Frames of Mind: Random Notes on the Art of Peter Coffin

Bob Nickas


Crystal Voyager, 1972, the pioneering documentary about surfing, is as much a portrait of legendary surfer George Greenough as it is a portrait of the era, and of Southern California, perfectly capturing this time and place. Surfing is a sport in which nature plays an intense part; an individual, tiny in comparison to the vastness of the ocean, can become one with nature, and can make a transcendent connection. The film is best known for the last twenty minutes, where the camera seems to travel inside curling tubes of water, is submerged in glorious waves, catches the prismatic play of light underwater, and takes us on an embryonic journey. Here, the camera can be thought of as a surrogate body, surfing fluidly through the ocean, through time and space, in tune with this primal force of nature. This last section of the film is set to the atmospheric music of Pink Floyd, a piece titled “Echoes.” As the music rises and swells like the ocean, image and sound merge in a symphonic experience that touches upon the very ethos of surfing, and of a time when the idea of personal freedom was linked with the notion of the individual as part of a larger collectivity. Pink Floyd would later project this footage behind them when they performed “Echoes,” giving visual accompaniment to the music, and recalling the light shows they played to in London in the late ’60s, psychedelic liquid crystal experiments by Gustav Metzger. This period is of interest to many contemporary artists precisely because it represents the possibility that art, like drugs, can be a catalyst for mind-expansion.


Peter Coffin was fascinated from an early age in living things, plants, animals, the woods, the ocean, and the universe — in this world and the world beyond — and he embraces the notion of an “expanded field” of vision in his work. He is an artist who is more like an explorer, someone who seeks out the little mysteries in nature, not to solve them so much as engage with them, play with them, and see what other mysteries they might lead to. His excitement and energy seem boundless, as if the world is new to him each and every day, as if every day offers the promise of a new discovery that he is eager to investigate. Coffin seems to have somehow held onto that rare spirit of adventure that we experience briefly in childhood, keeping his youthful self alive well into adulthood, and informing his art.


As soon as you stepped into Coffin’s most recent exhibition, at le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France, “The Idea of the Sun,” you heard the sound of wind, then you were met with the sweet smell of oranges, and a greenhouse filled with plants. Untitled (Orange Pyramid), 2007, hundreds of oranges stacked in the form of a pyramid on a wooden table, can’t help but refer to the Pyramids at Giza, which have a direct link with the heavens, and for some to the possibility of time/space travel. The configuration, as Coffin has noted, “ … happens to be significant in theoretical physics. The intuitive science that involved a study of structures using spheres proved valuable later when a return to the model of the sphere became useful to atomic physics. Science fluctuates between intuitive conjecture and a search for proof.” In this exhibition there were references to the play between inside and outside, light and space, to nature and mysticism, reminding us that we are in this world, alive, among other living things, flora, fauna, other mammals, and other worlds. Off in a corner, Untitled (One Minute Whale Breach), 2007, is a clockwise rotating loop of a humpback whale rising majestically out of the sea in slow motion. The video image itself rotates completely once a minute, and so the horizon rotates with the whale. The seamless loop, as the artist has said, makes it appear as if “the same whale is leaping out of the water again and again.” Based on found footage from the 1970s, the video plays off the idea once held that the world was flat, that to sail off into the ocean — into the unknown — meant that one would risk falling off the edge of the earth. The forever-revolving whale becomes an image of the turning of the earth itself.



Endless Summer


Circularity and looping are central themes in Coffin’s work. Circularity abounds in nature. The planets revolve in the solar system. The Sun and Moon rise and fall, and with them so too do the ocean’s tides. Untitled (Rainbow), 2007, is made up of many pictures of rainbows joined into a spiral that turns from inside out — or from outside in, depending on your point-of-view. The piece conveys an immense sense of hopefulness (another Coffin theme), recalling Bruce Nauman’s neon spiral, Window or Wall Sign, 1967 — “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths” — as well as Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork, The Spiral Jetty, 1970, and Ad Reinhardt’s art cartoon, “How to Look at a Spiral,” 1946. Untitled (Log With Model of the Universe), 2005, features double revolving disco lights inside the cave-like space of a dark hollowed out log. This is a perfect example of how Coffin can raise the everyday to far loftier heights, and suggest the infinite. Here, with simple, almost dumb, means, he turns the log into a mystical, charged object.


Coffin has written: “This piece involves playful representations of the third and fourth dimensions as they relate to the physics of the universe. Physicists believe that the universe is the shape of a Torus (a donut representing a hypersphere), and since the early twentieth century have used it to describe a universe in which time is the fourth dimension. It is indirectly represented in this piece by the movement of the lights inside the log which consist of two spheres that spin independently and around each other simultaneously, in this way creating the shape of a Torus with its rapid movement. The colored lights of the moving spheres project a pattern out of both ends of the dead log, and onto the floors, walls, and ceiling facing the openings at each end, extending this shape onto and around the room. If viewers follow the light around the room they may notice that it takes the path of a figure eight around them.”


Another spatiotemporal work, Untitled (Four-Color Eclipse), 2007, is a looped film in which an image of a solar eclipse is projected with a revolving color wheel placed directly in front of the lens. You can hear the projector running, see the reels and color wheel turning, see the light bulb, and projected light as it travels across the room. Typical of Coffin for nothing to be hidden, for “special effects” to be rendered with modest means, and for all to be inter-related.


Like other artists of his generation, Carol Bove, most notably, and also originally from Berkeley, California, Peter Coffin returns purposefully again and again to a particular period — the late 1960s-early ’70s — that offers cultural and social touchstones for us today. This is an era that was both troubled and liberating. Among many books published at the time that appear in works by Carol Bove is Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation. A line from this book serves as the basis for Robert Barry’s Marcuse piece continuing 1970 to present: “A place to which we can come and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do.’” The idea resonates for the work of Carol Bove and PC, resonates with the sense of generosity implicit in what they do, while acknowledging that there is always more to come, more to do. We, and the world, are never finished. Again, circularity: one thing inevitably will lead to the next, and all are in some way related, part of a continuum, even if this isn’t immediately apparent. The connections between things are often revealed slowly over time.


Peter Coffin not only refers to this other (possibly idealized?) time but to specific artists and specific works, as well as to music.  Untitled (Free Jazz Mobile), 2007, is based on the structure of an Alexander Calder mobile, with all of the instruments — cornet, tenor sax, vibraphones, drums, and bass — that correspond to those used on Don Cherry’s  composition, Symphony for Improvisers, recorded in 1966. The buoyant nature of Calder’s mobiles meets the improvisation of the free jazz of this time, as if the instruments, suspended just a few inches off the floor, are no longer bound to the rules of conventional music. Coffin here conjures an act of levitation. The instruments hang silently in the gallery, as both musical objects and mute performers. Another musical work brings Coffin’s sense of humor to the fore. In Untitled (Symbiotic Relationship Dance Party), 2003, a collaboration with Brett Milspaw, we are presented with a group of “musicians” in miniature form: Mexican jumping beans that are set on a drum, a floor tom, with a small festive string of lights hung above, and contact microphones inside the drum. There is a small folding stool and a pair of headphones. Put them on and you can hear the jumping beans “perform” at their very own fiesta, slowly turning over and over on the skin of the drum: maracas in slow motion.


But there’s more. As Coffin has written, “This piece is inspired by an interest in symbiotic relationships among living things, as well as the idea that we may be involved in such relationships that we are not aware of. Some scientists have suggested we may be hosts to DNA, and that it is a symbiotic relationship that keeps us preserving the life of DNA, as though this is our purpose as host. (The larvae inside a Mexican jumping bean is like the DNA living in our bodies.) Some have also theorized that culture itself is something we generate unconsciously as a way to contribute to the preservation of DNA, and that DNA may guide it indirectly through this symbiotic exchange. Dance, for example, could be a kind of unconscious behavior that has another significance we do not ordinarily consider, just as this piece applies the idea of dance to the natural movement of the jumping beans and even allows it to be considered musically.”



Endless Column


Around, About Expanded Field (Sculpture Silhouette Props), 2007, comprised of forty grouped elements, appear as actors/props on a stage: here we encounter everything from the Venus of Willendorf, 28,000 BC to Yves Klein’s Blue Sponge, 1959; Nikki de St. Phalle’s Snake Tree, 1964 and Rodin’s The Thinker; Louise Bourgeois’s Labyrinthine Tower, 1962-81 and an Easter Island Head. Coffin’s pieces, which silhouette these objects, are somehow flat and dimensional at the same time. The contours and volume of many of these works are so immediately recognizable that the viewer, in playing a game of identifying them, also “completes” them. A film that includes footage taken from a helicopter flying through natural landscapes is projected behind, and also partly on and through these silhouette figures. Because they are placed in front of the projector, they cast shadows on the screen. There is a play between the fixed object in space (sculpture) and a moving image (space itself). In the film, we see various shifting landscapes: woods, coastlines, snow-peaked mountains, and deserts. Similar to the effect in Crystal Voyager, here the flow of movement, the sound of the wind, and the bird’s-eye view turns the camera into an object of perpetual motion, or a bird flying above the earth. One sculpture referred to in this piece, Brancusi’s Endless Column, 1935-38, calls to mind a specific work by PC, his Untitled (Endless Beanstalk), 2004, a chrome-plated bronze beanstalk that stretches from floor to ceiling, and appears to actually be growing between the floors of the building, and up into the sky.


A new work by Coffin also implicates the space outside of the gallery. Untitled (Red Balloon), 2007, a metal structure that reads as a line in three dimensions — as a drawing in space — and can be seen as a model for a roller coaster, or ride, is meant to convey a single red balloon up, down, and all along the line. Every seventeen or so minutes, the balloon is released, and goes out through a skylight above. The balloon ascends upwards and floats across the city, perhaps seen — or unseen — by people below. Back down in the gallery, another new work, Untitled (Dreaming Seagull), 2007, remains decidedly earthbound. A taxidermied seagull, eyes closed, and on a pedestal which places it at the viewer’s eye level, sits silently on its perch: a classic Peter Coffin moment from a Surrealist painting never painted.


This work can be seen in relation to a new series, Untitled (Surrealist Frames), 2007, wall sculptures adapted from the form of Salvador Dali’s, Messenger in a Palladian Landscape, 1936, a shaped canvas in a gold-leafed frame. Dali’s form is derived from the shapes that contained words in many of Rene Magritte’s paintings, forms that Coffin refers to as “thought bubbles,” similar to the ones found in comic strips. In the painting, L’arbre de la Science, 1929, for example, the words sabre and cheval (saber and horse) are inside a bio-morphic shape created by smoke from the barrel of a gun. Magritte and Dali shared an interest in these forms, and both went on to make shaped frames for paintings. Coffin’s series can be read as a commentary on the back-and-forth relationship the two artists had about these words within shapes, which they intended — as was Surrealism’s aim — to disrupt the accepted image of reality. Coffin’s attraction to these “malleable shapes” is in their correspondence with his idea that “the frame of our perspective is not constant.” The movement from Magritte to Dali to Peter Coffin brings us back to this ongoing theme of circularity and quotation in his work, to acts of transformation, as well as to the endless migration and reanimation of ideas turning from the inside out, or from the outside in, depending on your point-of-view. Ultimately, Peter Coffin is interested, in this series — and in all his work — in expanding the “frame of mind.”