In the Measure That I Do Not Know You
by Mary Margaret Rinebold
What about the moment a subject encounters an artwork in a museum, in public, or elsewhere? The entanglement that results from these encounters are the enigmatic exchanges Peter Coffin incites--incites being the decisive word. Because the kind of objects Coffin works with do not establish static links – a person looking at an artwork; instead, Coffin actuates the continually shifting rapport between the two, as if the unseen line between a viewer and an artwork is tangible, and dynamic.
Aesthetic discourse encompasses contradictory opinions about the life of an object, or the lives of surfaces, such as images. One of these opinions asks if images and objects, whether fabricated, or collected and assembled, hold self-animating potential, enabling them to be considered entities themselves. Whether this embodiment occurs autonomously, so, after an image or an object has been made, or as a representation of the person who materialized them, is also debatable. But for now, it may be enough to assume that once realized, an artwork moves through a self-determining series of interactions.
Or put differently, the same system that makes branches makes fingers. Well to be precise, photosynthesis and reproduction aren’t exactly the same process. But the two are similarly algorithmic in the sense that they follow a predetermined living system with individual outcomes that depend on the surrounding environment . Similar to a technology, or a script.
But a script needs a reader to be actualized, and the reader may receive the script in divergent ways, establishing a gap determined by chance between Peter Coffin’s ideas, which are transmitted in the form of artworks, and the ideas’ reception, that is, the viewers.
In his 1967 essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Sol Lewitt discussed these potential outcomes in saying
Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times, only to be ruined. Logic may be used to camouflage the real intent of the artist, to lull the viewer into the belief that he understands the work, or to infer a paradoxical situation (such as logic vs. illogic). Some ideas are logical in conception and illogical perceptually.
For example, if an artwork, and one that may be considered conceptual, is formed and made visible over time, such as Coffin’s Music for Plants project (2002-ongoing), instead of collapsed in one place and moment, the immaterial actions and intentions of the artist working in this conceptual capacity sets the interval that puts the artwork in motion, and leads to the time and place where it will be perceived by a viewer. The unseen elements of the production of this system, such as the often-intuitive decisions made by the artist during production, and the numerous potential situations in which the work will be viewed, hold the same material constituency as the artwork’s plastic components.
If this is true, then the site for production and the site for presentation of such artworks are in continual negotiation, because one procedure doesn’t end where the other begins. The two processes frequently interrupt one another. The image conjured by this relationship between making and viewing sometimes brings about a type of uncomfortable, even awkward mental diorama in the popular consciousness of ‘the artist at work,’ such as iconic photographs or films of artists in their ateliers, grappling with the blank canvas.
On the other hand, interchanges between the formation of an artwork and the place it is presented, which increased during the 1960s and 1970s alongside emergent conceptual approaches to art making, was not necessarily pre-meditated nor ambitious. Instead, these examinations were more innate responses to, and means of undoing the matter of an art object.
Another aim of conceptual art practices has been to question the types of audiences who relate to artworks, foregrounding the politics of the roles ‘artist’ and ‘viewer,’ and implying that the distribution and reception of an artwork hold the same status as its material components. That instead of being the sole author of an artwork, the artist is a catalyst in the set of relations – which include the viewer – that comprises it.
And supposing that a publicly exhibited artwork is seen by more than one viewer, it will then have more than one reception; possibly an array of potential outcomes, and multiple identities as the recipient of multiple viewers’ projections. Such as the way a work of art changes depending on the unseen projections of more than one, and normally unplanned, viewers. So that the art object is not limited to one mode, but is instead a collection of numerous individual encounters.
Or more to the point, and working within Coffin’s vocabulary, if a plant were just that, a plant. If a UFO were just an estimation of what we imagined it to be. If a bumper sticker were merely a vinyl, horizontal rectangle pasted onto a surface with adherent on one side, and a collection of letters inscribed across its other side; then fine enough, these objects and their surfaces are a practice in form and style. But what of the affects they elicit? That is, the thoughts, emotions, and physical actions they cause in the person looking at the plant, or the UFO, or the car covered in bumper stickers?
For instance, the bumper sticker says something; it’s a sentence that has a meaning. It may be provocative. Or it may be banal. And if there are hundreds of them, pasted next to one another on the same surface and obscuring the viewer’s perspective of the anachronistically red sports car hosting the series of variously-colored vinyl rectangles whose symbols and phrases become so numerous that discerning one from the other is difficult, the resulting amalgamation of all these phrases and colors could induce a psychedelic mental and emotional meandering in its interlocutor. Non-sequiturs that tangentially take the viewer all kinds of places besides the present, precipitating all kinds of thoughts besides the obvious, besides what is directly ahead. (INSERT DETAIL IMAGE OF BUMPER STICKER NEARBY)
And if I extend the psychedelic atmosphere, maybe it’s also kind of like how single bands of color, when they appear side-by-side and move in the same direction, can start to vibrate. Coffin has used various hues, and applied each to the wall in concentric layers to silhouette the artist AA Bronson. Here, the outlined figure of Bronson is traced instead of articulated. A full color spectrum that includes magenta, burnt orange, yellow, green, blue, and lavender delineates a fissure of the associations that usually indicate AA Bronson – activism, artists books and independent publishing, General Idea, Canadian, bearded, dapper. It’s as if Bronson, or a Bronson-void, had been traced onto the wall as a trace of his energy.
Or, taking the familiar example of a statue in a museum or a busy city square, the rendered figure – its significance and all that it represents – becomes porous. That is, the statue absorbs all the passing soot, precipitation, shouts, laughs, honks, protests, and food carts, surrounding it. These layers of encounters, then, eclipse the objects we think are the topic. The invisible sets of relations between ourselves and the thing we are looking at, or standing near, actually take the foreground of the scene we find ourselves in.
Coffin instigates and observes this frequently changing field of correspondences. That is, layers of encounters that eclipse the objects we think are the topic. Instead, the unseen sets of relations between ourselves and what we are looking at, or standing near, take the foreground of the scene we find ourselves in. Accordingly, we, the subjects, and them, the objects, are together pushed to the periphery while Coffin is simultaneously an instigator, and an observer within this series of transactions that regularly change, develop, or become something else. And another something after that.
Put differently, a truck carrying large barrels of what appeared to be water, drove by me on a road. This was in an industrial part of town. So I was standing there, looking at this truck drive by me, and it was a big semi-truck with a vehicle at the front with a trailer behind, carrying rows of wide, transparent blue plastic barrels carrying what looked to be water. I could tell because the barrels were turning from blue to red with the glare of the evening sun. Probably these color variations were the result of the time of year, almost-August, and the afternoon light: orange and red.
Anyway, the barrels of what I assumed were water were on this truck, and as its long trailer bed rounded the curve in the road, the barrels on it looked like they were expanding, nearly foreshortening in various points from the front to the back of the truck, following the road’s bend. Which made me start to think that this really didn’t look like the trailer bed of an industrial truck, it actually looked kind of two-dimensional, less like their actual function – plastic barrels of water – and more like a moving tableaux.
Clouds inhabit similar dual roles. They serve a meteorological purpose, and at the same time often resemble a series of familiar figures (as anyone who’s spent time looking at cloud formations from the ground, or through airplane windows can attest). (INSERT IMAGE OF COLOURED CLOUDS HERE IN THE BACKGROUND OF ONE PAGE TEXT AND THE NEXT WITHOUT TEXT)
And don’t artworks function this way? Can they also shapeshift? There they are, in the centre of a gallery, suggesting simultaneous trains of thought in the viewer in addition to their physical presence.
Time is also implied, as these alterations in the artwork we are looking at, happen not all at once, but over a duration of movements, the inconspicuous sequence of a series of plots, which may abruptly, and unexpectedly reverse, distort, swell, or crease. It follows that if these concentrations are flexible, implying that the objects that co-produced them are also flexible, then we can further predict viewers are similarly pliable; that a viewer may change the physical appearance of an artwork, maybe even on account of having seen it.
All this is to reiterate that a single logic need not apply to a viewing perspective, and also that, recalling Lewitt, an automatic response may be more effective in approaching an artwork. Which is itself less of a single moment or a single place, than a conduit moving between Coffin, the artwork, and the viewer, both recording the exchange, and being changed by it.
Like engraving. It is a record of that day, similar to a camera obscura, a marking, an acid or sun burn. A scar. Something that says, “this is what it was like to be next to, but not of, such-and-such a figure with such-and-such a shape,” resulting in images that are recordings of once-objects. They have a shape, one that can be documented, formed by a chain of rememberings. (this could be a good place to insert an image of a Sculpture Silhouette
That in 1495, this is what someone contemplating a geometrical form looked like. (INSERT IMAGE Dodecahedron Jacopo de Barbari-Ritratto di fra Luca Pacioli 1495 nearby)
Writing is the same. The words tell you about an event that took place, or what something looked like. But then, is reporting necessary? Or does it have a neutralising effect? If you talk about it, do your words replace the event? Does all the air and momentum of a figure, a person, an experience, deflate in the retelling?
Marks on the palms of hands indicate something happened, such as leaning against a brick wall, with pressure applied to the underside of hands that use the wall as support. Later, people can see this evidence and think they know about the action it indicates, even if they’re only reading the outline. Likewise, an object might not be the same object it started out as, once it is described, rendered, or reprinted, and altered in accordance with its changing surroundings.
Like Yves Klein’s 1962 reiteration of the 2nd Century BC marble Nike of Somothrace. Sure, it’s the famed Nike of Somothrace. Kind of like AA Bronson, the original statue is an icon. Presently, this first version thrusts itself over a very long and grand staircase in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. There was a picture of it in my third grade science book. Since my third grade science book was published, distributed, and seen by me far from rue du Rivoli, I can attest that this sculpture has really made the public domain rounds. Knowing this, and a long time before I was in third grade no less, Yves Klein re-rendered the iconic statue in his signature blue, so that the figure became a meta-formation of itself. Art history-upon-art-history, or a chain of recollections, resulting in the transformation of a statue of a goddess of fitness, into anything other than that.
Or how a collection of recordings made to serenade plants, recorded at the location and moment the plants were being serenaded, may in fact be anything besides that definition and situation. And that the physical manifestations of thoughts and experiences, are in fact all of the memories of those thoughts and recollections, instead of the material we see immediately before us, as if an object’s defining, tactile structure is discretionary, even missing.
A similar literary example is a story without a middle. Better, a story without an end. A story that remains an event, or just an idea, because the thought of it is enough.
Conversely, maybe images and likewise demonstrations can move like stories; ones that are better left without an ending, because as it turns out, they’re even better when they’re cut off in the congealed position of.