Desc.

Beth Cowey, ‘Desc.’, Installation view, Chorus/20 Albert Road, 2024

Beth Cowey, Sort 1, Oil, wax & newsprint; Sort 2, Oil, wax & newsprint; Sort 3, Monotype on newsprint; Type 1, Jesmonite; Sort 4, Oil, wax & newsprint, 2024

Beth Cowey, ‘Desc.’, Installation view, Chorus, 2024

Beth Cowey, ‘Desc.’, Installation view, Chorus, 2024

Beth Cowey, Type 1, Jesmonite, Approx 5 x 3 x 2 cm, 2024

Beth Cowey, Type 3, Jesmonite, 26 x 19.5 x 2 cm, 2024

Beth Cowey, Untitled (Desc.), Oil, photographic paper, pencil & gesso on panel, 29.5 x 21 cm, 2024

Beth Cowey, ‘Desc.’, Installation view, Chorus, 2024

Beth Cowey, Untitled (Xerox), Acrylic, oil, newsprint & gesso on panel, 26.5 x 18.5 cm, 2024

Beth Cowey, Untitled (Xerox), Acrylic, oil, newsprint & gesso on panel, 26.5 x 18.5 cm, 2024

Beth Cowey, ‘Desc.’, Installation view, Chorus, 2024

Beth Cowey, ‘Desc.’, Installation view, Chorus, 2024

Desc.
Beth Cowey
16/08/2024—25/08/2024
Friday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm + by appointment.

misc, misc, Beth’s Desc., etc.

Beth says that a painting is either a window or a wall, but that some of these things are both. A swaying either/or between the window’s descriptive tendencies and what the wall articulates. That is, landscape and that which separates us from it. Some years ago I was working for a charity which had just set up a satellite office on an island in the back room of an outdoor clothing and equipment shop. The room had no windows, and so to remedy the absence of a view my colleague took a picture on his phone from outside the building in the exact location where he would have liked a window to be. The snapshot captured the sky, grey; hills, green; concrete, also grey; a car, red; the pavement, a sliver of the sea, figures in the distance, birds in the sky, etc. Since I’m “good at computers” I was tasked with getting the photograph printed at scale so that he could mount it on the wall next to his desk. Several years later, the service closed and the picture was still sitting on the floor.

Since the works in Beth Cowey’s exhibition Desc. are small — Beth refers to them as anti-monumental — I went searching through my inbox for an article on “minor” artworks (too basic??) that a friend once shared with me while we were preparing for a group show. I haven’t been able to find the article, only my thanks for sending it on, an admission that I was struggling to understand it, and an offering of an Anne Carson poem in return, which I’d like to share here in full because I’d forgotten about it, and was glad to discover it again while looking for something I’d lost (note: losing things and forgetting things are two different things.)
Major things are wind, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the names of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct time. There are more major things than minor things overall, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.*

I’d like to add that minor things are often miscellaneous things. The miscellaneous isn’t so much about leftovers — which say something about consumption and the brink of waste — but things yet to return to some kind of order; things which might one day prove “useful” or are otherwise soaked in the wax of memory, by which I also mean mood. The miscellaneous makes of itself a history of the uncategorizable. A chronicle of mysteriously notated documents; silk flowers fallen from their bouquets; panes of perspex and glass no longer attached to their frames; light shades of various shapes and styles; a letter from a dead relative asking where that CD-R you promised had got to; a single chopstick; a surprising number of UK to EU or EU to UK power adaptors; pebbles from Brighton beach; a jar of elastic bands; a CD-R (not that one) with unfamiliar handwriting; a small tin with a kitsch design housing a solitary button. Interesting fact: the word miscellany at one time also referred to the food of gladiators. A rich mix, mash, misc, etc.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in anxious proximity with the miscellaneous recently. Reader, I’ve been moving house and the landlord has a penchant for fitted candelabras. I don’t know how much you need to know this — there’s a chance you already do — but I thought I’d explain my situation because we might also be talking about concealing and presenting, about the depth of the background, about what is felt here and there, about mood and not having a mood, about the fold bringing the internal into contact with itself. It might explain my stakes in these sorts of things. In sorting things. In gathering, holding and undoing. In the perpetual waste and repair** of life.

Another interesting fact (facts can be miscellaneous, too): until the 20th Century books were often bound in elaborately folded signatures and sold “unopened” — this meant that the reader had to carefully cut pages not yet separated along their top edge in order to open up the text. We could say that this act of cutting or tearing was the last act in making the text public, in wresting it from its author, even its printer. I read somewhere once*** that when we make a thing (a painting, a poem) public it’s no longer ours, but yours, theirs, etc. Maybe not everyone shares this sentiment, but I do. Anyway, when faced with unopened books, some readers would tear each page as they went along, abandoning the book half shorn when they moved on to something else. I like this image of the half read book made manifest. It emphasises a sense of loss and its opposite, the either/or and back again which we find at the studio desk, where the unexpected blooms as a felt potential in the transfers, folds, cuts and tears of working hands.
And on that, Beth’s sculptures — which you might find sitting on surfaces, or affixed into the walls like wanton architecture — ask what happens when the excess, discarded labour of studio work (here, stacks of printed paper) are grafted together and cast. Casting is all about potential. The potential of combining water and powder. The potential of mixing and swirling. The potential of watching it thicken like yoghurt. The potential of allowing it to fill a volume. The potential of a chemical reaction, making something that was not once solid, solid. These casts solidify the miscellany of material production, before being broken apart so that they appear as artefacts and return as fragments, traces, naturally. A minor thing, half book edge, half striated landscape, chipped by the waves and landed in a gallery in Glasgow. A room with a view of the street.
Another interesting fact: apparently, if a Sufi dervish loses anything from his pockets during a whirling ceremony, he shouldn’t pick it up but instead see it as a sacred loss.****

Text by Jessica Higgins

* Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Major and Minor” (1992)
** Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall” (1917)
*** I think it was the artist Gregg Bordowitz, either in his book “Taking Voice Lessons” (2014) or during his talk “Gimme Danger” (2018), in which case the sentence should read “I heard somewhere once…”
**** Catherine Clément, “Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture” (1994)

Written on the occasion of Beth Cowey, Desc., August 2024. Organised by Chorus at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow.

Image credit: Matthew Barnes

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