Text by Abraham Orden, for the publication pp.
In all things the difference between great and very good is, as a rule, a matter of the thinnest of margins. This is as true in art as it is in sports, where fractions of a second divide champions from the rest. In art, too, the ultimate power of discernment lies with time, but where a race is decided in a decisecond, here a decade is not enough. Only in the gradual course of years will the good work, which has concretized something essential about the conditions of its creation, peel off from the great one, which draws those conditions up into communion with the universal.
In this way the merely good is merely representative of its time, while the great endures in the present, continuing to serve the audience by offering anew to break up the ossification of the present into past, and open a prospect onto a living future.
He not busy being born is busy dying. -Dylan1
Good art is thus a symptom of its time, while great art is a cure for it.
The great contains within itself the resources of its own endurance, reserves of value, ways of meaning, which are only unlocked by shifts in the world around it. The measure of these reserves is the measure of greatness. It is on this that criticism endeavors to speculate.
The works that comprise this book and the exhibition which it accompanies were composed over a period of several years, and finally produced just over a decade ago. I can remember encountering them in those years, seeing the collection of books and magazines in Peter’s apartment, going through the raw prints spread out on a table in his studio. There was a framed one hanging in another friend’s apartment, on the wall of his bedroom. A few were shown together in one of Coffin’s early exhibitions with the Andrew Kreps Gallery, and they have been exhibited around town fitfully in the intervening years. Until now the series has never been exhibited in its entirety2.
Back then, I remember being impressed by the extraordinary scrupulousness with which this project’s overall composition positioned it in relation to Coffin’s declared masters, the canon of conceptual art and its inheritance. Each of these works reproduces several open books or magazines next to one another on a blank white field. The images are on a 1:1 scale with the originals and have been photographed on a copy stand, in the tradition of conceptual photography, wherein this technique of straight documentation is employed to exclude any of the fuss of expressivity from the act of reproduction itself. The artistic gesture becomes contained, then, in the material being documented, in how it has been handled and, in a case such as Coffin’s work, where everything is drawn from extant sources, in how it has been selected and positioned.
I remember too, to return to my original impressions, that the sheer range of these sources bespoke all the hunger, patience, dedication, investment and controlled-burn excitement of a sweetly ripening practice. It is also immediately salient in looking at the work today that Coffin’s concern has been for these materials as objects in their own right, as books and magazines, and not just as sources for images. In some of the pictures the volumes are spread flat to reveal both sides of the fold, other times a side is folded under. Always, the presentation is accomplished neatly, but never too tidily. There is an air of casualness or perhaps respect about the material’s handling. The artist wishes us to know, maybe, that these images are taken freely from the world, that the effort, in a productive sense, was minimal. Or perhaps his confidence in the primacy of what is being presented merely entails a lack of concern for limiting the boundaries of content exclusively to the chosen picture. In any case, the books and magazines are allowed to sit comfortably in the works, as it were, and be themselves.
The impression of coolness that this creates feels somewhat studied. There is a suspicious consistency, for example, to the way in which what has bled out from the excess of the object—the other, partially revealed pages underneath, the rolling page folded away—harmonizes intriguingly with the presented images. And the elaboration by which the work’s overall structure disassociates the artist from traditional notions of authorship could almost be called mannerist, in the historical sense. Above all it evokes the earlier photography of the Pictures Generation, including Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler; Coffin’s works are suffuse in that idiom’s neo-Duchampian character of radical muteness. Clearly the artist has not entered into the representational by neglecting its contemporary politics. But it is as plain to see that his objectives are not doctrinal.
In those forebears’ art the absence of assertion serves to project negatively an attitude of impenetrability, an air of having transcended culture by decoding it. Often, the work reads as evidence given to prove what is false.
In Coffin’s work that same absence of assertion is turned into a posture of genuine inquiry. On the surface the images are all over the place but taken together, they provoke in us an intuition of deeper places where they will connect. Prismatic light, rock formations, patterns, island chains, geometric diagrams, technical charts, color configurations, evidence of humans acting out their nature, of nature acting human: everywhere they range, these choices combine to substantiate an underlying order to the universe.
This work is evidence given to prove—not specific truths, but the existence of truth. Its method in this is Socratic, when barring the common fallacy that the Socratic teacher is itself3 master of the inquiry. True Socratic pedagogy has more in common with visionary management than with rote instruction. The teacher’s superior position merely connotes a better grasp of the goals and a more seasoned intuition; by these it endeavors to lead the students on the path to discovery. There is no implication that the teacher already knows the territory, for asking the right question does not presume knowledge of the sought answer. To seek truth is not necessarily to seek answers at all; in philosophic inquiry, it is rather a quest to improve the quality of one’s questions.
Nothing is clearly told in Coffin’s pictures, no particular things are demonstrated. But in experiencing the effortless inquisitiveness of their arrangement without demanding that it resolve into definite claims, in recognizing the work’s designed ambiguity for a guiding influence rather than perceiving it as an inimical lack, we are prompted to look afresh at the world, and this by relaxing our grip on it.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
-Rilke4
The pictures are like acupressure points on the mind; we touch them to loosen it up, and release its obscure energies.
Coffin opposes the way images exist in these works to the way in which they function in popular media, specifically the way in which images are implemented for express purposes which require their meanings be directed into fixed channels, such as in an advertisement that associates a cleaning product with an image of a lemon to equate it with freshness and naturalness. Because it limits its viewership’s capacity for interpretation to the mere reception of its intended message, advertising makes a fitting foil for these artworks, where the message is purposely multivalent. And with its sinister implication of discouraging the function of the viewers’ independent faculties in order to access their resources, often through dissimulation of the undesirable aspects of what it promotes, it is easy to see how this sort of media could inspire a contemporary artist’s reaction. That said, it must be acknowledged that the mechanism by which advertising harnesses our associations with the lemon and ties it to an industrially manufactured chemical product is itself so fundamental to language and human nature than it cannot be fully accounted for by interrogation of any one aspect of our culture.
When the freshness of citrus is stretched by association to encompass things other than those fruits, this is a metaphor (albeit a hackneyed one in the case of the above). The metaphoric capacity, for abstracting a quality from one thing and identifying it with another, otherwise unrelated thing in order to illuminate the the second thing’s nature, is fundamental to language and, it is widely believed, as old as it.
Figurative language was the first to be born, proper meanings were the last to be found.
-Rousseau5
Aristotle called the metaphor an “enigma that reveals a likeness,” that which “gives a name to what had been nameless.” It is a way of employing the known to comprehend the unfamiliar, an act which, when it is used in the service of truth, keeps language alive and useful in the flux of advancement.
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors… -Nietzsche6
A mobile army, negotiating an ever-shifting front line: our changing understanding of reality gives rise to new ambiguities, new frontiers of namelessness, which require new descriptions. When we seek to create new characterizations, when we reach for new associations, it is the heat of our creativity which melts language and lets these be forged from it.
But this creativity denotes a certain autonomy. The effort to describe the world anew, better, is predicated on a critical attitude to what already exists. If creativity is the heat, criticality is the friction which gives rise to it. This critical stance is directly opposed by the consumerism that is fostered by some all entities that would exploit or exert control over individuals, advertising included.
The anxiety that “society”—our fragmented and global aggregate is itself in need of a new name—is on the verge of being subsumed in consumerism is not new, but I am qualified to comment neither on its historical appropriateness, nor on its present validity. I do however recognize an unprecedented reason to wonder about it emerging, and this in the interval since Peter Coffin began creating these images.
The so-called fifth wave of the information revolution, Big Data, promises to have an effect on humanity that, for sheer transformative power, matches or exceeds that of any of the preceding four waves. The new scale on which information is being captured, stored, and processed is expected—to take one example—to metamorphose our idea of efficiency into something wholly new, which in turn could birth solutions that “save the world” from many of what are widely perceived to be its most pressing problems. Assuredly it will result in a future that will characterize the present day as heinously wasteful. SThere are countless such benefits are to be awaited in all fields (is this a complete sentences?). (is this a complete sentences?). But as with every technological development, the step this one brings us towards utopia is also and simultaneously a step towards its opposite.
Unlike its predecessors, but nevertheless in keeping with the class of world-changing developments altogether, Big Data is not the result of any one particular technology; now in its earliest, emergent phase, it is manifestly a culmination of the other four waves: Batch Computing (the mainframe), Personal Computing (the PC), Online Computing (the server), and Mobile Computing (smartphones and their ilk). From each of these is derived an integral part or layer of a system which currently accretes as much data every 48 hours as was recorded by humanity from the beginning of time until the year 2003, and which, it is currently predicted, will have grown 50 fold by the year 20207.
This is beyond impressive;
Happy is he who could learn the causes of things.
But meanwhile time is flying, flying beyond recall. -Virgil8
The only just comparison to be made with the mind-boggling dimensions in which information is currently being gathered is with the once mind-boggling speed at which information could first be processed with the invention of the computer itself.
The oldest and most recent of the waves of the info revolution beg comparison with each other and distinguish themselves from the rest in more ways than by their grandness. In terms of their development, implementation, and manipulation as platforms for innovation, both are also unlike the others in that they require such resources as to be the exclusive purview of large and well-financed institutions that have the means to educate and employ singularly-equipped specialists: only a few people in the world ever got to work with the first computers, and only a few now are working with Big Data. Though in the case of the latter practically everyone is, or will shortly be, involved.
Raw information is not itself data. It can be construed as such only when it is quantified. Thus entities that would gather data about something—for example us, our habits, our preferences, our thoughts—are obliged to provide techniques for converting those nonnumeric streams into fixed and certain values. There are two main means to this end. To a certain extent, it can be accomplished by translating the information through algorithms that assign it with relative values. While the future promises an increased role for this technique of conversion, it is not hard to imagine that, as relates to human behavior, its refinement is subject to certain ultimate limits. We will not, I think, be guilty of anachronistic romance in claiming that although behavior may be predictable, free will is just unquantifiable.
The second major method of converting our lives to data cleverly circumvents this problem; it is also far cheaper and more efficient and hence, much more prevalent. That is to channel our experience into controlled conditions wherein the options are pre-defined as quantitative, so that participation automatically entails the generation of data. This is one way of describing life online, and particularly in social media. The Facebook user, for example, can post what it wants (within legal limits); but the impulse to say what it “likes” has been obviated: there is a button for that.
If the business of social media is to gather Big Data on the individual, it is most successful when it is thus able to blend pure consumerism, in which the only opportunity for individual expression is through choiceselection, with old-fashioned opinion polling, wherein those expressions yield up the individual to analysis. Call it the templating of experience. It is one of Big Data’s dystopian aspects.
As in an advertisement, where all associations that distract from the promotion of the product are systematically excluded, ambiguity must likewise be suppressed to the greatest extent possible in the template, because ambiguity is as much anathema to data as it is to dictation. Just as an association that produces two or more equally true meanings is unable to transmit a message to an audience, neither can it prompt a positive response from a user.
Ambiguity does not compute. But the experience of it is imperative to independence. Things that refuse to gel seamlessly in the mind cause friction: criticality: creativity: freedom.
No matter the scale, the gathering of data can only ever be merely a symptom of its time. Ambiguity is a cure for it. This art poses the question of what happens when we embrace the cure.
1 Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (song lyrics), accessed February 2014, http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/its-alright-ma-im-only-bleeding.
2 This first complete presentation also enjoins me to point out that in their original form, these are discreet works, and not a single object comprised of a continual chain of images, as might be inferred by the structure of this book.
3 For what it’s worth, this is hereby my contribution to the unresolved debate of how to modernize the conventional but antiquated “he”—or, in this case, “himself”—to stand for human-in-general. “It” may seem an odd and even cold alternative at first, but “it” has distinct advantages over both “his or her,” which is a pair of hairpin turns that require any sentence to slow to a crawl or risk whiplash, and “her,” which is too thorny. There is precedent, furthermore, in the universal use of “it” to refer to unborn children whose sex is not yet known. “It” doesn’t sound heartless to us when expectant mothers use it, so I am inclined to think we could accustom to it.
4 …ich möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben…
Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an einen jungen Dichter; (Leipzig: Insel 1950), 21.
5 For citations of the quote, and more on the topic of Metaphor, see my text “Metaphor/Metonymy” at the University of Chicago School of Media Theory website: http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/metaphormetonymy/
6 ibid.
7 Unfortunately this enticing information was taken from a website of Ogilvy, the advertising firm, which does not cite its source. http://adayinbigdata.com/
8 FELIX QUI POTUIT RERUM COGNOSCERE CAUSUS. SED FUGIT INTEREA, FUGIT IRREPARABILE TEMPUS.
Virgil, quoted in Norman Davies, Europe, A History (London: Pimlico, 1997), 177.