Jeff Cowen

Asemia

7th November 2024 - 11th January 2025

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He sleeps poorly. Has done for years. When he wakes, he writes in his journal. He does not understand what he writes - his handwriting is illegible, even to himself. No matter. It puts him in a trance, a quiet act of automatic mark-making undertaken in the solitude of the early hours. This is essential to his work.

Jeff Cowen makes photographs, technically, but that feels an inadequate descriptor. He sometimes describes himself as a ‘printer’. The act of the camera is just the first step, the first mark to be made, in a process that has as much to do with alchemy, chance and painting as it does traditional photography. I can think of few artists using photography who have expanded the material possibilities of the medium as much as Jeff Cowen.

It is a strictly analogue process. Many of the instruments in his dark room are self made, including the enlargers he uses to blow up negatives. He wears a gas mask, to protect himself from his own chemicals, which he subjects to sheets of thick paper high in silver content. Sometimes he will collage sheets together, and often applies inks and chemicals with a brush. He works alone, and rarely shares specific details of how a work has been made, in part because he doesn’t always know himself - ‘How on earth has that happened?’. He doesn’t even want to know. Alchemy, chance and painting.

As well as avoiding discussions on the technicalities of his processes, those esoteric experiments in metallurgy, he also won’t always discuss the original source of the image. When I ask him where the blurred figures in ORP3 come from, he refuses to say. Particularly in the works chosen for this exhibition, the photographed image has generally been moved away from in the dark room, his treatment tending towards obfuscation, towards making the content illegible. Likewise, his titles are formulaic, numerical and arbitrary - they are designations that reveal almost nothing about the work, useful only for administrative purposes.

Asemia is a medical condition in which a subject loses the ability to comprehend or express signs and symbols. It seems to me to sit at the heart of Jeff Cowen’s work, which is striving for something that goes beyond or before understanding, both for the artist and the viewer. When I suggested it as a title for this exhibition, he said ‘Hopefully people won’t know what it means; they’ll think it’s a country from long ago or something.’

This strategy, a term the artist doesn’t like for its implied sense of preconception, connects these works to a number of historical lines, most obviously Surrealism, where artists sought to tap into the unconscious by applying techniques such as automatism. But in the fairly substantial literature on Jeff Cowen, it strikes me that not enough has been made of the connection to East Asian culture, particularly the practice of Zen, even though no secret has been made of his early interest in Oriental studies, that he studied in Japan, and thought at one point in his life about becoming an academic in that field.

Enlightenment, in the Zen tradition, is not a state of all-knowing, but rather a total acceptance of not knowing. It is interesting to note how close this is in spirit to the Christian concept of man before the Fall, of Adam and Eve before they ate from the tree of knowledge, when they existed in a state of complete unknowing. There is also a Hindu word for it, which T. S. Eliot uses as the final line in The Waste Land - Shantih Shantih Shantih - inner peace that goes beyond understanding. If that is what a work of art can offer, for both the artist as they are making it and for the viewer as they experience it, if a work can create, even for a moment, a feeling of boundlessness, of pure form where specificities and content, all signs and symbols, fall away, then that is surely a thing of wonder, and that is why I am presenting these works at my gallery.

Jeff Cowen - Asemia is presented alongside a concurrent book exhibition of rare Surrealist works.

Jeff Cowen (b. 1966, New York) has a scholarly background in East Asian studies. His first photographic series West 14th Street, which documented the lives of the transgender sex workers who lived in his neighbourhood, was acquired by the New York Historical Society. He then worked as a studio assistant to Larry Clark, and in the 1990s studied academic drawing and painting at the Art Students League and New York Studio School. His works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Germany, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Museum of Modern Art, Tbilisi and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow. In 2021 he was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Grant for Fine Art Still Photography, and in 2024 presented his latest project, Provence Works, simultaneously at the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.