Peter Coffin
By Abe Orden
Coffin’s art is generally termed conceptual, because it is about ideas, but the type of idea in which the artist traffics bears special attention; his work never provides the viewer with a finished thought, rather there is only a frame of mind in which thoughts occur. This is because he is good at keeping the work from being declarative, and he is good at excluding assertions from it.
Declarations and assertions are solid, fixed, inert things that are imposed upon the world; in place of these, Coffin limits his practice to inquisition and to proposition, states which are unstable, permeable, reactive to the reality they engage with. Thus I find the artist’s term for his practice, “catalytic conceptualism,” most apt. Coffin himself doesn’t know the answers, isn’t concerned with answers but only with questions of a kind that have to lead through a dialectic process to further questions. “Total curiosity,” to quote David Sylvester, is Coffin’s “ideal attitude of mind.”
But where the statement was originally referred to an artist’s ideal for himself, here we can take it to mean Coffin’s ideal for the viewer. He has said that he wishes his practice to be focused on “producing new kinds of artistic experiences in the viewer, rather than on drawing them into the character of the object.” The pieces which result are not containers for ideas; they are springboards for the minds that encounter them. Their success depends upon achieving a special resonance for thinking that in itself engenders curiosity. It is a quality of almost aphoristic profundity, spurring the viewer’s mind forward as it opens secret doors and reveals hidden shortcuts in the elaborate passageways of conscious thought. The distinct flavor of this experience is what one eventually comes to recognize as the signature element of Coffin’s work; it unifies the objects he has produced in the past five years, just as a medium or a style unifies the work of another artist.
It is in this way that the work asks instead of telling, and in the sense of agency or invitation for the viewer that is its upshot, that I see Coffin fulfilling not just his desire to exchange experience for objects as the site where art is located, but also his ambition to create “new kinds of artistic experience.” Consider how his claim echoes a rather more polemical observation from Conceptualist forbearer Joseph Kosuth, who in 1969 wrote that the value of an artist “can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying ‘what they added to the conception of art,’ or what wasn’t there before they started.” Coffin vis a vis Kosuth gives a handy example of what adding to the conception of art looks like, since Kosuth is of course the very definition—if you will—of a declarative artist working in the Conceptualist tradition, an artist of ideas, like Coffin, but one who works in fixed statements and nothing but. When considered alongside Sol LeWitt, another of the seminal characters of the movement to whom we will have recourse in this essay, whose texts on conceptual art are, as one might guess from their titles—Sentences on Conceptual Art and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art—another series of declarations, we have a wide and solid ground against which Coffin’s work stands as figure.
But if by attending to its mode of address we can thus distinguish Coffin’s practice from its historical precedents, the clarity of that boundary is threatened when we reach a third and most important antecessor, Bruce Nauman, a contemporary of Kosuth and LeWitt whose work blurs the distinction between historical ground and contemporary figure by virtue of Coffin’s direct engagement with it in his own practice. Consider Coffin’s 2004 sculpture Untitled (Line after B. Nauman's “T.T.A.H.t.W.b.R.M.T.”); this piece, which is referred to Nauman’s canonical 1967 work, The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths (Window or Wall Sign), has been variously described by Coffin as “the path of an idea as it develops,” and as “a freeing of Nauman’s idea.” On the first interpretation, we imagine the idea to be a dashing spark, which blazes this luminous trail as it bounces and squiggles its way between and through unrepresented entities. The undefined substance through which it passes on its journey could exist on a number of planes; it could be composed of the conditions of reality, or of abstract problems, or different aspects of consciousness, or different consciousnesses altogether. Whether the idea is traversing one mind or amongst a few seems beside the point, which is itself a point the work is offering. It is a polymorphous picture, an image open to multiple meanings. And when the piece is called “a freeing of Nauman’s idea,” it reveals a further motivation for its particular form, one which is parallel to the “dashing spark” but which undermines the very notion of an idea being Cartesian and graphic, indeed one which destabilizes the model of linearity in thought and history, upsetting the narrative which assures us that Nauman’s work comes before Coffin’s and that Coffin’s art builds on top of Nauman’s.
This reading of the work requires that we view Line as an interpretive distortion of Nauman’s neon spiral—and of the text which is embedded in it—into a three-dimensional scribble, likewise realized in neon tubing, though here simplified from red and blue to white. In this formulation, Coffin’s piece, put simply, is an image of Nauman’s; it is a representation of the original work. But if this is an image of Nauman’s piece, it must also be an image about Nauman’s piece, and furthermore it must be Nauman’s piece in a new image. One of LeWitt’s statements presents itself—with dizzying results: “a work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s.” A network of looping interpretations is revealed. First, as an image Coffin has made of Nauman’s piece, Line represents what was conducted from Nauman to Coffin. But since this is Nauman’s piece re-imagined, the work conducts on another level—but at the same time—now through Nauman and from Coffin. Finally, since it is also Nauman’s piece re-imaged, a re-presentation of the orginal work entails, and so on third level it conducts Nauman’s original piece through Coffin.
We have established Coffin as an artist of ideas, and one of the notions he likes to bandy about is that “an idea may have a life of its own.” Perhaps Line first represents the life of the notion that “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths”; perhaps then it re-presents that idea itself, and by so presenting it anew, perhaps it now conducts the mystic truth that “an idea may lead a life of its own”; this mystic truth, conducted to us through the work of art, then represents and re-presents the idea that artists help by revealing mystic truths, etc. Leave it aside; if we have grasped how the ideas are being transmitted in Line, I think we may excuse ourselves from chasing down their content, for the real mystic truth, the one that reveals the nature of things while defying its own interpretation by logic, is to be found not in the substance of these ideas but in the structure under which they operate.
Under each of our two interpretations, Line conflates its self-as-representation with its self-as-represented: the picture of the work of art is the work of art, either when the picture of the path of an idea is itself the idea, or when the idea of Nauman’s piece is the piece and is Nauman’s piece. The work keeps pinching together the planes of representation and reality, for a moment eliminating their difference. This redoubling of pictorial and real function is as we have seen: infinitely nested, one inside another, but irreducible; it is difficult to hold onto; it is “strange to think,” and that is its magic. For in this dissolution of the kinds of viewing into a single undifferentiated View, the artwork has revealed an explosive peculiarity, a kernel of inexplicability that defies parsing into our extant categories for experience.
This, I believe, is the sort of “new artistic experience” to which Coffin aspires, but we have yet to uncover its inherent value. Nauman points the way to an answer; in a 1980 interview, he said that “if you think of art as a discipline, then the people that are interesting are the people that are exploring the structure of the discipline.” “Producing new kinds of artistic experience,” “questioning the nature of art,” “exploring the structure of the discipline,” these are but many names for a single action; Nauman put words to the functional merit of such actions when he continued, simply, that “they’re breaking the discipline down, too, as they’re expanding it.”
The new artistic experience, this means, presents a challenge to the old experiences, as a new look in painting will undermine the dominant style of the moment. The new artistic experience is critical of what exists; it interrogates what appears natural and reveals the assumptions lying below it. The new experience takes the terms given it by the discipline and dismantles them, renders them useless, “breaks them down”; in so doing it calls the viewer to a new order of address to the world; it can literally allow one to see things differently.
Line, for example, is an inherently representational work of art, and this bears with it certain conditions that we have found Coffin aims to deny. On the one hand, the experience of viewing an image is always already one of being “drawn into the object,” for whatever an image’s content, it is a subject of contemplation which reifies in the viewer all the old notions of what it is to look at art. On the other hand, representations are fundamentally declarative; the more specific an image, the more insistently it signifies, thus exerting more assertion. Line is subject to these terms, but it rebukes and transcends its own nature; by compounding its condition as an image with its function as an idea and its existence an object, it renders the distinctions between those concepts, and with them the “facts” we use to identify each, meaningless. In Line the representation cannot be extracted from the reality, so contemplation in the traditional sense is nullified, and what appears to be asserted by the work is infinitely called into question.
In art that is good in the way that Coffin’s is good, the limits which define its parameters are also the organs which generate its vitality. We have found that the work’s important parameter is the exclusion of the declarative, and that its vitality is measured by how thoroughly it breaks down the terms the discipline presents it with. In the next work to which I turn our attention, Untitled (Greenhouse), 2002, the prohibition against the declarative, which means here both the definitive and the expressive, is present at a deeply intrinsic level. This pushes Coffin to radical artistic invention on a completely different scale, which in turn—and this demonstrates the principle—produces a consonantly more wholly unprecedented, thoroughly destructive—and thus deeply vitalized—artistic circumstance.
The material object of Greenhouse is a middle-sized, commercially available greenhouse, filled with a quotidian selection of houseplants. Installed in the gallery, the work tends to invite reflection on the Readymade, but this is a misleading avenue, for the Readymade was a challenge to notions of the artistic object, and Greenhouse is addressed to artistic experience, placing objecthood beside the point. Greenhouse is an object, to be sure, but the specific class of objects it inhabits gives a crucial distinction. Namely, it is a site, a ground for an event. The event is where we must direct our attention. There is one modification installed amongst the verdure which speaks to this: the studio setup, replete with microphones, amplifiers, and other equipment for the production and reproduction of music. The greenhouse is a music venue, where artists are invited to play to an audience part animal, part vegetable.
Now there appears to be nothing particularly unusual afoot at one of the musical performances at Greenhouse, but there are clues. The inclusion of plants is suggestive; the fact that one is hearing or playing live music in a gallery or a museum is made slightly uncommon by the fact that it is part of an artwork and not corollary to it—that is, that the performance is not an event itself, but only a part of the event at Greenhouse. But in its visible nature these circumstances are basically indistinguishable from other, familiar musical situations. To say that they are indistinguishable, however, is not to say that they are the same. It only means that the way in which these events at Greenhouse differentiate themselves from the commonplace event must be teased out of them by analysis, and this will show them to be radically different indeed. For if in Line Coffin managed, with deceptive simplicity—LeWitt: “most successful ideas are ludicrously simple”—to dissolve the boundaries between a number of modalities of viewing, here he bags a much larger prey by collapsing in similar fashion the categories we use to understand the production and consumption of art.
Here again, as in Line, we have art about Coffin’s “idea which leads a life of its own,” but now the phrase evokes a different meaning. Greenhouse is not a conduit for the artist’s idea to reach the mind of the viewer; we must turn instead to another statement of LeWitt’s statements: in Greenhouse, “the idea is a machine that makes art.” Here the idea is the frame, the context which Coffin has assembled, comprised not only of materials and plants, but of musicians, audiences, galleries and museums. This is the machine which will make the event, which is the art; there are several implications.
The first is that Coffin has only assembled this machine; he has produced nothing; indeed he can only produce nothing, for when the machine makes the art, there is no longer an artist in the traditional sense, no maker, no author. This can be termed the holistic exclusion of the declarative; it is the limit against expression and assertion on the part of the artist at its deepest, most intrinsic level of the process of art-making. It has been rendered impossible.
The second is that the viewer, as participant in the event, is integrated into the machine. This is another way in which the possibility of assertion is nullified, for just as the role of artist has been absorbed, there is no longer a viewer position over and against the work of art to which it would declare itself.
The third is that the machine has not just absorbed the roles of viewer and artist, it has dissolved them, and other roles along with them, just as representation and reality are dissolved in Line. The viewer, the musician, the plant, the gallery, each is no longer classed as audience, performer, object, venue. Each and all become an amorphous, unified body which together “makes the art.” In short, all of the identities we assume art will provide us with are completely scrambled in Greenhouse; the modes of social interaction which the field of art defines are broken down, literally dis-integrated, and we are left wondering why it is we had come to expect those modes to be handed to us in such a way in the first place.
If the value of such an upheaval is self evident in at least its raw form, one finds oneself treading onto ambitious intellectual territory indeed when one begins to translate the implications into the realms of the social, political, cultural, and theoretical—too ambitious for the present work, I’d say. As Nauman put it, “art is political in the sense that it pokes at the edges of what’s accepted or what’s acceptable, or because it investigates […] how the culture can and should function […] So the impact has to be indirect, but at the same time I think it can be real.” By taking the work’s enormous critical activity as a kind of code by which to decipher and appreciate its experiential worth, we can tune in to the work’s “real” impact. And though it is indirect, we needn’t only observe it; we can feel it.
Understanding of the freedom granted to one as a participant in Greenhouse is accompanied by a temporary loosening of the self, a sense of involvement in an undifferentiated collective enterprise—I stress once again that this is something one must realize to appreciate; it is not a sensation that overwhelms those in the presence of the work. But once one has grasped that fluidity—if I may be allowed to speak in such paradoxes—one is party to an experience best characterized by co-opting a phrase of Dave Hickey’s, to whom I leave the last word: Greenhouse operates on a modified version of “Chet Baker’s premise”: that the event plays the participants and that, consequently, the event, as played, is not a showcase for anyone’s originality, but a momentary acoustic community in which the participants breathe and think together in real time, adding to the event’s history, without detracting from its integrity, leaving it intact to be played again.