Isn’t it wonderful that as we look or think about Jim’s work with vinyl and windows, we don’t have to apologize for our completely subjective reaction to the work! The very medium itself – the medium Jim has created, or, rather, the media he has re-shaped – and most of his public statements about the work, encourage a kind of radical subjectivity, even as the work incorporates objects in museums or windows in buildings, those massive objects that create our public space.
I think I first saw Jim’s work with vinyl and windows on the front of the Red Hawk restaurant. That’s a while ago now, but I remember words were a central part of that – a poem? Perhaps an Emily Dickinson poem? I remember more clearly what I first thought – Oh, this is a palimpsest! Jim wants us to notice the surface and look through the surface to the text behind the text! And since this was the Redhawk, I immediately thought that Jim wanted us to look through and see our friends, our colleagues, those people we might think we know but really don’t. (the great Charles Baxter, who was a part of our community for 25 or 30 years, used to call the Red Hawk “the faculty mess.”). Jim was going to force us to see people we might take for granted and to see them again for the first time.
Since I first imagined Jim’s work in this medium inside my own metaphor, one that rises out of classical scholarship (which makes it easy to talk about this in the Contexts for Classics series), I was stuck with my metaphor every time I saw different manifestations of this activity. And I felt completely justified dwelling on my own narrative or possibly my own allegory for Jim’s process.
Indulge me. Somewhere in the 8th or 9th century, a young man (almost certainly a man) prepares a sheet of vellum in the workshop of a long forgotten monastery. He scrapes the skin clean, making it thin and as white as paper, and then treats it with the appropriate oils to make it soft and supple. He’s probably illiterate, but once he’s finished with it, a monk takes the vellum and uses it to write up a contract for the purchase or sale of cattle for the monastery herd. Or it goes to the library where a different monk makes a copy of a classical text.
Three or four hundred years later, the monastery wants to make a fine copy of the New Testament, but they don’t have enough new and clean vellum for their book. So they send the old vellum back to another illiterate young man out in the workshop, who gently, so gently, scrapes it again, and uses some kind of acid wash to eliminate the old text. Or he thinks it does. The biblical text is written down, and then sent off somewhere for the greater glory of God.
The monastery closes as the result of some war or other. The stones are taken to rebuild the homes, barns and fences of the local communities. The place is forgotten. But eight or nine hundred years later, a young scholar working with a tattered piece of vellum in the Kelsey vault or up on the 7th floor of Hatcher, finds the first text emerging faintly through the Biblical text, and she is able to reconstruct life in that monastery from the first millennium. And maybe she’ll get tenure, too!
So this is what I did with Jim’s method. His medium. What I wanted to do was look through it! To see how it changed the objects behind the windows. I knew it was Jim’s work, so I noticed it immediately as I walked past, and I was pleased. Particularly on the loggia of the new Kelsey wing which I walked everyday on my way from Angell Hall to the parking structure, I was most interested in looking past the reflections of myself, and through Jim’s work, to see how those vases or broken figurines were changed by the shapes and lines on the windows.
And then I realized I had to look more closely at Jim’s work itself, the shapes and swirls of them, the contexts he planned for them. I hadn’t been a part of the opening festivities. Nor had I seen the catalog. I was flying blind in a glorious swirl of images, and loving it. As I walked from one museum to the other, the two museums that have been a part of my daily life for forty years, the museums whose collections I know better than any other, I started seeing the connections – the uses of objects or shapes of one museum migrating across State Street and appearing on another building. These were shapes I knew. I had written a poem about Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, for instance. I had looked at the sculpture for weeks. I’d even read Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, an experience I hope never to relive. I defended the work from charges of kitchy Victorian clichés. I could recognize Nydia’s hand when I saw it on a window. I’m a Canadian, so you can bet I know the look of General Wolfe’s hand as he dies on the Plains of Abraham after “planting firm Britannia’s flag.”
Then, finally, I went to look at the windows from the inside. The museum objects regained their materiality and filled the foreground. But I could look past them, and see objects reworked on the windows, and past the windows the campus landscape and the thousands of people hurrying from here to there, filled with serious, perhaps desperate purpose. I felt I was reconstructing my own canvases. See that swirl of wind in the new leaves of that tree. Or those odd figures suddenly marching off to the library. Aren’t I clever, I thought! This is fun. And then I realized that the artist had very likely done this on purpose. And what were those purposes? Probably they had nothing to do with my palimpsest. But I knew the artist just well enough to know he probably wouldn’t mind.
And then I stuck Jim’s work in another context. At home I have a large Tibetan prayer flag, probably four feet by four feet, that anthropologist Tom Fricke gave me thirty years ago or more. Like most prayer flags, it is not perfectly printed and it’s on cheap cloth, but the block or blocks it was printed with were extremely elaborate. The top half or more is filled with the many manifestations of the Buddha. The bottom quarter is filled with symbols that represent this world, our lived world. The world of illusion. But between the two worlds are several rows of what look to be windows. The places of transition between two very different states of being. Magical and necessary places, central to our spiritual and imaginative lives.
And those Buddhist windows had taken me to windows in Vermeer or in the surrealists (like in the Magritte painting, “The Human Condition,” a poor reproduction of which I had tacked to my bedroom wall half a century ago ), where artists had arrived, in a kind of convergent evolution, at the same place as the Buddhists. Windows as context, as passages between different kinds of perception, both openings and barriers. Exactly the place where Jim Cogswell arrived when he was giving us his Cosmogonic Tattoos!
All of this work – the metaphoric window on that piece of vellum, the symbolic windows on the Tibetan prayer flag, the transformative imaginative windows in surrealist paintings, the architectural elements in the public space around us here at the university, the elements that Jim has reworked to create narratives that connect and change us – all of this is doing one of the essential jobs of art, re-enchanting the ordinary, transforming it with and in imagination.
