Talk about unphotographable.

I would send you to see this gigantic mixed-media mural-wall-installation-thing for yourself, so you could have your entire field of vision filled up by it too. It's the single most exciting piece of artwork I've seen since, since, Yayoi Kusama's installation room at the Phoenix Art Museum. (Before that it was Michael C. McMillen's garage installation at LACMA.)

This work is by Paul Coze, 1963, and is an extraordinary piece. In person, you don't know where to look, you're not sure which of the complex and dissonant and densely packed images to attend to. Only after a few minutes does it begin to make sense. Please don't judge the quality of this gigantic mixed-media mural-thing by the quality of these photographs, cause it's just not the same experience.

On the other hand I, uh, don't know if they'd be happy to see a line of art lovers at this location, although it's a public place. If you want to email me, I'll tell you where it is.

The work is by Paul Coze. Here's a quote from the Arizona Republic:

"Another work 'lost' for several years was the mural hung in 1963 inside City Council chambers at 200 West Jefferson Street. It was removed and put in storage, where it remained until (Coze's former wife) Kay Coze pushed to find it a new home at XX.XXXX's XXXX XXXXXX. She contacted XXX-etc. about displaying the mural at the XXXXXX, which was under construction. (The guy), whose father had been a spokesman for the city and who remembered the mural, jumped at the chance."

Which means the mural-thing used to live in this building downtown:

This is also kind of intriguing because this building is small and round, and this mural-thing-object is not only 25 to 30 feet wide, it's convex, it bows out, so it would have demanded a featured place in the chamber.

We used to have so much Goddamned style in Phoenix in the 50's and 60's. Whatever happened to us?

Paul Coze lived in Phoenix in the 1950s and 1960s, taught at his Studio Paul Coze, produced public art. If you pull any little loose thread of his biography, though, there's just one surprise after another.

He was born Paul Coze in 1903, in Beirut. His father was French. His mother was Serbian and claimed lineage from the medieval Serbian King Tverko I.

The young Coze was tall, handsome, good with horses, smart, restless. In Egypt he became acquainted with English boy scouts and thoroughly approved of them. On returning to France, he found there were no French boy scouts, so, with Gallic logic, he simply co-founded the Scouts de France at age seventeen so he would have an organization to join.

At age 25 he published a book, "The Manners and History of the Redskins," still in print in France today under a happier title, and that same year the French government sent him on his first trip to western Canada to collect ethnographic objects and take photographs and make recordings. He would make four trips between 1928 and 1934, making him a kind of sideways Indiana Jones.

Back home, according to a web source, he "helped organize the Cercle Wakanda, a group of Parisian 'Indian hobbyists' who staged theatrical productions on Aboriginal themes," using his authentic props and buckskin and model canoes and games, making him a kind of sideways French equivalent of Karl May. This Time Magazine article from June 1938 describes Coze's second club to go along with his Indian club, the limited-membership Club de Lasso formed in 1935, with about 30 privileged people riding horses and twirling ropes in loud checkered shirts there in the shadow of Hitler's impending invasion of Paris.

In 1933 FDR hired the fiercest critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- a guy named John Collier. John Collier's entire biographic is off-topic so let's just say he first encountered Native Americans at Mable Dodge's Taos house in 1919, became sympathetic to their situation, and he was the one who was appointed by FDR to reform and reverse fifty years of punishing assimilation by drafting the Wheeler-Howard Act in 1934 and brought local self-government to the tribes. Do you know the story of the Indian Schools? John Collier stopped that.

John Collier also brought Paul Coze to America.

Paul came from France to live in Santa Fe and do research among the Navaho and Hopi. Coze actually spent the rest of World War II, and then the rest of his life, in the United States, sometimes on a reservation somewhere, sometimes in Pasadena, sometimes in Santa Fe, sometimes in Phoenix. Among many other accomplishments Coze was technical advisor for three minor Hollywood films like "Rogue's Regiment", was honorary French consul for the rest of his days, painted, taught art, illustrated and designed books, and placed some of his cultural collection at the Heard Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. He was a damned good and resourceful cook. He was a "charismatic and purposeful" teacher. And he produced this.

In person the work advances towards the viewer, because it bulges out towards you, and because it has an irregularly shaped raised panel, with images of people of the two societies. Old fashioned but unstuck in time, like the Gammage, not falling into any particular style category. If you were going to take on the same topic today I'm thinking it would show the hybrid mix of Hispanic and Anglo cultures in Phoenix with Natives relegated to the sidelines, if mentioned at all. Just my opinion.

You notice the bridge between the two societies is where Paul Coze chose to sign his name. Given Coze's biography, that makes perfect sense.

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