Eileen Cowin’s penetrating retrospective at LACMA defies straightforward chronology to explore nearly six decades of staged photography, magazine transfers, and video. The installation opened in Los Angeles, presenting the artist as a wry disruptor who blurs the boundary between fiction and nonfiction.
“Between Panic and Paradise” at LACMA
Between Panic and Paradise,
Eileen Cowin’s penetrating retrospective at LACMA, begins in the present, with large, recent color photographs and her newest work, a stirring video. The show then veers back to early work, photographic transparencies with magazine transfers made in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and continues, gallery by gallery, oscillating between different periods of the artist’s nearly six-decade career.
By deviating from straightforward chronology, the installation resonates smartly with one of Cowin’s key operating principles — that we don’t experience time as a continuous line moving in one direction, but as episodic, fragmented, interrupted, layered. Clock hands circle predictably and calendar pages turn on schedule, but internally, within our bodies, minds and hearts, time is a whole different thing — discontinuous, wondrous, searing.
Cowin in Los Angeles and the Institute of Design
Cowin was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and attended graduate school at the Institute of Design in Chicago. She began teaching on the East Coast, and showing work that combined photographic imagery with printmaking techniques, collage and stitching. In 1975 she settled for good in Los Angeles, home base to Robert Heinecken, one of the most consequential practitioners of material experimentation in photography. It was an especially fertile period for photography, and L.A. artists were catalytic in elevating the medium’s stature and expanding its range.
Cowin soon shifted to straighter technical methods applied to crooked storylines. She’s become most influential for her staged photography, choreographed decisive moments shot in both color and black and white. In her lauded Family Docudrama
series (1980-84), Cowin cast herself, her husband and stepkids as characters in suggestive, often tense scenes set in the bedroom, dining room and garage.
In one inexhaustible untitled image from 1980, the couple sits in elegant dress at a candlelit table engrossed in each other’s company, while the young, shirtless son adjusts the channel on a television perched on the near side of the same table. The space is shallow and compressed, like a theater set, and details are few and deliberate. The one picture hanging on the wall is another of Cowin’s images from the same series. The scene thrums with the complexity of domestic life, the simultaneity of partnering and parenting, as well as of looking, being looked at, being overlooked, and being visually represented.
Duane Michals and William Wegman in the Directorial Mode
From the earliest days of photography, artists have staged tableaux for the camera, often using painting and literature as inspiration. Think 19th century photographic storytellers Julia Margaret Cameron and Oscar Gustave Rejlander. There was enough of a resurgence in the 1970s to merit a new term, the directorial mode,
coined by critic A.D. Coleman to categorize Duane Michals, William Wegman, Les Krims and others. Cowin has brought the tradition up to date beginning in the late 1970s by suffusing her work with the look and feel of cinema and television (close-ups, storyboard-style progression), and the centering of women’s experience in the narrative.
In terms of narrative, Cowin is a wry disruptor. She has spoken of her interest in lying and duplicity, and has consistently, fruitfully, positioned her work on the border of fiction and nonfiction. The Family Docudrama
series and much that followed read as something like autofiction, drawn from life but juiced up, rephrased, with gestures and incidents isolated and amplified. Cowin may appear as the subject in her photographs, but she is primarily the narrator, an intriguingly unreliable narrator who recognizes the inevitability of multiple, simultaneous truths.
Cowin’s Magazine Transfers and “New Hampshire”
In those earliest works using magazine transfers, Cowin layered disjunctive images, visually uniting realities that can’t easily be reconciled emotionally. In “New Hampshire” (1971), for instance, a man is seen with a camera to his eye in a peaceful moment
