Margaret Cogswell: RIVER FUGUES: Moving the Water(s)

MARGARET COGSWELL 1

MARGARET COGSWELL RIVER FUGUES: MOVING THE WATER(S) CUE ART FOUNDATION APRIL 26 - MAY 31, 2014

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Gregory Amenoff Theodore S. Berger Sanford Biggers Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan Corina Larkin Brian D. Starer

CURATORIAL ADVISORY COUNCIL Gregory Amenoff William Corbett Lynn Crawford Paddy Johnson Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Sharon Lockhart Andrea Zittel

CUE FELLOWS STAFF Polly Apfelbaum Theodore S.Berger, Chair Ian Cooper William Corbett Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Deborah Kass Corina Larkin Jonathan Lethem Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow Carolyn Somers Lilly Wei

Beatrice Wolert-Weese Interim Director Jessica Gildea Associate Director of Programs Hannah Malyn Development Coordinator

Each year, CUE invites ten individuals from across the country to anonymously nominate up to three artists for the solo exhibition program.

Artists are invited to apply, and the final selection is made by an independent jury each fall. Jurors for the 2013-14 season were Michelle Grabner, artist and founder of The Suburban, Chicago, IL; Paddy Johnson, founder, Art F City; and Gregory Amenoff, artist and Chair, Visual Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts.

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CUE ART FOUNDATION IS A DYNAMIC VISUAL ARTS CENTER DEDICATED TO CREATING ESSENTIAL CAREER AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMERGING ARTISTS OF ALL AGES. THROUGH EXHIBITIONS, ARTS EDUCATION, AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS, CUE PROVIDES ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES WITH SUSTAINING AND MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES AND RESOURCES.

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MARGARET COGSWELL

Margaret Cogswell is a mixed-media installation artist residing in New York and the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2009), New York Foundation for the Arts grants (2007, 1993) and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants (1987, 1991). Cogswell received an MFA in sculpture from Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University and currently is a member of Mapping Spectral Traces, an international network of scholars and artists whose work addresses place.

Since 2003 the main focus of Cogswell's work is an ongoing project exploring the increasingly politicized role of water. RIVER FUGUES began while in residence at SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio and culminated with Cuyahoga Fugues (2003), an installation inspired by and incorporating generations of stories reflecting the life and dreams embodied by the Cuyahoga River.

The response to this project has led to other commissioned River Fugues including Hudson Weather Fugues (Wave Hill, the Bronx, NY, 2005) and Hudson River Fugues (Lives of the Hudson, the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY, 20092010) and The Peekskill Project V: The New Hudson River School, Contemporary Artists Address the Regional Landscape at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. In 2006, while in residence as an NEA-sponsored artist at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, Cogswell created and exhibited Buffalo River Fugues. Between 2007-2009, Cogswell’s River Fugues was part of Envisioning Change, an exhibition of work addressing environmental issues which traveled to the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium; the Ministry of Culture in Monaco and The Field Museum in Chicago. In 2008, Cogswell exhibited the first of an ongoing series of Mississippi River Fugues at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis in Tennessee.

In September 2012, Wyoming River Fugues was realized as a solo exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Wyoming, Laramie. In conjunction with this commissioned 3-year project, the exhibition culminated with a twoday symposium that addressed water issues in Wyoming. Never Drink Water Downstream included presentations by Native Americans, scientists, ranchers, students, environmental activists, legislators and others whose research or narratives contributed to the realization of Wyoming River Fugues.

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The exhibition RIVER FUGUES: Moving the Water(s) at CUE Art Foundation interfaces elements of Wyoming River Fugues with Ashokan Fugues, a new component that explores the NYC water supply system and the Catskill Watershed. River Fugues: Moving the Water(s) is a two-pronged project with an upstate component to be exhibited at the Olive Free Library in West Shokan, NY during the summer of 2014. In Fall 2014, Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues will travel to the Shanghai HImalayas Art Museum where it will be interfaced with new work developed during a two-month residency in China.

Other works in progress include New River Fugues in Giles County, Virginia and new components for Mississippi River Fugues.

For more information, please visit: margaretcogswell.net.

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STATEMENT

Moving the Water(s) is a research-based, mixed-media installation presented both at CUE Art Foundation in New York City and the Olive Free Library in West Shokan, NY. It is comprised of two sections: Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues and Moving the Water(s): Wyoming River Fugues. Moving the Water(s) is informed by stories and local history and presented through video, audio, sculptural components and works on paper. It links critical water issues in New York with those in Wyoming, as well as ongoing issues surrounding water quality and access to water both in NYC and the Catskill Watershed. This project is of great personal significance because I have spent the last 30 years living and working alternately in New York City and West Shokan, a small hamlet located next to the Ashokan Reservoir that provides 90% of the drinking water for New York City.

“Moving the water” is a reference to flood irrigation, a process I was introduced to while researching and developing the installation Wyoming River Fugues presented at the Art Museum of the University of Wyoming in Laramie in 2012. “Moving the water” seems an appropriate metaphor for referring to other interventions such as “moving the water” to build dams, to conduct open pit coal mining, oil extraction, hydro-fracking or to move the water through aqueducts from the Catskills in upstate New York down to New York City.

Moving the Water(s) is part of an ongoing series of River Fugues projects begun in 2003 while in residence at SPACES World Artists Program in Cleveland, Ohio. Lured by fire, water and the imposing presence of volcanic steel mills at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, my site-specific response became Cuyahoga Fugues, an installation inspired by and incorporating generations of stories reflecting the life and dreams embodied by the Cuyahoga, and exploring the Cuyahoga River and steel mills. This experience became the inspiration for creating an expanded body of work, exploring the lives of other rivers around the country.

All River Fugues entail regional travel and research, recording images and narratives with video and audio that are later edited using the musical structure of the fugue and integrated into sculptural installations.

In music, by definition, a fugue is:

a contrapuntal composition in two or more voices, 8

built on a subject (theme) that is introduced at the beginning and recurs frequently in the course of the composition.

In its most general aspect, counterpoint or contrapuntal music involves the writing of musical lines that sound very different and move independently from each other but sound harmonious when played simultaneously.

I use the fugue because of its flexibility as a conceptual framework which can be applied to any set of components one is trying to integrate, be they musical, sounds, voices, narratives or images.

While my initial process for gathering materials parallels that of a documentary filmmaker, the work upon completion is not linear or descriptive in nature. Instead, my mentors are found in composers and poets, particularly Glenn Gould and his narrative fugue, The Idea of the North, along with Anne Carson and her prose poem, The Anthropology of Water, and Seamus Heaney’s poetry and essays. During the process of editing my videos, I immerse myself in the language and structure of poetry and music to study the use of intervals and phrasing, and to observe how the poet/composer pulls the reader/listener into the world of the poem/music. My struggle with recognizable images (that is, images to which you can attach words to describe what you see) is to figure out how to use them like a poet uses words, re-contextualizing them so that their juxtaposition takes the viewer to an unexpected place.

In Moving the Water(s): Wyoming River Fugues and Ashokan Fugues, Seamus Heaney’s poem "Keeping Going" served as an important guide. It is a powerful poem about "the troubles", a poem in which the “the whitewash brush” becomes the portal of entry, the unifying element through which the history of a place is built, the reader enters a family’s life, and is present at a brother’s cruel death.

The whitewash brush is the thread. In constructing my videos, my challenge is to find that “whitewash brush” in the many hours of my footage, recognize it when I see it, and know how to use it.

Although readings in Cadillac Desert and Rivers of Empire had laid the groundwork for an overall history of the diversions of waters, particularly in the southwest, it was through the introduction to flood irrigation and all that it entails 9

in terms of water rights and access to water that I found a way to pull all these disparate, but related ideas, histories, uses of water and the role of rivers in Wyoming together.

Taking Seamus Heaney’s lead, I use the orange tarp and the magician as metaphors and facilitators in hopes that, like the whitewash brush, the viewer might enter and explore the disparate worlds that are united by the common thread of the diversion of waters. The orange tarp was quite magical, ever so primitive and basic, but effective. It moved the water, concealed and revealed much like the cape of a magician. Like a magician’s sleight of hand, the diversions of waters for mining, dams, reservoirs and aqueducts often become a case of “now you see it “ (or have access to the river’s waters) and “now you don’t” (because it has been diverted elsewhere).

In Moving the Water(s): Wyoming River Fugues, the video projected from the surveyor's transits opens with a black screen and the words of Marc Soldier Wolf, an Arapaho elder on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming: A river is considered a vein, like in our bodies, that feeds any land, any part of the land, like the veins—the blood in the veins— big or small. And the biggest reservoir in our life of anything close to water, and which has the same value and is very necessary like water, is our heart.

Mark Soldier Wolf’s words are critical to the piece and link directly to the first scene of a man straddling an irrigation ditch while putting a large stone down on top of an orange tarp to divert the water for flood irrigation.

I use the circular image for each video projection because this shape can allude to so many aspects of seeing. It is about discovering an image as though through the lens of a telescope, a portal, or a beam of light which, when raking a landscape in the night, illuminates only that which it is focused on. In each of these cases, the revelation is intentional and only partial. One is aware that there is more outside the frame of the lens or the parameters of the beam of light than what is within, so one must work to imagine or attempt to recall from memory the surrounding context of what is only partially revealed.

As for the sculptural components of the installation, I came to realize that, 10

in the end, access to water was determined by how the land was surveyed. With this in mind, I have chosen to create my own version of surveyor’s transits that house the video projectors and throw their images across the walls as they seemingly rake the landscape.

The moving bucket of light emerges from the image of a bucket of coal that I caught on film one night while working on Cuyahoga Fugues in Cleveland’s steel yards. As this form moved in and out of a fog of smoke and steam, the wet sides of the steel bucket glowed under the steel mills’ bright yellow lights, appearing like a ball of fire in the black night sky. The starkness of this mysterious glowing object moving back and forth along a cable through the fog had a haunting impact on me because its real function and “meaning” was unknown to me at the time. I realized then the evocative power of an object which had movement, but whose purpose was indecipherable. Given this, the bucket of light re-emerged in Wyoming River Fugues to mysteriously, and almost imperceptibly, traverse slowly across the gallery space.

In the end, I find myself returning to Roland Barthes and his book Camera Lucida in which he spoke of a memorable photograph as having the quality of punctum, that is, the ability to pierce. It is this idea of punctum that has become my mantra in the studio, and challenges me as I strive to create works which are often poignant elegies exploring the complex and changing relationship of a society to its industries and rivers.

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IMAGES 12

MOVING THE WATER(S): Wyoming River Fugues, 2012 Video still 13

MOVING THE WATER(S): Wyoming River Fugues, 2012 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable 14

MOVING THE WATER(S): Wyoming River Fugues, 2012 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable 15

MOVING THE WATER(S): Wyoming River Fugues, 2012 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable 16

MOVING THE WATER(S): Wyoming River Fugues, 2012 Mixed media installation Dimensions variable 17

MOVING THE WATER/ORANGE TARP, 2012 Archival digital print of video still 18

MOVING THE WATER/ORANGE TARP, 2012 Mixed-media drawing on paper (watercolor, color pencils, ink). 22" x 30" 19

WYOMING RIVER FUGUES: Orange Tarp/Set #3, 2011 Watercolor, color pencils, graphite on paper. 22" x 30" 20

WYOMING RIVER FUGUES: August Embankments, 2011 Watercolor, color pencils on paper 22" x 30" 21

ASHOKAN FUGUES: Boundaries 2013 Watercolor, color pencils on paper. 12" x 15" 22

ASHOKAN FUGUES: Off Limits 2013 Watercolor, color pencils on paper. 11" x 16" 23

ASHOKAN FUGUES: No Access 2013 Watercolor, color pencils on paper. 11" x 15" 24

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ASHOKAN FUGUES: Light in Winter, 2013 Watercolor, color pencils on paper. 7" x 11" 25

ASHOKAN FUGUES: Winter Defiant, 2013 Watercolor, color pencils on paper. 7" x 11" 26

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MOVING THE WATER(S), 2014 Ashokan Fugues and Wyoming River Fugues.

Installation layout for CUE Art Foundation.

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Acknowledgements: Surveyor’s Transits, Water Towers, and Drawing Frames: Terry Kolb (left, in studio) Production and Technology: Michael Casselli & Stefanie Koseff Audio Engineer: Benny Moutoun Studio Assistants: Mayumi Hayashi & Shigeru Oyatani 28

WRITING MARGARET COGSWELL: MOVING THE WATER(S): ASHOKAN FUGUES AND MOVING THE WATER(S): WYOMING RIVER FUGUES p.28 29

MARGARET COGSWELL: MOVING THE WATER(S): ASHOKAN FUGUES AND MOVING THE WATER(S): WYOMING RIVER FUGUES

By Amanda Parmer

Margaret Cogswell’s two installations—Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues (2014) and Moving the Water(s): Wyoming River Fugues (2012)—play sound and image off one another to show the social and physical effects of water’s commodification on the land and citizens of the United States. Drawing on documents, interviews and historical records from the past hundred years in New York and Wyoming, these works present an immersive visual and aural score regulated by a metronomic beat. The content of Cogswell’s projected videos are a mash-up of her video documentation, holding together otherwise disparate themes, sounds and locations. Her politicized narratives are punctuated and tied together by the character of a magician who appears in each.

Presented in a darkened room, the projected footage in Moving the Water(s): Wyoming River Fugues is deliberately rough and unpolished. The space is animated by oscillating video projections atop sculptural iterations of surveyor transits—the instruments used to survey and portion off land—as a cipher of the ways in which access to real estate is bound up with access to water. The projector heads pan the walls of the gallery in horizontal bands, occasionally abutting one another and then moving apart again. The video turns left to right while the projected image shifts as well, zooming unpredictably in and out, and side to side in an allusion to the alienating effects of speed and the systematic way capitalism mines the natural environment.

Three circular projections crisscross the gallery walls, employing alternating camera angles, tracking shoots, zooming focus and landscape pans to display footage of dirty, ragged orange tarps; dry, barren land; trucks sunk in a riverbed; decomposing wildlife; and industrial rotary sprinklers. The video begins in the darkened gallery with an audio recording of Mark Soldier Wolf, an Elder in the Arapho Tribe on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He makes his tribe's 30

analogy between veins in the human body and rivers. In some shots, boots swish through tall grass, river water runs and birds call out to one another. These formal and contextual juxtapositions render tangible the effects of the industrialization that is increasingly controlling access to water in the country today, and reveal what is at risk if it continues unchecked.

Contrary to 18th and 19th century practices that advocated for the preservation of the environment by aestheticizing landscapes that artists celebrated as nature unhindered by humans, Cogswell plays up the gritty details of industrialization and its effects on the environment. Through an imbricated structure of spoken word, ambient sound and visual cues, Cogswell chronicles the transformation of water over the past century from a free and available resource into an element subject to financial, social and political maneuvering. As curators Saskia Bos and Steven Lam explained in the introductory text for their 2009 exhibition Free as Air and Water at Cooper Union, “global power has systematically distributed the world’s resources in unequal ways, concerns such as human rights have become increasingly tied to issues involving air, water and land.”

During the period from 1906 to 1913 the City of New York decided to claim 10,000 acres of land by eminent domain, giving 2,000 people 30 days notice before forcing them from their homes: 500 houses were destroyed, 35 stores leveled, ten churches dismantled, eleven schools eradicated and five railroad stations demolished or relocated. Over these seven years, the project’s chief engineer, J. Waldo Smith, devised a reservoir in this space that would continue to provide the most valuable of liquid assets for New York City: potable, unfiltered drinking water for the next hundred years. Cogswell’s most recent work, Moving the Water(s): Ashokan Fugues (2014), aims to demystify the history of the city’s water and the people, communities and social fabric it displaced when the reservoir’s construction was initiated in 1906.

In this bifurcated narrative, New York City’s mayor at the time, George McClellan, accurately hailed Smith as a magician for providing unlimited quantities of free drinking water to an otherwise dry city. The complex network of reservoirs, connected by a web of subterranean aqueducts, flows down through Smith’s Catskill Water System in a feat of engineering rivaling the aqueducts of the ancient 31

MARGARET COGSWELL

Romans, and delivering 1.3 billion gallons of water daily to millions of people in New York City. Today, when both the local environment and the unfiltered tap water in New York is under threat by increasingly aggressive, corporatized efforts at hydraulic fracking beneath the watershed, it is well worth rethinking the city’s relationship to the water supply, the communities it connects and the divisive role its acquisition has played over the past century.

In both works, Cogswell aims to dispel and unsettle the willful blindness as to where potable water comes from, recurrently laying bare the water’s commodification and the wizardry that keeps New York City’s tap water out of sight. Using the footage of the magician in both the Wyoming and Ashokan works, Cogswell ties a sense of mystery to one of mischief. The appearance of the magician may evoke childhood wonder, yet it can also arouse suspicion, as is seen in these installations. By linking these two works through the repeating footage of the magician, Cogswell connects the consequence of hydraulic fracking in Wyoming, the 1906 land grab that made possible the Ashokan Reservoir and a possible future for one of New York City’s most valuable assets.

Drawing our attention to the politics of water and how the threat of hydraulic fracking has impacted Wyoming, this composition can be viewed as a multi-siren alarm attesting to what would be at stake in New York today should fracking begin below the New York watershed. By reflecting the aural, aesthetic and material commonalities between these two seemingly disparate geographic locations, Cogswell is able to address themes and consider relationships between the two.

In the process she carves out a discursive space for considering the networked relations between hydraulic fracking, the erosion of social structures and New York City’s unwitting contribution to these invisible structures that are privatizing the natural resource we rely on most heavily and which will inevitably shape our future.

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This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE Art Foundation, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for further information on AICA USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org.

Writer Amanda Parmer is an independent writer and curator living in Brooklyn. She recently she has organized Crossing Screens at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons, the New School in New York. This exhibition and programming addresses the ways our bodies, in tandem with digital culture, act as filters for understanding the world and one another. In 2012 she organized the Open Forum Panel Discussions for the New York Armory and Volta Shows. These dialogs between New York and Nordic based artists, art historians, curators, critics, directors and dealers to drew on the distinctions and affinities between these cultural bodies. Some of the fiftyseven panelists included: Bjork, Eva Diaz, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Theaster Gates, Ragnar Kjartansson, Linda Nochlin, Sarah K. Rich and Sharon Zukin. Parmer’s 2011 exhibition F is for Fake: The construction of femaleness by the US media at Cleopatra’s Brooklyn and Berlin included screenings, talks, reading groups and installations from Judith Barry, Joan Braderman, Laura Mulvey, Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden, Paper Tiger Television, Elayne Rapping, and Martha Rosler. In 2010 she co-curated the exhibition and accompanying catalog Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art at The Kitchen and along the West Side of Manhattan. She is a contributing writer for Art in America, Art&Education, Artforum.com and Bomblog.

Mentor Barbara A. MacAdam is deputy editor of ARTnews, where she has worked since 1987. She was executive editor of Art + Auction from 2005 to 2006 and an editor at Review: Latin American Literature and Arts and New York magazine. She has reviewed books on art and literature for the LA Times Book Review, Newsday, and the New York Times Book Review, among others, and contributed articles on art, design, and literature to various magazines and newspapers. She is also a curator and serves on the boards of the International Art Critics Association and the Paris-based Arts Arena.

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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY:

MEDIA SPONSOR:

CAF AMERICAN DONOR FUND THE VIKING FOUNDATION BERKELEY PHILANTHROPIC FUND ANHOLT SERVICES (USA) INC. WILLIAM TALBOT HILLMAN FOUNDATION AGNES GUND THE JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION NEW YORK COMMUNITY TRUST EMILY HALL TREMAINE FOUNDATION THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS (A STATE AGENCY) Artist Acknowledgements: A Fellowship from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation provided partial support for initial research and development of Wyoming River Fugues in 2010. Other support for Wyoming River Fugues exhibition and symposium at the University of Wyoming Art Museum in 2012 was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the University of Wyoming Colonel Rogers Fund, University of Wyoming Art Museum Gala funds and Wyoming Public Radio. Additional support for Ashokan Fugues was provided by the Margaret G. and James A. Cogswell Trust.

Finally, I must thank all the many contributors to this project in Wyoming, the Catskills, and New York City who shared so generously of their time and expertise, making these projects possible. It is their stories and their experiences that have informed and shaped Moving the Water(s): Wyoming River Fugues and Ashokan Fugues.

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All artwork © Margaret Cogswell

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