Sirens

1977 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
6:47 minutes

Paul Kos

year born: 1942

gender: male

nationality: American

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens exist in literature across many cultures including Ancient Greece and India, described as part bird and part woman, or like a mermaid. They were said to charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces. Those who lived in the sea lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. Paul Kos’s film Sirens presents four hallucinatory scenes, lush and deceptive environments authored by a mischievous agent. Mocking laughter periodically erupts, disturbing implicit assumptions the viewer may hold about the properties of nature. The landscape is instead revealed to be a construction, a hoax of grand scale orchestrated by a taunting faceless overseer. As each peaceful scene is eventually destabilized, one tries to make sense of why it’s all happening. But as the viewer tallies the reasons the earth may want to take revenge, to see its human inhabitants suffer discomfort and distrust, it becomes somehow easier to embrace the shame of embarrassment inherent to the historical treatment of our environment.

Paul Kos works with everyday materials and video to enact a playful conceptual engagement with life and the world. He responds to simple, humble materials and the indigenous elements of specific sites, which he mines for their physical properties and metaphoric possibilities. Throughout these pieces, Kos’s work uses humor to relate the stuff of life back to larger questions of time and spirituality.

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