Lou Cohen: NOT A COMEDY
“Who is this who without being dead goes through the kingdom of the dead?” These words from the Divine Comedy are not included in the video by Lou Cohen, who nevertheless chose certain passages offered as a pretext for a strange group of shadows, struggling with failure, standing still and from which a few glances and a few words incapable of triggering the slightest movement. This quote, however, condenses something of the experience that we are given to live when we read this text (the Divine Comedy) and more generally perhaps, Cohen seems to tell us, when we venture into this mysterious zone that is that of representation. I put the expression in italics: amidst all the paradoxes covered by this word, this space, this history (and Cohen would not embark on such a journey without taking the history of art with her) – perhaps we need to start at the beginning and accept the unwavering link that representation maintains with death. Being an artist, therefore, and practicing forms of representation, would then consist of maintaining a strange commerce with this dark, disturbing continent – the crossing of which Dante memorably staged. So, without being dead, we are given the opportunity to make our way, momentarily, among those who are no more.
Lou Cohen's proposal in Not a Comedy, however, consists not of “moving on” but rather of “making a stop” – and that makes a big difference. We will not go through Hell; we will settle there – in a time long enough for something of the cold temperature and the dark breaths to reach us too. Hell is worth stopping and that is what Lou Cohen's dry pastel drawings, based on group photos and then digitally reworked, are all about. The result is a vast stage where everything seems to be subject to a puzzle game, to be constructed as much as deconstructed. Costumes, backgrounds and inset images change, faces decompose. It is normal: we are in Hell. As always in Cohen's work, these people are watching us. They carry objects, they show us images (we recognize the faded traces of master paintings in passing), they draw curtains. They seem passive, waiting for instructions: they're posing. The video which accompanies the four drawings will not say anything else but insists on what only the moving image allows us to grasp: time. Because if it takes Lou long weeks to conceive and realize the drawings, once they are finished, they no longer bear the trace of what it is like to spend time in Hell. The video, on the other hand, allows us to feel it: temporality dilates. We wait, we start again, we try again. What happens there is a never-ending loop where everything is always repeated. But isn’t that precisely a representation? Text by Clara Schulmann
