Cose Journal Volume III ‘Sinks’
Cose is a journal that focuses each issue on a domestic object. This issue does sinks. The book promised sinks and delivered sinks.
The cover has a gelid glint and the title plunges out. The gloss of the page has the steely odour of embryonic grapefruits.
Titles such as "Sink Epilogues" or "A Lonesome Basin" run mellifluously like tap water.
There are good images of soaps. Soaps that are firm and serious all of one piece. Soaps with scoliotic spines that bend in creamy arches. Rounded soaps with the dull frankness of soft-edged matter. An Issey Miyake block in ectoplasmic sage stands out. Some lull recumbent on their backs, some straighten forward from the compactness of their spumable meat, all generally glad by the sterile spectacle of their uniform distribution of emulsified fat.
The imagery touches like a Josef Albers best apprehended with eyes tenderised by a surfeit of idle affairs. The colours are good and the grid is clean and the soaps have the appeal of multivitamin jelly lozenges that appeal to listless papillaes.
The solvents have the ‘here I am’, an ‘I’ blithely oblivious to its ‘I’-ness, declarative presence of the models at Balenciaga’s 54th couture collection. They come as stickers of imperturbable fibre plastered onto predictable locomotion. A visual presence with the soundness to reduce itself to a form so typifiable that it occludes all of its latent potentialities.
"Frank, my dear," an editorial by Massimilano Bomba. Staring into the eye of the predator, two jelly orbits plunge out of its soft head. The spheres of white gel globulets prepare to launch themselves into irrelevant orbits. Flared nostrils. The deft thin lips of utter intellectual occlusion. Rubbery extremities. A glossed lump of hopping cartilage.
A very nice essay tells the story of a man who built his wife a sink. He linked the sink to a spring. Then he left her only to later contracted enterocolitis from a deer that had died in that spring.