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By Abe Orden
For BING magazine Dec 2007 – March 2008
By these lights, Peter Coffin’s recent show at Galerie Perrotin in Miami reads as a kind of allegory of iconism, or the making of an icon. On the one hand, there is the long series of “Imprints,” one-to-one scale photographs of a single piece of the Xerox-receptive toy “Silly Putty,” which has been imprinted with an image, photographed, and then rolled up and imprinted again. There are a great number of iconic artworks of the past included among these, to be sure: Matisse’s “The Dance”, a famous still from a Harold Lloyd film, Safety Last, an Eames Lounge Chair, Barry Flanagan’s Leaping Hare on the Empire State. But there are also a number of “lower” images, from cheap advertisements, dime store magazines, pop culture. The artist has, in his own words, “tried not to curate” this group; he has simply selected each of the images “because it has stuck in my mind.” In other words, the series reflects an individual’s iconography (Coffin stresses that it is not a “personal” iconography, and that he is trying to keep his work distant from anything so expressive), but the criteria for such status are not solely defined by what we think of as an image’s “power,” or its “importance,” or by our impression of the genius of its maker, or any other measure of value; it’s just there in the photograph because it’s there in his head. The hierarchy of significance for these images is thus leveled: the putty is a metaphor; it looks a little like a brain and like a brain, it records impressions mechanically, without weighing their worth. In other words, an image may make an impression because it is impressive, but it is at least as likely to be recorded for any other, less ennobled reason
And on the other hand, there is the latest of Coffin’s works to set on its way to becoming an icon. I refer to the infinitely looping, circular spiral staircase of grey-painted metal, nearly eight meters in height and leaned casually against the gallery wall. This is a piece which, if it rises to the cultural height it already promises, would be the newest in a bevy of Coffin’s works to produce astronomical reproduction statistics in the art-circulation machine. Like many of those works before it, the staircase is based on a simple idea, which Coffin manifested without the sort of introspection that leads an artist to ask, “is this work invested with meaning? Does it reflect an original view of the world?” What he asks of the piece is more accurately put as, “does it have the potential to engage meaningful contemplation? Can it provoke reflection?” Make no mistake: between these there is a world of difference, for the former questions interpose the figure of the artist’s mind into the act of viewing in a way the latter pointedly avoid.
In this sense Coffin is ultimately Warholian: rather than asking himself if his new piece is “brilliant,” he made a work that he refers to as “dumb,” meaning both inexpressive and inconclusive. And so when he gives his reason for having had the staircase produced, “it stuck in my mind,” he means that he has simply recognized a potential to stick in other minds too. That it does so by arousing these minds to artistic experience, by kindling “artistic thoughts” in them, is but one way among many for an icon to achieve its stickiness, we may recall from the “Imprints.” But leave that aside; what is important is that the responsibility for generating significance from the work (and with it the possibility for its becoming iconic) is no longer hinged upon the viewer’s perception of a genius mind as reflected in the piece; instead it is transferred wholly to the direct relation of what the image does in the minds of those viewers themselves.
Does it all mean that Coffin has become suspicious of the nature of the iconic artwork as such, or rather of the nature of the artist who would make an icon of his or her genius? I would like to say so, but if I read criticality into Coffin’s work, I must acknowledge that this is value I myself have generated, for to assume that the work itself is inherently critical is to fall prey to the mistake that this art would lead us away from, in that criticism marks the return of the artist’s voice and the work’s specific meaning. Coffin’s art must be recognized as less rhetorical than that, more dumb and so more profound; I elsewhere wrote that it is more akin to a question than to a statement, but I see now that this art is closer still to the experience of having a question itself, a thing from no life but one’s own.