SELECTED ESSAYS
AND REVIEWS:
Tom Sleigh
Mississippi River Fugues
Margaret Cogswell, a student in 1968 at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennesee, has just been to hear Martin Luther King speak in support of the sanitation workers’ strike: she’s elated by King’s oratory, his passionate conviction that he’s “been to the mountaintop”—and though he understands that “I may not get there with you,” he knows “that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land.” The next day she is climbing the steps to her dorm, her foot “raised in mid-air like a freeze-frame in my mind,” when she hears the news that he’s been murdered. The power goes out, tanks roll onto campus, she hears sniper fire around the dorms: devastated by fear, grief, and anger, she eventually decides to leave the South. But that isn’t so easy: born in Memphis (though raised in Japan), she is and is not a Southerner: King Cotton, slavery, Civil Rights, the mystique and myth of the agrarian South, these are all part of her cultural inheritance.
But after she graduates, Margaret Cogswell does indeed leave the South for New York City, where she makes sculpture, then installation work. Over the years, her artistic explorations show her to be a polymath, one of those quiet visionaries who aspire to the complexity that Nathaniel Hawthorne once defined as happiness: the ability to live as deeply as possible in all our faculties.
In the last five years, Margaret Cogswell has focused her faculties on exploring the ever-shifting banks and waters of American rivers—and produced a series of installations that are among the most original in contemporary art. Like Thomas Cole before her, she’s captured, in a fugue of voices and video, the Hudson River Valley, though she’s tempered Cole’s mystical effects of light and shadow with the river’s diesel-powered clang and thrum. And her fugues on the Buffalo and Cuyahoga Rivers transform Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” into an empathetic understanding of the steel mill workers and the peculiar poetry of their daily work lives.
Now, perhaps inevitably, given her Southern roots, King Cotton and the Mississippi have woven themselves back into her life. In keeping with Hawthorne’s dictum, she has paddled down the river with a canoe builder in his hand-hewn pirogue, talked to the Army Corps of Engineers, African American art historians, the Yazoo Levee Board, cotton growers, gin owners, earth science geologists, cotton journalists, levee inspector and former bargehand/ state trooper (who does a mean “cow in distress” imitation), and the only African American riverboat captain on the Mississippi who is piloting the Memphis Queen.
In the ante-room to the installation, these voices resonate from hurricane lanterns that Cogswell has fabricated from copper and sheet metal. In each lantern, she has installed a video screen and a DVD player. Suspended at different heights, the lanterns house these disembodied voices, each voice accompanied by the projection of a candle coming alight, until the voice falls silent and the flame flickers out. A sense of elegy and ghostly presence pervades this part of the installation, the voices interweaving with the river’s ambient sounds: whistles, pulse of engines, rush of water.
In the main gallery hall, Cogswell surrounds us with buoy-like structures that serve as swiveling projectors casting images of cotton production on the walls: a huge mound of cotton lint is scooped up by a caterpillar tractor’s jaws, a presser tamps the cotton down into huge bales; or a crop duster flies low over the cotton bolls, covering them in spray, while cows in a neighboring field look on and the sound of water rising fills the air; or we see the fields on fire, the revolving stainless steel teeth of a cotton harvester, the strangely unsettling vision of the sun rising through mist or the full moon pulsating above the fields.
Underneath all this, you hear the sound of treading feet ominously flooding the room, and reinforcing the installation’s most spectacular elements: two large paddle wheel-like forms that double as projection screens; and a construction based on a drawing of a pre-steam 18th century dredger powered by men who walk round and round in enormous squirrel wheels. Cogswell’s dredger, looking a little like a medieval weapon, projects a hint of threat and menace. This is in radiant contrast to the projections in the paddle wheels that show the ghostly figure of a man walking round and round in the soft blue light emanating from the circular screens.
It’s hard not to think of the collapsing levees on the Mississippi, of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, of the industrial and agricultural pollution fostered by our need for King Cotton, and of Martin Luther King quoting the prophet Amos in his Memphis speech, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." And yet the installation, whose apocalyptic overtones are unmistakable, never succumbs to an oversimplified view of the consequences of global capitalism. Instead, Cogswell presents us with the irreducible and unforgettable details of the Mississippi River valley’s cotton fields. Human transience and the ghosts that press around us may be at the heart of this vision, but in her life-long commitment as an artist to the clear expression of mixed emotions, she demonstrates how the waters that may cover us over can also buoy us up.
Tom Sleigh
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John Massier
Margaret Cogswell: Buffalo River Fugues
Catalogue Essay: HALLWALLS CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER
Margaret Cogswell’s site-specific installation Buffalo River Fugues
belies its own reality of hard, emphatic industrial materials with a lyrical
eloquence that is almost tender in its application. It is as though the
remnants of industrial ghosts past to which Cogswell is alluding surface
as lines of melody realized in a gallery space. Ductwork and conduit are
drawn three-dimensionally throughout the space and the multiple allusions
to heavy industry emanate with reverent lightness.
Experientially, Cogswell’s installation is striking in its unavoidable
contrasts. The gargantuan forms of industry diminish us when they loom
before and over us—paradoxically, in much the same way that natural
forms such as mountains, canyons, and rivers diminish and humble us. Cogswell
uses our familiarity with this relationship to her advantage and great
effect. Though her installation is succint and concise, the physical presence
of enormous ductwork in the gallery is nonetheless startling by its allusion
to an omnivirous scale.
Undercutting the weighty presence of the ductwork, electrical conduit
snakes about with a serene grace, punctuated at specific points with lantern
boxes, housing the looped images of white candles, burning down and then
burning up again. The conduit, in particular, elaborates the sensation
that the installation has been drawn in space. It all looks convincingly
functional (and some of the conduit does, in fact, power specific elements
in the exhibition), while simultaneously reading as what it is: a purposely-aesthetic
realization, both a sculptural installation and a drawing rendered with
galvanized steel and electricity. Industrial calligraphy.
The scale and materials set us up with certain expectations of volume
and noise and cacophony and yet almost everything else in the installation
cuts against the grain of this expectation. The environment is astonishingly
serene and the sounds that are heard reach us not through an abrasive
dissonance but at levels so intimate they almost whisper. A lone radio
beside some abandoned toolboxes emits a remix fugue of aspirations and
lost dreams: fragments of songs, evangelical prophecies, and tourists
exclaiming the wonder of Niagara Falls. Cogswell’s audio elements
are sentiments with no place to go and enhance the notion of abandonment
within the space, particularly the sounds of an old steel mill like a
labored exhausted breath.
Fugue is a double-edged reference that Cogswell utilizes with maximum
flexibility. It is a musical reference relating to the repetition of a
particular theme with variations within the repeated lines. It also refers
to a disordered state of mind, specifically when one has wandered from
home and experiences a memory loss related to the environment that has
been rejected and left. Taken together, one could surmise a hauntingly
elegant cycle of lostness, fueled perpetually by a forgetfullness as to
the nature of the loss.
Buffalo River Fugues is the third in a series of River Fugues, in which
Cogswell has explored the complex and still-changing relationship between
humans, industry, and river systems—not merely in an elegiac manner,
but in consideration of multiple layers of meaning within these relationships.
She does not simplify the equation and lionize the natural world at the
expense of industry, as though the latter’s contribution were merely
degradation and environmental havoc. The elegance with which the installation
is realized extends to each component and not merely the sense of loss.
Industry too has a certain irrefutable magnificence about it and it is
impossible not to recognize this in Cogswell’s treatment of her
industrial materials and components, and the undeniably hypnotic—one
might almost say romantic— footage of hot steel running through
a mill. In some sense, that is beauty incarnate. Her use of ductwork reflects
a thicker brushstroke, but one equally compelling and valid as the lines
of conduit or the delicate flicker of a candle. Industry is not a villain;
it is an equal partner, a co-conspirator and enabler of progress.
It feeds us, fuels us, burns us, scars us. It’s beautiful and horrible.
It makes our lives better, easier, and devastates the natural world. Like
a musical composition, Buffalo River Fugues is constructed from fragmented
parts because only a collection of elegant fragments suffices to reference
the complex interdependence we share with the natural world we subsume
and the industry that enables us to do so.
John Massier
Visual Arts Curator
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Eleanor Heartney
Margaret Cogswell: Cuyahoga Fugues
Catalogue Essay: SPACES WORLD ARTISTS PROGRAM
ISBN # 9667008-6-4
"The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions
that inhabit our landscapes." -Robert Smithson
It is rare for an artist today to dwell on images of industry. From the
perspective of contemporary art, it is as if the factory, the steel mill
and the oil refinery do not exist, or have been relegated to that portion
of consciousness where unwelcome realities are entombed and repressed.
Yet this was not always so. The history of art and literature since the
industrial revolution are full of depictions of the world of smoke stacks
and factories. Sometimes these are presented as metaphors for lost innocence,
as when Milton serves up the “great furnace flam’d”
with its “adamantine chains and penal fire” as the image of
hell in Paradise Lost, or D H Lawrence conjures the coal mine to suggest
the blighted landscape of modernity.
But for others, industry is a symbol of progress and hope. Carl Sandburg’s
Chicago is the “City of the Big Shoulders” personified thus:
“Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth,
laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs.
..”
Charles Sheeler’s sleek precisionist factories and
Joseph Stella’s cathedral like suspension bridges are the visual
equivalent of this optimistic vision.
Whatever their particular position, such artists draw on the great shaping
tension of the modern world brought about by the intrusion, in Leo Marx’s
apt phrase, of “the Machine in the Garden.” Nostalgia for
an imagined pastoral past mingles with recognition of the transformative
power of industry to create an almost schizophrenic sense of reality.
As Leo Marx notes, our national myths are rural but our reality is urban.
Margaret Cogswell’s Cuyahoga Fugues is a rare artistic
exploration of this complex terrain. She has taken as her subject the
Cuyahoga River which winds along a 120 mile journey through Ohio to Cleveland
before emptying into Lake Erie. Known by the native inhabitants of the
area as the “crooked river”, the Cuyahoga gained notoriety
in 1969 when its surface caught fire, a disaster which helped spark the
passage of the Clean Water Act.
Cogswell was struck by the multiple roles which the river plays in the
lives of those who live along its shores. It offers recreation, glimpses
of natural beauty, and for many inhabitants, a means of livelihood. Without
the river, and the trade routes it provided, Cleveland would never have
grown into a major city. Nor would the Republic Steel Corporation and
Jones and Laughlin steel mills, which at one time employed 3,400 have
ensconced themselves there.
Today the mills are only a shadow of their former selves. Most of the
blast furnaces, basic oxygen furnaces, continuous slab caster, hot mills,
and finishing divisions have been abandoned. Their empty shells lie crumbling
throughout the Flats, like ruins of an ancient city left to the elements.
However, Cogswell discovered that there is still a functioning blast furnace
where molten iron is made from coke, iron ore and limestone.
Cuyahoga Fugues is just that - an installation
which weaves together voices, the sounds of river and steel mill, and
video images of nature and industry to convey a sense of the overlapping
realities that find their center in the Cuyahoga River. To create this
work, Cogswell traveled the length of the river during the winter of 2003,
taping the landscape and its inhabitants. She gained entry into the working
blast furnace and recorded its sights and sounds. And she interviewed
the river’s residents - steel workers, children, environmentalists,
fishermen, city planners and a local social and cultural historian.
The resulting installation brings all these elements together in a darkened
gallery whose windows have been closed off by sheets of the same steel
made at the mill. Dominating the gallery are two large steel pipes of
the sort used for conducting the wind from the power house to the blast
furnaces to feed the fires. These become literal conduits for the sounds
and images of river and industry. Coiling from the back corner is a pipe
which has been partially cut away and covered with plexiglass which creates
a screen on which an interior projector casts images of the Cuyahoga river.
Distorted from the oblique angle of the projection, we see the reflected
landscape of the river as it moves from its rural source to its industrial
mouth at Lake Erie. The indigenous sounds of “civilization”
along the way belie the beauty of the landscape. At one point a siren
warns of an approaching train and ghostly reflections of ducks in the
water float by. At another the shadowy figure of an ice fisherman perched
atop a cooler appears. The sounds of the river mix together - mingling
birds chirping, rushing water, sirens, a symphony of car horns. The film
carries us from the relative purity of the upper river to the densely
populated industrial section below. Meanwhile, the circular opening of
the pipe distorts the images in another way, abstracting them to create
a whirlpool effect.
The other pipe is suspended in the middle of the room, making a right
angle whose intersection is also filled with a video screen. Here, the
sounds of the mills dominate, filling the air with whistles, sirens, and
the harmonic sounds of the wind rushing through pipes to feed the blast
furnaces. The images projected on the screen are equally dramatic - we
see the fire radiating from the mill, rolling steam from the cooling process,
the flatbed railroad cars carrying hot slabs from the continuous slab
caster to be rolled into sheets at the hot mills, billows of smoke from
the basic oxygen furnaces, an eerie tour of an abandoned mill, and finally
the rushing of river water used as a coolant throughout the mills.
Placed between the two pipes is a mini-installation inspired by the ice
fishermen, Cogswell encountered on her trip upriver. A small monitor which
proffers a blurry video of the men sits atop a cooler of the sort they
carried onto the ice. A fishing rod is propped against a small log. A
small transistor radio has been outfitted to project a series of conversations
with river denizens. A woman talks about the way her husband courted her
on the river, a man recalls the long history of the river, and children
discuss the color of water and where it comes from. These voices mingle
with others which emanate from the transistor radio, a portable item hardwired
with electrical conduits to the thermos and portable TV. The second set
of voices belong to former and present mill workers who talk about the
river and the mills, as well as the dangers and exertions of the job.
Together, the visual and aural elements of Cuyahoga Fugues form
a story that is at once celebratory and elegiac. It reflects a set of
relationships between people, nature and industry which is changing and
a way of life which is ending. But it also acknowledges the intense bond
between the river and the people who live on its banks. The river, both
eternal and ever in flux, becomes a metaphor for life itself.
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Christopher B. Bedford
Artists Rethink Our Interaction with Nature
Arts & Life, The Plain Dealer, Friday, June 6, 2003, Section E, p.E8
".......Cuyahoga Fugues, a site-specific installation by
Margaret Cogswell, is the most accomplished work. The New York-based artist
has transformed her section of the gallery into an eerie industrial chamber
that explores the complex interdependence of man, industry and the Cuyahoga
River.
Two enormous galvanized steel pipes divide the space. Through the Plexiglas
portal of one pipe, we see and hear digital film that captures the fiery
imagery and windy harmonics of a working steel mill at night. The portal
also plays scenes of a mournful, deserted steel mill, more like a graveyard
than a center of production.
Glittering images of the silver Cuyahoga in the dead of winter are projected
through a 24-inch steel and Plexiglas pipe at the other end of the gallery.
These are interspersed with scenes of a fisherman who has dropped a line
through a hole in the ice. With neither sentimentality nor irony, Cogswell
records poignantly the mythic character of the Cuyahoga as a natural phenomenon
that both sustains and outlives human endeavor."
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Douglas Max Utter
Making the Wind, Elements @ SPACES
angle A JOURNAL OF ARTS+CULTURE, VO. 1 No. 4 June 2003, page
17
".......A fugue is an interweaving of repetitive themes
and structural features, a catís cradle of sound suspended between
two or more musical thoughts. Cuyahoga Fugues is a deceptively
simple installation of large duct work and video projections by New Yorker
and SPACES World Artist Program resident Margaret Cogswell. In the always
factory-like gallery at the rear of SPACES Cogswell has brought together
thoughts about the constant revisions of the winding Cuyahoga river, and
the mythic interiors of steel mills. She visited a surviving blast furnace
in the Flats during recent winter months and was overwhelmed by the heat
and elemental grandeur she encountered.
In one place she also thought she heard something singing above the roar
of the flames. Asked about this, her guide replied, "This is where
we make the wind." He explained that "wind" in mill parlance
is the air brought in to feed the furnace through a system of pipes. In
her installation, Cogswell includes a recording of mill sounds, among
which the high notes of the "wind" can be heard clearly at times.
It seems like the voice of something like a soul, one that can be heard
here and throughout the galleries and works at SPACES."
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