Susan Cohn: UNcommon moments
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
27 August-2 October 2015
A life is made, not simply endured. Each day we make decisions, take action — social and political circumstances permitting, which is exactly the point: what can we wrest from our brief moment? For we struggle to construct the substance of our lives, even in dark times, even when what we are doing may seem, in that moment, common enough, unimportant. Like putting on a piece of jewellery. Ah, yes…that final touch, before facing the day.
For jewellery does matter. We hold it close, on our bodies, every day, throughout our lives. It is important to us, yet its significance is freighted more in familiarity and accumulating associations than in actual physical substance, let alone monetary worth. A higher value is at stake — the power of jewellery resides in its particular identification with our own bodies, our selves, and with legacies of affection. Gold is precious because it is imperishable — its lustre cannot be dimmed. This quality gives gold its high price, but that distinctive glow also signifies undying regard. For what makes the most important jewellery magical is its belonging, in every sense, to people for whom we care.
Susan Cohn is a jeweller for the crucial passages of life, and for this difficult moment in history, as it happens (more on this later). Her 2015 exhibition UNcommon Moments staged three such passages. The first two were thresholds, always challenging: death, a final departure, requiring a farewell; entering into community, either at birth or arrival, meriting a welcome; and then everything in between, the long procession of days when one simply continues on. Unexpectedly, shockingly, in UNcommon moments death came first, before life: immediately one entered the gallery, there was TILL DEATH DO US PART — the time of departure; in the centre of the gallery was the time of arrival, ironically titled ALL WELCOME; and finally, at the very end of a straight path, a warmly lit space presented several modest rituals for on-going daily life, titled KEEPING ON KEEPING ON, that collectively suggested something of the grace and fortitude these require. Suddenly, it became clear that the way through the long dark rectangular gallery was prescribed. If existence is a passage through time, the journey was rewound as one walked back to the entrance: life in a continuing loop.
The project began with artist Ian Mowbray, Cohn’s dear and terminally ill friend — how does a jeweller mark the passage of a loved one, his UNcommon moment? Cohn and Mowbray opted for a message-stamped toe-tag, a last token to accompany his body to the grave: its wearer will go into ‘that good night’ equipped to communicate. The message stamped on Mowbray’s gold tag is ‘Your secret is safe with me.’ (As Cohn noted, ‘this works both ways, for both the living and the dead.’). Installed together with a spot-lit coffin and a life-size video of a man’s body (Ian Mowbray played himself), being carefully washed and tagged, the ensemble surrounding the toe-tags was abrupt, interrogative, too much and too soon. (Death is always in your face. No one seriously commits to life without pondering the meaning of the end.) Typical of all toe-tags in form and typography, despite being made from materials as various as gold, titanium, fine silver, jade and anodised aluminium, Cohn’s toe-tags suddenly seemed utterly familiar, exactly right. Of course: why didn’t we think of that before? There are nine toe-tags in Goodbye 2015, as it happens, but there can be as many, in principle, as there are lives to celebrate. And yes, life is what is being asserted here: in Cohn’s words, ’Toe Tag is a talisman, not for death but for life. The end becomes a beginning.’
Paradoxically, or so it seems, in UNcommon moments Cohn articulated large questions through gatherings of small objects, set into extensive landscapes or settings. Here lies the structuring insight of the project: each physically modest (apparently unimportant) piece of jewellery achieves a wider significance through its (potential) use by numbers of people. Which is exactly how jewellery functions in society: in multiples, as tokens of types. Cohn likes the term ‘democratic’ for her jewellery; she thrives on making jewellery and objects accessible, and backs up this commitment by producing unlimited editions of earrings and rings, and the Cohncave bowl manufactured by Alessi. Hers is a thoughtfully situated practice.
Small objects, large settings, enormous challenges, for individuals and for society as a whole. As well as toe-tags for leaving, there were ‘welcome’ message sticks for newcomers in ALL WELCOME, the second ‘arrival’ installation. The exquisite rose-gold and ebony Styx is a lovely gift but it is also useful: each contains a USB with essential geographical and cultural information about Melbourne, such as maps, or train routes, or which footy team to barrack for. (Sticks for crossing the Styx, of course.) These Styx were mounted on overlaid wire grids, suggesting both the refined beauty and regulated terror of modern life, which takes us immediately to the huge photograph opposite: unwelcoming wire gates at what might be an abandoned Australian mainland detention camp for asylum seekers. Photo-collaged, showing a stretch of unattended grass, it might be anywhere and nowhere, now that asylum seekers arriving in Australia by sea are detained offshore on Nauru and Manus Islands. (ALL WELCOME is, in part, an irony.)
Here Cohn’s work invokes individual lives framed, in multiples, as she alludes to the internationally notorious Australian government policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, suggesting that government neglects the misery inflicted on individuals. The expansive physical extent of Cohn’s installation shows how, and in some cases where, individual pieces of jewellery are socially situated in, and against, this social and political context. Here disparate elements — the overlapping grids supporting the Styx, the image of the massive gates, the fringed newspaper ‘carpeting’ the floor (so much topical information now shredded) — together assume particular significance: the reiterated grids of modern society (legislative, social, informational) are templates, underlying rhythmic arrangements that nevertheless permit variation. It is the structure of all our days. But these arrangements are not always benign, and they are not universally supported: in Australia, the detention policy and its disastrous effects are strenuously criticised. To underscore the point, small cards in the installation bore the world ‘Welcome’ on one face, with the gate’s wire mesh on the reverse symbolically cut into pieces.
Susan Cohn addresses her work as a jeweller, as a designer, with the same keen scrutiny she brings to bear as a citizen of her community, her country, the world in general. I once saw it written that work done in a spirit of service is akin to worship. The focus of Cohn’s work is how jewellery articulates daily life; the exactness of her choices says to me, ‘This is how objects live with us. And why.’ The third group in UNcommon moments, titled KEEPING ON KEEPING ON, was personal, immediate. It’s clear that two people usually meet at the domestic table-setting of Still life — the Chinese elm tea table is well used, and its eclectic collection of familiar items, such as the Stelton water jug, lacquer tray and Japanese Usuhari glasses, are from Cohn’s own home. Two works explicitly address her ambition that ‘the handmade will add some substance and pleasure to this relentless daily activity.’ The newly-made coupled silver rings for handkerchiefs embroidered with Peace and Let’s Start Again are, perhaps, a mantra for maintaining relationships; the beautiful Cohnical Phase 2 (1997), a small vessel harvested from Cohn’s back catalogue, is more or less the size of a rice or soup bowl, but I always see it as a beating heart, moiré mesh pulsing. (On the wall behind, two iPads show looping glimpses of Melbourne life by day and night, ostensibly inconsequential activities that are, in fact, essential.)
Back to the individual body and everyday wearing. All jewellery (even the most official) riffs with permanence and ephemerality. Its physical fabric ensures jewellery endures through time, each piece mutely keeping company with our journeying selves. Like its wearers, jewellery simply persists. But not without effort. The final work, Ganbatte jewellery, titled for the Japanese word that encourages one to keep on, that wishes someone good luck, speaks to the routine rolling out of small moments, day by day, that make up the fabric of a life, and call for quite as much resolution as great occasions. Seven discreet pins comprise a conceptual emergency kit: a mini-microphone for communication; little ‘reset’ buttons for those times ‘when routines and everyday life get you down’; a 3-D printed ‘Life Saver’ (a favourite sweet, metaphor and joke in Australia since the 1930s); a little rose-gold mounted wooden roll for notepaper and perhaps, for continuity. Ganbatte jewellery reminds us how Cohn often sets elements into a matrix. One may think of her grids as boxes or frames, and they are these, but more importantly, they say that one life, one set of experiences, sits among many. Cohn wrote: ‘Ganbatte jewellery says I see your struggle; know someone is thinking of you.’
Much has been written about jewellery as a gift, a bearer of messages between giver and receiver, often as precisely coded tokens of affection. But what about the love of jewellers, the makers of gifts? Jewellers deal in and desire every day, as its servants and messengers, but convention sublimates their emotional engagement to that of others, who mostly remain anonymous. That‘s why jewellers like making commissioned pieces for special occasions: only then do they enter the narratives of their own jewellery, gain the chance to declare their own commitments. Something like this spurred Susan Cohn to make the toe-tags that opened UNcommon moments. She wrote:
‘I wanted to say goodbye through gifting, through a giving.
And one of the absolute joys as a jeweller
Is making a gift for someone to wear.’
For jewellers make with loving care. This usually happens before the piece meets its prospective owner, so it’s often overlooked, but the jeweller is always attentive, implicitly tender: who else knows how to make the piece sit comfortably on the wrist or lightly on neck, or, conversely, how to structure an imposing ring so the wearer must acknowledge its presence? One forgets the origin of these caresses too often. (I think here, too, of the many others — hairdressers, surgeons, dentists, masseurs, tailors — whose intimate care of our bodies we welcome, as they shepherd us through necessary corporeal chores undertaken with care and precision, at best with a kind of knowing affection.)
In the complexity of twenty-first century life, Susan Cohn, jeweller, persists in making work that matters. For us all. Especially in, and for, this challenging moment in world history, when love and respect is needed more than ever, everywhere.
All quotations from Susan Cohn, exhibition text for UNcommon Moments
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 27 August-2 October 2015, and from text of performance lecture All Welcome, Wednesday 2 September 2015 at Anna Schwartz Gallery.