Erin Cosgrove

Essay for the Hammer Museum "What Manner of Person Art Thou?" show brochure

Blood and Irony
By Julian Gough

I yearn for sex, and food, and status, yet when I get all these things, I want more. There must be some greater thing that would satisfy all yearning forever... People have come up with many ideas to satisfy this human ache. Most have been called religions and involve stories designed to make you feel better (you are not a serf, you are the beloved son of God).

Religious stories have grown less effective as the advancing tide of science has washed away their foundations. Yet the stories science tells don't satisfy our needs. So the various arts-once humble servants of religion-have been promoted. Art museums are the cathedrals of our time. Neoconceptualism has taken over the role of Jesuitical Catholicism: intricate, elitist, conceptual, and aping the intellectual rigor of science without actually achieving it.

But the masses never cared for ideas, concepts. The masses went to mass for a regular, often violent story that ultimately reassured. That need for a regular, weekly comforting fable of redemption is met today by the popular art forms: romance novels, soap operas, Oprah, cartoons. That transition, from religion to secular modernity, opens up a huge cultural space. This is the space in which Erin Cosgrove operates. And with What Manner of Person Art Thou? (2004-2008), she takes on animation, because the cartoon-pure art, free to do anything at all-most clearly reveals our needs.