period, many of them also incorporate secondary images sewn onto the surface with needle and thread.

In 1978 Cowin began to pair aesthetically “dumb” Polaroid snapshots that give visual form to sound-alike words, whose dictionary definitions are handwritten below. For example, a male figure, his head cropped off, crashes together some big brass cymbals; adjacent, another headless figure holds an icon showing Jesus atoning at Gethsemane. Cymbal meets symbol, while a drama of revelation unfolds.

These homonym Polaroids constitute Cowin’s first full-fledged Conceptual works; they recall most closely the precedent of Bruce Nauman, whose photographs from the late 1960s picture linguistic cliches. They immediately precede her mature work in the 1980s, in which the popular visual languages of movies and TV get the rug pulled out from under.

Cowin’s best work can be deceptively simple. A large untitled 1985 Polaroid, for example, looks across two pairs of feet in bed, toward a black-and-white TV playing on a pedestal. The scene is familiar to countless couples who’ve watched late-night TV through their toes—but Cowin surreptitiously smuggles in anxiety—producing cues.

The TV set is surrounded by wallpaper whose pattern suggests a hallucinatory night sky. The fellow’s feet are upright and casually crossed, signifying relaxed attentiveness to the TV program, in which a domestic confrontation between a woman and a man appears to be unfolding. Her feet lie side by side, facing away from his, as if she’s rolled over and gone to sleep.

What’s the story here? A benign nightly ritual? The loaded silence after an argument? The tense wake of a refusal of intimacy?

Cowin creates the opposite of a mass-media fiction, which would attempt to manipulate an audience into following its story to its own conclusion. Instead she offers tantalizing clues but withholds meaning, allowing you to come to conclusions of your own. Conflicted dialogues between the sexes are held in delicate suspension.

The process doesn’t always work, as in some late-1980s photographs whose obvious references to classic paintings in the Western canon mostly conjure the similarly inclined—but more playful and powerful—art history photographs by Cindy Sherman. And sometimes a degree of obscurantism occludes our entry into the picture, making their perusal feel more dutiful than intriguing.

But, using a distinctly modern visual language, Cowin at her best provocatively explores the fraught territory of personal relationships. This welcome show offers a concise overview of her often quirky body of work.

STILL (AND MORE TO COME)
Afterimage, May/June 2000
by Thomas McGovern

A mid-career survey can provide the opportunity to examine an artist’s oeuvre and intentions, present the development of the work’s depth or unintentionally highlight its shortcomings. Part of what makes such a survey exciting is the implicit understanding that there is plenty of work still to come. “Still (and all)‚” presents 27 years of photographic work by Eileen Cowin and provides a great deal of insight into her enigmatic and influential work. Curated by Sue Spaid, the exhibition shows an evolution of style and sensibility while it simultaneously conveys the continuum of the artist’s message. The 40-page catalog is densely packed with images spanning the artist’s career while texts by Mark Alice Durant and Spaid poetically interpret and analyze the work.

Cowin is an artist who is well served by this type of exhibition. Her photographs and videos are sensuous and mysterious and for those unfamiliar with her work, the meaning of individual photographs can seem elusive—look at one picture and you may feel that you have missed part of the story. Literal readings of the works are only partially useful because the images resist our desire to simplify and draw clear, linear narratives. She sets up non-linear relationships between objects and words, gestures and expressions and between spectator and image. Her best works continue to resonate long after seeing them.

In the early ‘80s, Cowin’s series “Family Docudrama‚” (1980-83) received wide exposure for the use of staged domestic narratives that suggested both positive and negative emotional attachments. Cowin appeared in these photographs and was often accompanied by her husband, stepchildren and twin sister. Her increasingly spare sets and strong lighting clearly referenced cinema and, although obviously constructed, her tableaux were seen by viewers as moments of complex, authentic human relationships.

Having achieved critical success with the “Family Docudrama‚” series it is interesting that Cowin did not choose to remain working with this single aesthetic. Instead, her work continued to evolve. The history of art and particularly photography is replete with individuals who have found success in a style or subject matter from which they rarely varied. Cindy Sherman (to whom Cowin has often been compared) has continued in a singular style for most of her career. Cowin, however, has rejected this narrow approach. By 1983 her “Family Docudrama‚” images were included in the Whitney Biennial and 10 other group exhibitions, had comprised four solo exhibitions and had been written about and published extensively. It would have been easy and perhaps even beneficial to her career to remain working in this familiar and familial terrain. Certainly in the fickle art world, repetition is potent currency whereas experimentation, exploration and investigation are, like the relationships Cowin portrayed, more difficult to interpret and recognize—but arguably also richer. From her early transparencies and gum bichromate prints to her photographic homonyms, constructed docudramas and recent videos, Cowin is a restless pursuer of the perfect still that suggests all.

The Armory Center has distilled Cowin’s 27 years of artmaking into approximately 50 works ranging from 1971 to 1998. Cowin’s earliest photographs are black and white transparencies, some in shadow boxes, that depict layered and superimposed imagery. In these poignant images, the artist references herself in domestic settings. The “real world‚” is not the subject so much as a vehicle for the artist’s personal investigation of the nature of human relationships.

Gum bichromate prints from 1973 to 1975 continue the investigation. Soft pastel colors and sensual, suggestive, erotic imagery evoke the sexual liberation of the era, but this message is complicated by the regular addition of images of seemingly unrelated events sewn onto each print’s surface. Like the superimposed imagery in the earlier transparencies, this added pictorial element begins to establish the artist’s concept of narrative structure. The presentation of two or more simultaneous images or ideas is the basis of this conceptual investigation, suggesting movement through time and changing or competing actions.

By the late ‘70s Cowin’s work became sparser and more specified while its mood became more cerebral, demanding that the spectator interpret works directly or be left behind. This dramatic and important shift was both stylistic and substantive. Whereas the gum prints and transparencies could be enjoyed both viscerally and intellectually, the former was enough for most viewers to get by on. But in the “One Night Stand‚” series (1977-78) and the photographic series of homonyms (1978) an awareness of the tension between form and content becomes essential to their richness. In one pairing of 20 x 24 inch color photographs from “One Night Stand‚” we see fragments of a telephone, lamp and tabletop. Leaning against the lamp is black and white Polaroid print of a man’s clothed torso as he appears to be removing his pants. The color photograph is softly lit and the image’s color palette ranges from a cool gray-blue to mauve to beige. The series’ title immediately evokes the sexual promiscuity of the ‘70s, reinforced by the image of the man disrobing. Paired with this is an image showing a portion of a bed with rumpled sheets cast in a soft, mauve light. The edge of a television screen can be seen and the Polaroid from the first photograph is subtly inserted in the rumpled sheets, implying that someone is underneath them. Both images are sparse, minimal compositions that are connected by their nearly monochromatic tonality. All the elements in both pictures are fragmented, giving viewers just enough information to surmise a bedroom and a sexual relationship. Absence is the strongest feature of the images, furthered by the series title, muted hues and minimal design. The Polaroid photograph continues the idea of a memory and acts as a surrogate for an actual relationship beyond casual sex. The opposition in these works between nature and culture, personal and public, reality and simulation is established and then collapsed. In 1977 Cowin began the conscious blurring of fiction and non-fiction, leading to her “Family Docudrama‚” series.

Cowin began the docudramas in 1980, the year former actor Ronald Reagan became president and the blending of fact and fiction began to subsume the American way of life. Sincerity was out—the calculated approach was in. This zeitgeist set the stage for a flood of postmodern ideas and images in which Cowin’s work was positioned in the center. Already free from presenting specific stories, the human relationships that were suggested in the earlier “One Night Stand‚” were realized in “Family Docudrama‚” as she assembled family members for her cast. Adding a twist to the now overtly psychological drama in the work was Cowin’s identical twin sister and the striking resemblance between her husband and stepson.

In a color photograph entitled Departure (1981), a woman in business attire appears to be leaving a room. With a sports jacket slung over her shoulder, she looks back toward a young girl and another woman with an expression suggesting both longing and self-confidence. The girl appears to be trying to approach the businesswoman and is either being held back or encouraged to proceed by the other woman—possibly her mother. In an open doorway behind the girl is a large black and white photograph echoing this scene—a man with a jacket over his shoulder is exiting while a woman comforts a young girl.

Questions abound in such enigmatic imagery. Is the businesswoman symbolically abandoning the child for a career or is she just putting on her jacket and saying goodbye? Both women seem emotionally attached to the girl—are they a lesbian couple or extended family members? Why does the picture in the background echo the scenario in the foreground? Most disturbing, why are the two women apparently the same person? Do they represent two halves of the same individual or different people?

Cowin’s response to such questions reveals her position as auteur and the inspiration she has taken from cinema. “I begin with a drawing, then devise the wardrobe, color scheme, lighting and I come up with the perfect gesture. Everything is mapped out.‚”*1 In Departure, these predetermined elements used with particular facial expressions allow Cowin to suggest family tensions that most of us have buried in our unconscious. The pull between professional obligations and familial attachments, marital transitions and the impact these changes have on children is acted out with a self-consciousness that is painfully real and supported by the artist’s acknowledgment of the themes of separation and departure in some of her photographs.*2 This narrative is further supported and complicated by the casually placed black and white mural in the background, a recurring device in many works in this series. In this instance the background image is nearly identical to the main action with a few important differences that highlight the changing nature of interpersonal family relationships. Where the background mural shows a traditional scenario of a man leaving the family and a child being comforted by a woman, the foreground scene demonstrates a contemporary career woman and the modern child’s mixed reaction to the separation. In this instance, the black and white mural in the background image acts as a memory or history of the way things were. The image of her twin provides a reference to the doppelganger, the ghostly double, the other self. The component slyly reminds one of Diane Arbus’s twins and places off society’s fascination with twins and the psychological competition that they must face. Most important to the complexity and ambiguity of images in “Family Docudrama‚” is the eye contact, or lack thereof, between the players. In Departure there is no eye contact and the paths of the actors’ gazes do not cross. The multiple readings of the work are triggered by two, three or four sets of oppositional components that the artist continually utilizes, establishing a psychological drama with no conclusion. While the photographs denote a scene or set of scenes, the connotation is expansive. It is this recurring convention that gives Cowin’s work its richness and what sets it apart from the work of other mise en scene practitioners.

The combination of these elements in what seems to be a simple photograph is what gives this work such depth. The setting, gazes, gestures, expressions and props offer multiple and contradictory readings and the exact identity of the players and the meaning of their poses are left to the viewer to decode and decide. As Cowin has said, “The theme is long lasting; the images are long lasting; the possibilities are endless.‚”*3 Unlike the work of Gregory Crewdson, Sherman or Jeff Wall, there is seldom just one storyline in Cowin’s work and the narratives are rarely based on the characters’ interaction in a shared event. Instead, Cowin continually sets up competing complicated and ambiguous relationships through the above mentioned devices. This complex narrative structure is accomplished within a sparse set incorporating few, but important, details.

Beginning in the late ‘80s and continuing into the ‘90s, video begins to appear in Cowin’s work, and while the medium seems to be an obvious vehicle for narration, her approach actually constricts its most useful storytelling device—motion. Cowin’s video work is often employed as stills and even her continuous video projections rely on suggestion more than on action. The force of the video work comes from the intimate emotional experiences eliciting doubt and longing, while simultaneously referencing the media-saturated world through the work’s very non-dramatic, anti-TV posture.

Cowin’s recent work freely mixes color and black and white photography, video stills, single channel videos and video installation and is perhaps the artist’s most powerful work to date. The net effect remains consistent for the artist—probing the nature of personal and social relationships and human emotions through the use of non-linear narratives, partial narratives and connotation. “I’ll Give You Something to Cry About‚” (1988), includes 12 30 x 40 inch photographs (color, black and white and video stills) assembled in a grid of three rows of four. Each image could be a frame from a narrative film. Cowin’s careful arrangement leaves the viewer in doubt as to what the narrative is, but suggests a host of familiar relationships such as falling in love, heartache, betrayal, anger, loneliness and separation. Across the top, a grainy video still shows a man pulling a woman close to kiss—she resists slightly, but smiles and we imagine that she will succumb. Next comes a thorned rose stem with a drop of blood on the tip. A finger, also tinged with a drop of blood, is inches away. Next is an image of a man’s face, eyes closed, suggesting not sleep, but more likely denial or ennui, followed by a black and white image of a woman clutching a purse. Remaining images show a man’s blistered thumb, stacks of mail, a man screaming, and the blistered heel of a woman’s foot as she lies in bed. There is a dreamy image of gauzy curtains (perhaps the previous woman’s bedroom), a man’s bleeding finger (possibly from the thorn), and lastly, a grainy video still of a woman turned away from the camera.

This final artwork epitomizes Cowin’s message and approach—each image is a scene suggesting a long-forgotten story whose characters we store in our collective unconscious. The images and the implied narrative are open-ended but are made pointedly emotional through the use of gesture and expression. We witness love lost (or maybe found) and are left with many clues and no conclusion. We could be witnessing an actual relationship or one based on conjecture. This could be about real people or merely a fairy tale. It is the artist’s balance between control and intuition that allows this drama to function and take hold of the viewer. We see idealized love suggested by the picturesque and romantic symbols and communicated through the body, its wounds and blood. Like language, these photographs are surrogates for reality, full of meaning but incomplete in and of themselves.

The timing for this show could not be better. The current fashion for mise en scene work is reaching a crescendo as witnessed by the celebrity of the photographers from last year’s “Another Girl, Another Planet‚” exhibition in New York City (see Afterimage 27, no. 4). It is not difficult to recognize a link of influence between the artistic practice of Malerie Marder, Justine Kurland (“Another Girl‚” participants), Liza Ryan (who studied with Cowin) and Sharon Lockhart to the one perfected by Cowin over the past 27 years.

The desire to collapse reality and truth, two of the traditional hallmarks of photography, comes at a time when photography is undergoing a rapid transformation due to the digital revolution and our collective pondering of the line between fact and fiction. The invention of this new paradigm has many founders and certainly this survey demonstrates that Cowin is one of them. Throughout her career Cowin has made work that explores the gulf between what we see and what we feel, and has done so with originality. Of particular note is that after much success, she is producing her best work to date. As an artist and a teacher at California State University Fullerton since 1975 Cowin has had a major influence on photographic practice, setting the stage for others and presenting a model for the restless pursuit of the unspeakable and the undeniable. As the term “mid-career survey‚” implies, she continues this pursuit, her desire unsatisfied.

*NOTES:
1. Dublin, Zan. “Cowin: Set-Up Scenarios‚” Los Angeles Times (September 8, 1985), p. 91.
2. McCarthy Gauss, Kathleen. “Eileen Cowin: The Facts Never Speak for Themselves‚” New American Photography (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985), p. 108.
3. Ibid., p. 110.

Eileen Cowin, work 1971-1998 Still (and all)
(And the Lord Shall Smite Thee with) Astonishment of the Heart: Eileen Cowin and the Domain of Gestures
by Mark Alice Durant

“I remember so many things So many evenings rooms walks rages So many stops in worthless places Where in spite of everything the spirit of mystery rose up” —Louis Aragon, POEM TO SHOUT IN THE RUINS

“the bells chime for no reason and we too chime bells for no reason and we too will rejoice in the noise of chains that will chime within us with the bells” —Tristan Tzara, APPROXIMATE MAN

In the attempt to brush off the dust of the 19th century and ring in the fresh years of the new century, the Futurists penned manifestos endlessly proclaiming the messianic character of the modern world. They embraced a culture of image and information as opposed to the 19th century culture of the written word and myth. The aesthetic revolution as predicted by the Futurists has come to pass; speed, simultaneity, repetition, fragmentation and incessant war have become the dominant characteristics of our era. Citizens of the late 20th century spend enormous amounts of physical and psychic energy filtering out imagery from their consciousness. Most images have become enemies in disguise, beautiful poisons we try not to swallow because once ingested they are difficult to dislodge. We have developed skills with which to “read” images without internalizing them. Knowing this, how can an artist respond to the glut, the avalanche of images that make up our everyday lives and the viewer’s resistance to full engagement? In the closing years of our fragmented yet interconnected century, the photographic and video works of Eileen Cowin suggest a reversal of our rapid image processing abilities. Paradoxically, she utilizes contemporary technologies (photography, video) and references popular culture (film, television) to create meditative sites that can act as antidote to our ravenous image consumption. Adorned and occupied by Cowin’s images and installations, the gallery and museum become public places for private contemplation where an intimate relationship to the image can be resuscitated.

Cowin’s photographic sequences and video passages present images and words floating in the dark, familiar yet askew, like a film that’s fallen off its reel scattering narrative fragments across the wall, related but irrevocably wrenched from linear storytelling. Even her earliest works, the gum bichromate pieces of the early 1970’s for example, reveal an interest in a multiplicity of perspectives, an assembling of personal symbols and cultural motifs, a layering of imagery suggesting stories. In her work of the 1980’s and 1990s, Cowin directs a stage of multiple moments, filled with narratives. Much like a literary filmmaker she embodies the directorial mode of artmaking; storyboarding, scripting, staging, working with actors and determining camera perspective. Her “set” is inhabited by clusters of symbols and animated by human gestures that together conspire to create associations in which meaning can be inferred at best. Family snapshots, Renaissance painting, and the visual language of film are primary sources for Cowin’s domain of gestures, and although this repertoire may spark a sense of recognition, we cannot, as viewers, “read” her work with any real certainty. We cannot process her imagery like so many commercials or TV dramas. It is this slippage between image and concrete meaning, between the familiarity and the unknowability of the everyday that reminds us that, like her art, the real meaning of our personal and collective relationships is elusive and full of ambiguity.

One Night Stand (1977-78) is a suite of images that has both conceptual and narrative elements. The tone and color of the photographs are flat and unaffected, a strategy in keeping with the minimalist and untheatrical aesthetic of the time. Yet even these distancing mechanisms do not obscure Cowin’s playfulness and interest in the structures of intimacy. Polaroid snapshots appear in each of the larger color images; photographs of photographs create frames within frames making it a kind of duality of instants. The night stand is a humble piece of furniture, it sits loyally and with little fanfare beside the dramatic presence of the bed; it is a supporting character in our daily routines and asks little in return for its services. A night stand may hold a water glass, eye glasses, skin lotion, birth control devices, pictures of family, prescriptions, bedside reading, and may also bear silent witness to a guilty one night stand with an inappropriate but fabulous lover. Within the frame of these large color photographs, miniature night stands appear sitting atop night stands of normal scale. Instant photographic prints of men and women in various stages of disrobing peak out from behind phone cords and alarm clocks, betraying what might have occurred in these rooms just moments before. The diminutive representations of bodies and objects imply an assertion of control, an attempt to script the chaotic consequences of intimacies unleashed. This dance between formal rigor and emotional depth is a characteristic of Cowin’s entire body of work.

The photograph is a vessel of containment, within the boundaries of the image lies a contained and confined world. If meaning is simply an agreeable arrangement of the chaotic, then with the frame the camera offers, and the frame the photographer imposes, comes the promise of meaning. For over 150 years this has given photography its evidentiary power—photograph as encapsulated meaning—sometimes easy and at other times harder to swallow. This metaphor begins to break down with Cowin’s photographs, for despite their apparent familiarity they resist encapsulation. Historically, photographic meaning falls into either of two categories, the fictive and the documentary. In Family Docudramas, Cowin collapses the oppositions between notions of truth and fiction in photography. Operating in some liminal space between soap opera and conceptual art, Cowin facilitates a spare and collaborative project with actors who are also family members. This ensemble features sons who look like their fathers, sister who could be twins, faces and gestures that mirror one another incestuously. In these works a formal tension is developed when the snapshot is transformed with the heightened sensuality of art.

Family Docudramas (1980-82) is a dance masquerading as a soap opera in which Cowin choreographs the awkward grace of adolescents inevitably out of step with the murky intentions of adults. Like an updated version of Buuel’s Exterminating Angel, these are disaffected period pieces, performances in which a certain American family is trapped in a farce of manners, caught in a web of social construction. Some argue that all photographs are intrusive. If so, what world is intruded upon in this series? Her actors acknowledge the presence of the camera and, by extension, the gaze of the audience. Her images call attention to their photographic qualities on both the cultural and structural levels. In this way, Cowin suggests that the incessant spectacles of photography, cinema and television have blurred the boundaries that separate the public and the private. Perhaps more insidiously, Family Docudramas suggests that we have become pathologically self-conscious to the extent that even in our most private moments we are aware of ourselves as images and as performers.

While living in Chicago, Cowin often rode the elevated subway in which noisy tracks closely pass by the windows of apartments and office buildings. As the lights come on each evening, a passenger on the train becomes audience to hundreds of split-second scenarios that glow individually in the night like so many lonely candles. In rapid succession the guilty pleasure of voyeurism is turned off and on, off and on, in synch with the staccato rhythm of the shuffling train. As soon as one spies into the kitchens and living rooms of strangers, the train moves on, teasingly offering other tantalizing but ungraspable secrets. This urban/optical phenomenon inspired Cowin to investigate darkness as an elemental editing technique. By surrounding and inserting an inky blackness between images, she could dramatize the appearance of an image as if it were emanating from the night, and also make seamless the continuity of seemingly unrelated imagery.

Cowin combines this strategy born of modern culture with Biblical metaphor in Lot’s Wife (1991). The fate of Lot’s wife unfolded in the shadow of God’s revenge against Sodom and Gomorrah. Reviving this allegorical fable about what is allowed to be looked upon and what is forbidden, Cowin redresses the tale in the costume of film noir. Her characters occupy the symbolic realm like insecure gods, mythic and vulnerable. A veiled bride, reminding us of one of Julia Margaret Cameron’s women, gazes to the right toward the interior of the narrative. This image is followed by a series of isolated dramas, a lacy-curtained window framing a television surveillance monitor on which a hatted man walks away; a woman nervously sits upon a park bench alone and stares back at the camera; two white-shirted men throw undetermined projectiles toward some off-camera target; a German shepherd lopes forward lowering its head menacingly in animal self-containment. If counting from left to right, the eighth image reveals the same veiled woman looking back. According to the book of Genesis, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for disobeying God’s command not to gaze upon Sodom once they had fled the city. Cowin presents her just as she turns; curiosity is a tragic flaw and she is punished by fierce and unforgiving Jehovah. The image on the far right of the sequence shows a pair of men’s shoes standing on a ledge; darkness looms just beyond the toe tips. Does he stand at a precipice of an abyss, or the edge of a star? Is it curb or cliff, roof or roadside? Is this Lot reflecting upon his loss? Or is it God himself masquerading as a Raymond Chandler character, omnipotent and detached, gazing upon the tragic ends of his creators.

I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (1996) features a dozen images that evoke the passion and dissolution of a union of two. Combining what appear to be stills from old home movies with more contemporary symbolic moments, Cowin distills a life-time of gestures down to a small cluster of image/memories. A man wraps his arm around a woman, affectionately yet forcefully pulling her face toward his parting lips. A finger retreats from a piercing thorn, a drop of blood stains both the tip of the thorn and the tip of the finger; the wound has bound these objects forever. With the wound lies the potential for compassion for, as Barthes has suggested, the wound is the entrance for love. Other images in this grid further choreograph this dance between man and woman in pendulum swings between lust and anger, connection and isolation. Two badly bruised feet rest upon a bed. A man’s hand displays an open wound. A fist clutches a stack of letters. A man’s mouth widens, agape in anger or laughter; and, in an image suggesting the dreamy after-moments of making love, two windows with delicate veils soften the lovely late afternoon light outside. In the lower right-hand corner, a woman’s face turns away; is she turning away from the kiss in the first frame? By unleashing the chaos beneath the robes of angels and making us capable of betraying God for an earthbound taste of the divine, a single kiss can astonish the heart.

Every relationship of any consequence comes with the promise, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” For Cowin that promise is both an authoritarian threat and a statement made by a storyteller who can and will provide a tragic narrative for the tear-prone listener. Does narrative save us from getting lost in the inchoate and episodic character of our lives? Does narrative provide an anchor of stability without which we could never survey a horizon line for perspective? Or does our narrative dependency sentence us to a life of illusion, of false security that will ultimately turn our lives into a farce? Cowin does not answer these questions for us, but in her work she navigates the choppy seas, perched high in her crow’s nest above the watery tumult. With piercing eyes she looks for land and searches for survivors who may have lashed together a few fragments of words and images in the hopes that these temporary and fragile vessels of meaning will keep them from sinking amid the waves.

Cowin offers us an experiential art that is esoteric and accessible, simple and monumental. Cowin blurs the boundary between the still and the moving image. She shows us the strange grace of gestures that float free of an anchoring liturgy; she describes unnamed rituals that occupy dark corners, and suddenly and temporarily she freezes them within the elegant frame of her camera. Cowin’s images capture encounters in the shadows; her characters populate the edges of darkness, a limbo between the chaos of hell and the heaven of eternal illumination. Caught at this threshold we discover the ambiguity that is fundamental to our human experience. Although the eyes of the loved one are enflamed, we fear that the brightness and warmth will bring only a momentary certitude. We stand in that brief glow, a flickering against the larger darkness, wanting more but, considering the alternative, it will have to suffice.

Still (and all) Eileen Cowin, Work 1971-1998
The Impossibility of Expression
by Sue Spaid

Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying the truth.*1

Set Up to Look Set Up

Film’s well-documented influence on art and the development of computer imaging has placed “set-up” photography (a.k.a. mise-en-scene) at the center of the medium. However, it was an unfamiliar genre only twenty years ago, even though 19th century photographs such as Julia Margaret Cameron dressed and composed their sitters. In 1979, a San Francisco gallery director was left quite baffled after a conversation with Eileen Cowin; the director thought photographs were supposed to look believable not “set up to look set up.” Susan Sontag’s 1977 book On Photography, a compilation of earlier essays, publicly challenged photography’s veracity and thus paved the way for Postmodernism’s full-scale analysis of photography’s ability to feign truthfulness. Her assertion that “the consequences of lying have to be more central for photography than they ever can be for painting, because the flat, usually rectangle images which are photographs make a claim to be true that paintings can never make”*2 must have sounded earth-shattering in the early 1970s. Prior to On Photography, only a handful of known photographers, such as Minor White, Ralph Gibson, Duane Michals and Robert Heinecken, readily challenged photography’s epistemic claims, though dozens of Southern Californian artists were contesting “the conventional distinction between lie and truth”*3 implicit in photography.

Given the inherent sincerity of 60’s and 70’s aesthetics (Greenberg’s truth to materials, Minimalism’s specific objects, pop art’s quotidian references or Fluxus’ live happenings/events), it’s not surprising that concurrent photographers sought a gritty reality. Photographers like Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Bill Owens and Garry Winnogrand tended to document the extraordinary hidden in everyday life. The next generation examined photography’s potential for artifice mostly by simulating reality, and a handful—James Casebere, Eileen Cowin, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall—froze fantastic scenarios to perpetuate new realities. As photographers forged reality from fiction, viewers abandoned their faith in truthfulness, and began to experience boundlessness previously reserved for painting and cinema.

Still (and all)

Since 1995, the genre known as mise-en-scene (French for setting a stage) has exploded into proto-cinematic photography. Dozens of photo-based artists from Meghan Boody, Jenny Gage, Anna Gaskell, Alexei Hay, Dana Hoey, Hubbard & Birchler, Sarah Jones, Justine Kurland, Sharon Lockhart, Chantal Michel, Liza May Post, and Vibeke Tandberg to Sam Taylor-Wood yearn to capture film’s duration and event simultaneity within a single static frame. Mise-en-scene facilitates an illusion akin to film, thus upending the conventional distinction between the still and moving image, whereby “the still photograph is evidence; the moving photograph, illusion.”*4 Sharing Eileen Cowin’s earlier quest for fantasy (the gum prints (1973-75), One Night Stand (1977-78), Lady Killer (1977-78) and Family Docudrama (1980-83) series), this newest generation revitalized mise-en-scene to explore and cultivate new realities.

On viewing proto-cinematic photographs, suspension builds as the contemplative spectator selects an image’s primary event and then conjectures before, during and after events from the surrounding clues.*5 Thus, the spectator supplements each work’s creation via interpretation affirming Duchamp’s aphorism: “It’s the viewers who make the pictures.” By contrast, Cowin’s concurrent ineffable strings of straightforward stills (Don’t Ever Lie to Me (1994), Match (1995), Small Intimacies (1995), White Heat (1995-96), Through No Fault of Her Own (1997) and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (1998) confound the direction of time rather than sketch it, baffling those who enjoy constructing scripts. Comprised of strips of seemingly unrelated images, they seem nonsequential rather than sequential (left to right), though they reference a mode of storytelling that originated with Christian altarpieces. In this respect, Cowin’s nonlinear structures parallel the development of recent films such as Pulp Fiction or Out of Sight, which popularized nonsequential flashbacks. One’s response often resembles the refrain from Cowin’s favorite Kurosawa film, Rashomon: “I can’t understand it.”

If a still offers evidence, then the “still” segment of Cowin’s exhibition title connotes Roland Barthes’s notion of the classic text, which has “nothing more to say than what it says.”*6Thus, one can attribute the “and all” portion of her title to everything the photograph shows but does not specifically express.*7 For Barthes, “the classic text is pensive...replete with meaning...yet it still keeps in reserve some ultimate meaning, this zero degree of meaning...this supplementary...signifier of the inexpressible, not of the unexpressed.”*8 The treacherous gulf lying between what the viewer perceives as inexpressible (the pensive) and as utterable recalls Duchamp’s “art coefficient,” his distinction between the “unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”*9

Still (and all) denotes a literal translation of some static and self-evident component (expressible) engulfed by a dynamic and inscrutable everything else (inexpressible). Paradoxically, still and all means “nonetheless” of “even with everything considered,”*10 which actually contributes more skepticism regarding photography’s veracity. While the trendy proto-cinematic generation injects movement into the still, Cowin is saturating video with stillness (A Form of Ecstasy (1994) and It Goes Without Saying (1996)), thus further twisting the typical storyboard format’s narrative. By magnifying the zero degree of meaning and the length of duration present in an otherwise static still, Cowin’s mid-career survey, Still (and all) exposes the general problems of expression.

L’Impossibility du Fer

Eileen Cowin has often remarked, “I have been involved in the study of relationships.” An identical twin, she entered into an unusual long-term relationship at birth. Many other kinds of relationships recur in her work, including word/image, family/lovers, cause/effect, duration/activity, surveillance/voyeurism, stimulus/response, victim/persecutor, observer/observed, reality/fiction, subject/object, and director/cast member. Family Facing Camera (1984) captures a nuclear family reproducing itself in its own image; thus their fraudulence is forever framed as real. The ultimate voyeur, the camera carelessly renders each subject an object.

One of Cowin’s earliest projects (1978) presented two different images side-by-side that correspond to same-sounding words as Sink, Bound or Feet. Although she never visually depicted the homonyms associated with the word “impression,” the twin meanings of the word “impression”—an imprint made on a surface by pressure and the effect produced on the mind—has long intrigued her. Theoretically, homonyms multiply the potential number of relationships between words and images. Any visual exploration of homonyms initiates an unfolding chain. If one word evokes two images, then each image might yield two new words (four words), potentially engendering two new images (eight unrelated pictures), etc. Maybe Cowin’s recent multi-panel works bloom from such a process, only now the homonyms go unnamed.

Not surprisingly, the punning Duchamp toyed with homonyms. When asked to define genius, Duchamp replied, “l’impossibility du fer (the impossibility of iron),” which is homophonous with “l’impossibility du faire (the impossibility of making),” which is synonymous with both the uselessness of making (grinding one’s pigments vs. buying a tube of paint) and the impossibility of choosing a particular object or color. By expanding words into a cascade of images, Cowin thwarts the reader’s urge to collapse a picture into its linguistic equivalent.*11 “Indeed, it is the direction of meaning which determines the two major management functions of the classic text: the author is always supposed to go from signified to signifier, from content to form, from idea to text, from passion to expression; and in contrast the critic goes in the other direction.”*12

Even as viewers become familiar with Cowin’s repeated imagery, her motifs resist translation, particularly as some pictographic language, since each picture’s interpretation is hardly stable. The seeming unrelatedness of Cowin’s multi-panel imagery recalls Duchamp’s literal nominalism, the grouping of several words without significance, such as cheek, amyl and phaedra, to yield pictures independent of each reader’s interpretation. “The reproducer presents ...without interpretation, the group of words and finally no longer expresses a work of art (poem, painting, or music).”*13

For Cowin, the impossibility of making is simply the impossibility of expression or authorship. Thus, Cowin’s work is central to any characterization of an anti-representational theory of art in which no linguistic items can represent non-linguistic items.*14 Artists who refuse the real are free to introduce fresh experiences, novel concepts and emotional depth akin to Socrates’ first Form (or pure idea). Pictorial terms without precedent (novel concepts) avoid Socrates’ critique that representations don’t tell us anything about the reality that exists in the notion of things.*15 While the images comprising Family Docudrama (1980-83) appear to depict some actual family, this series actually anticipated heated debates in the 1980s concerning “the mommy track,” “working women” and “stay-at-home moms.” Set up to look set up, there is nothing real about them. “[T]here are no people, only characters; there are no events, only performances. Daily life thus presents itself as an impenetrable network of social relations; reality and role playing are indistinguishable.”*16

Emotional Depth

As director, script writer, cinematographer and editor all rolled into one, Cowin is wholly responsible for developing each character’s emotional depth and inspiring her actors to evoke relevant responses. Like a Mike Leigh film, Cowin’s intense works engage the viewer in temporal explosions of anxiety, bitterness, dread, terror, intrigue, danger, boredom, ecstasy, affection, displeasure, betrayal, confusion, grief, pity, panic, regret, nostalgia, disdain, contempt, gratitude, pride, remorse, indignation, resignation, eros, desolation, dejection, lament or anticipation. While the list of emotions seems endless, the number of photographers who dare to explore emotions (seemingly only Cowin, Taylor-Wood and Bill Viola) is quite short. Interpreting one’s own emotions, let alone capturing another’s, is quite tricky, especially since so few emotions are directly observable, unlike a pinch, a pimple or purple hair.*17

From the onset, Cowin has explored emotions, yet her images still espouse the difficulty of clearly articulating either an emotion’s cause or its interpretation. Dozens of early works engender sensual delight—Untitled (taking off shirt) 1971), Untitled(woman’s skirt/nude couple) (1971), the Genuine Delicious series (1973) and The Hand is Quicker series (1974). As cheeky, erotic and playful prints, their motives are never clear, but the response belongs as much to the viewer as to each image’s subject. Although Three Women (1987) float, they seem exhausted, delirious, and almost disappointed. Potentially a post-party round-up, they appear engaged in a bit of self-reflection. With their backs facing the viewers, Three Men (1987) seem emotionally unavailable and rather unconcerned with introspection.

The overly bleak nature of the bleached out One Night Stand series sets it apart as rather emptied of emotion, as if the subjects are too drained to feel. Given their miniature night stands, casually displayed self-portraits and decentered croppings, they hardly seem matter of fact. These situations are charged by the absence of inhabitants. The subjects in the Lady Killer series are also missing, yet each picture’s aggressive overtone clarifies some of the underlying emotions.

The works in Still (and all) run the emotional gamut. One soon discovers contradictory emotions peering through sensuous surfaces. “Many emotions...come in networks of relations, from which no single one could with integrity be abstracted.”*18 While the gap between the still and all, or expressed and shown, may never disappear, Cowin’s images provoke experiences that enhance one’s awareness of the complex range of emotions present.

*END NOTES
1. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (1977), p. 100.
2. Ibid., p. 78.
3. Desmarais, Charles, Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph 1960-1980 (1992), p. 12. Proof, an exhibit which Desmarais originated at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, assembled photographic works by 45 artists, including Cowin, who had lived and worked in Southern California between 1960 and 1980. Proof demonstrated how many works produced during this fertile era anticipated theories that Postmodernists later articulated.
4. Desmarais, p. 13.
5. DeDuve, Thierry, Kant After Duchamp (1996), p. 122.
6. Barthes, Roland, SIZ (1974), p. 216. This phrase recalls Frank Stella’s “what you see is what you see.”
7. Sircello, Guy, Mind & Art (1972), p. 239, Sircello demarcates showing from expressions and signs. “F shows in the expressions.” Thus, one need not verbally express one’s disappointment to show it.
8. Barthes, p. 216.
9. Tompkins, Calvin, Duchamp, a Biography (1996), Appendix, p. 510.
10. Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, 1998.
11. Barthes, p. 171. In SIZ, Roland Barthes mentions that meaning typically moves away from the signified (meaning) into a sea of signifiers (sound-images), from a particular to a generality, in order to locate some profound truth (the still as evidence). Cowin’s opacity stems from her work’s moving in the opposite direction, when it resists translation.
12. Ibid., p. 174.
13. Marcel Duchamp, Notes from the White Box (1914).
14. Rorty, Richard, Objectivity, Relativity and Truth (1992), p. 2.
15. Plato, The Republic, Book X, p. 327.
16. Dana Asbury, 1983, quoted in Mark Johnstone, Four Photographers by Four Writers, “A Prospectus for Some Conditions, Some Criticisms and the Critical Condition of Eileen Cowin’s Work” (University of Colorado at Boulder, 1987), p. 8.
17. Ekman, Paul, “Movement in Expression of Emotion,” Explaining Emotions (ed. Amelie O. Rorty, 1980), p. 81.
18. Rey, Georges, “Functionalism and Emotions,” Ibid., p. 184.

Collection Highlight EILEEN COWIN’S Based on a True Story
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Members Magazine
by Tim B. Wride, Assistant Curator of Photography

As a culture we have been conditioned to blindly accept as truth the adages “every picture tells a story” and “one picture is worth more than a thousand words,” statements implying that there is a narrative to be derived from any image. At the same time, we still widely accept that photographs are inherently truthful, even while their veracity is being assaulted through a greater public understanding of the potentials of digital imaging and photographic manipulation. Pairing these two seemingly opposing beliefs—photographs as a source of fiction and photographs as a source of truth—has provided fertile ground for exploring the manner in which photography can be used in the creation of narratives.

Santa Monica-based artist Eileen Cowin continues the wide-ranging traditions of narrative photography that stretch from the 19th-century moralizing montages of Henry Peach Robinson or Oscar G. Rejlander, to the reportage of Lewis Hine and the photo-essays of W. Eugene Smith and Danny Lyon, to the fictive constructions of Duane Michals. Cowin’s work is differentiated from her predecessors, however, by its distinctive contemporary psychological and cinematic sensibility, which relates it more closely to the work of Victor Burgin or Cindy Sherman.

Cowin has been working with narrative strategies for the better part of the last two decades. In work such as Based on a True Story, she exploits the viewer’s propensity to “read” images. Cowin’s six panels contain the barest of associative elements: an extended finger tracing the lips of a stone sculpture; a lone figure, shirt drenched, seated on an unmade bed; a face buried in a handkerchief; cupped hands with water leaking from them; a wrapped package; a male figure in bed. Her format recalls that of storyboards, animation cels, or comic strips—images that progress from one to another to form a narrative. Through this familiar format, she coerces the viewer to spend the associative capital necessary to arrive at meaning. Even in her selection of a title, Cowin challenges her audience to decipher the story behind the images, to add up all the elements and form the prescribed narrative—but whose narrative, the artist’s or the viewer’s?

In Based on a True Story, Cowin completely gives herself and the components of her “true story” over to a sense of mood. She has pared down her visuals to a sparse yet richly evocative elegance. The pictographic elements of the piece are encapsulated within film noir cartouches, where they function as graphic signposts to the implied “story.” They are almost calligraphic in their emotional intensity, which is heightened by their appearance within a blackness that bespeaks a place within memory or the unconscious. These enigmatic yet accessible images almost float to the surface of a tactile darkness in what seems a mocking reference to the fortune-telling magic eight ball popular with children a decade or two ago. And like the eight ball’s overly general and universally applicable answers, the images of Cowin’s piece require that the viewers contribute as much as they receive, interpreting the images according to their individual emotional and psychological states.

EILEEN COWIN AT JAYNE H. BAUM
Art in America, April 1989
by Eleanor Heartney

Eileen Cowin’s earlier photographs seemed to belong to the genre of the domestic snapshot. They purported to be slice-of-life images of families at the dinner table, or couples conversing in the living room or the master bedroom. Just beneath the surface, however, was an element of artifice—a self-conscious pose or an odd disconnection between characters that subtly undermined the illusion of spontaneous intimacy.

In her new photographs, the theatrical element has been made explicit. Men in trench coats or nondescript suits and women in slinky red dresses posture against a deeply shadowed background, arranged in tableaux that seem derived from film or art history. Their gestures are broad and symbolic, the situations in which they find themselves suggest the conventions of film noir and their faces are frequently obscured by shadow, hair or hat, heightening the suggestion that they are meant to represent types rather than individuals.

Voyeurism is a recurring theme—several works feature figures peering from behind Venetian blinds. When the characters are not observing each other, they make it clear by their studied poses that they are aware they are being watched. At times, their deliberate, archetypal movements echo Kabuki theater. Like the film stills that these photographs imitate, Cowin’s images suggest freeze-frame shots from mysterious narratives. The work that offers the closest approximation of traditional narrative consists of four panels: in the first, a woman in a red silk shift peers through a Venetian blind; in the second, she stands with her back to us, holding a crumpled letter and staring at a telephone. The third image shows her again peering through the blind, this time in close-up, and the fourth presents what is apparently the object of vision: a man branded with the stripe pattern of the Venetian blind, rummaging through an unmade bed.

While Cowin’s earlier, domestic photographs focused on the terrors of familial intimacy, these new images crackle with sexual tension, even when the characters are all men. As in film noir, these tableaux suggest that the rituals of male bonding and competition are essentially a matter of pose. If women fit into this world at all, it is as glamorous and potentially dangerous objects of desire. Although Cowin inevitably celebrates such conventions, through her deliberately self-mocking artifice, she also challenges them. This is also true of the works that refer to art history. Cowin’s treatment of the odalisque as a television viewer, or her presentation of a veiled Magritte heroine before her painted representation, casts a sheen of absurdity over Western art’s tendency to objectify women. Cowin’s photographs are great fun, but they bear a hidden stinger.

Eileen Cowin (published by Gallery Min, 1987)
REAL IMAGES OF AN ILLUSORY WORLD
by Mark Johnstone

The photographs by Eileen Cowin symbolically explore interpersonal relationships between people. The basis for her current work dates to 1978 when she began to create and direct imaginary scenarios of domestic life. These pieces depicted aspects of relationships occurring between and among people—including moments of terse confrontation, sibling rivalry, romantic interlude, and mundane daily chores—which were either depicted alone or humorously blended together. The emotional or psychological feelings stimulated by these images are largely generated by the visual devices of gesture or pose that Cowin incorporates into the photographs.

There are numerous precedents or parallels for Cowin’s approach within the continuum of art, from historical tableaux vivant paintings to contemporary media such as cinema or television. Thematic similarities between Cowin’s photographs and specific paintings are intentional; these parallels are not exclusively formal, but an engagement of the indescribable and elusive movements that have been present, yet are frequently hidden or submerged, within human life throughout recorded time. They may be forms of awakening in the human spirit or soul, as can be described through words like “redemption,” “corruption,” “salvation,” and “grace”. These particular concepts have deep and resonant symbolic significance within western Judeo-Christian religious tradition, from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to that moment when a mortal Virgin Mary learns that she has been divinely blessed and is carrying the Son of God in her womb.

These ancient beliefs have always existed, even while terminology or circumstances have shifted and changed. What had traditionally been referred to as a human spirit or soul was renamed the “id” in the modern field of psychology. Likewise, art changed through the ages and the momentous and stirring meaning of Masaccio’s “The Expulsion” (1426) or Fra Angelico’s “The Annunciation” (1455) became replaced with the introspective studies of Ingres’ “The Bather” (1808) or Edward Hopper’s “Eleven A.M.” (1926) and “Excursion into Philosophy” (1959). The painting by Ingres is a highly eroticized artistic vision of a moment in an everyday routine; the Hopper paintings, while being no less sensual, suppress any erotic qualities and address those introspective moments when an individual feels alone, despite the events and circumstances of surrounding life. There are also precedents for Cowin’s fascination with the dynamics of the family unit, as in Van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Wedding” (1434), or Edgar Degas’ “The Bellini Family” (1860).

Cowin’s works from 1980 to 1983 are primarily busy scenes of adolescent children and middle-aged adults, which are provocative as curious moments of interrupted action. For a period of time she referred to these pieces as docudramas, a word recently coined to describe cinematic or television recreations of historical events. A docudrama is a fictional and dramatized version of real events, and is constructed to appear factual. The circumstances of contemporary American life in Cowin’s photographs are imaginary, although the characters and their expressed emotions may appear familiar. It is worth noting that although Cowin has continually portrayed herself in many of the images, they are not the confessional revelations of an autobiographical diary.

Her photographs are antithetical to the “decisive moment”, a phrase that is commonly applied to fleeting scenes which are acrobatically seized from ongoing life in the real world. Cowin’s images are structured as a juncture of implied actions among characters in a manner that is simultaneously specific and abstract. Interpretation or imaginative recreation of an image is based on an apprehension of psychological issues, unlike records of the real world which can be imagined as part of an ongoing continuum, and they are parts of a photographically stilled narrative. They are observations of life which will be interpreted differently by different people, based on an individual viewer’s own life experience.

A transitional period appeared in her work between 1983 and 1984, as the complexity of scenes gradually became simplified. Her figures increasingly assumed more elegant poses, imaged in a moment of stasis that serves to expand the implications of a pose or gesture. The work progressively changed in other formal ways which contributed to shifts in content. These new directions included: a shift from multiple lights to direct single source lighting, an appearance of older figures in her cast of characters, enlarged image dimensions (from 20 by 24 inches in 1982 to approximately 4 by 15 feet in 1984), and the multiple combination of images into a diptych or triptych format.

Cowin’s images probe the emotional, visceral, and intellectual resonance of narrative in a photograph. The groupings, which she has formed specifically for this publication, suggest a loose series of short stories, or novellas. The assembly is not chronological, but based around particular themes of interrelationship between people. Her characters and props are limited, like the sparsely staged productions of a small theatrical acting troupe. Particular objects and environments are repeated such as tables, telephones, beds, and certain rooms of a home. Romance and struggles within familial boundaries recur, and intruders or alter egos occasionally materialize.

A range of ideas about human relationships is played out within the restricted territory of her imagination. A bedroom becomes a private symbolic ground of intimacy between two people, and the perfunctory circumstances for food consumption become celebrated forums for expressive emotional exchanges of immaterial sustenance. Age-old issues of parenting, aging, privacy, and anger are occasionally revealed literally as fait accompli. In other images, dreams or desires are silently inferred as the unspoken relationships expressed through gesture and body language between people.

The potential of narrative is simply and eloquently illustrated by the diversity in her dressing of figures. The different ways that men or women are clothed can be a rich and resonant general evocation of culture, or imply specific rites and rituals within a culture. Cowin’s photographs cross the boundaries of time and engage both mythic depiction and tangible aspects of human life, as it exists through past, present and future time. Her images will likely acquire value as sociological interpretations of interpersonal relationships in the decade of the 1980s, just as similar values can be inferred from 16th and 17th century Dutch paintings or the 19th century Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts of Hiroshige and Hokusai. What can be experienced in them has been mediated through her vision—they are undeniably real images of an illusory world.

“...for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.” —Milan Kundera

I have been influenced by the films of Alfred Hitchcock where the more familiar and ordered the world appeared the greater the impact of a fearful and or irrational event. After the 1994 earthquake, I mixed Film Noir with biblical epics like “The Ten Commandments” and “The Last Days of Pompeii”. I read about plagues and pinned pictures of locusts on my wall. I read stories about people in situations beyond their control.

I have continued to incorporate the vocabulary of the cinema into my work and have used video in combination with the photographs . Referencing our experience with film and television, I wanted the “moving image” to set up expectations of a completed action. The video image, a loop of a continuous action, has the same effect as saying a word over and over: it begins to sound strange and loses any connection to meaning. In the video installations the moving image also alludes to what is absent, what is outside the frame. With room size installations I am trying to create an event or situation so the viewer becomes a participant and an observer.

I have collaborated with writer, Louise Erdrich. Both of us have explored similar themes: stories that are fragmented and episodic, day to day events that turn into myths and the impact of loss and change. She shares my preoccupation with the irrational and the mysterious. Her words ground the work in the present and to a particular kind of space but with the mixing of words and images we are using language to cover rather than reveal.

I am committed to a continuing investigation of the emotional, visceral and intellectual resonance of narrative as a paradigm of photographic imagery. This is revealed in a body of work which includes photographs, video, text and installations.

Neal Gabler wrote an article in the LA Times about how we were losing our narratives- he said the 19th century was about order and logic but the 20th century was about fragmentation, dislocation and a sense that man was not progressing but he was lurching aimlessly.

Using this idea of fragmentation, I am interested in the nature of narrative and the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. I am investigating ideas about chance, fate, memory and experience.