ON RECORD #1
The Long Way Around Can Also Be the Shortest:
Peter Coffin on Field Tests in Modalities of Consciousness
ON RECORD is a series of spoken dialogues with contemporary artists about the ideas and influences that inspire their works. ON RECORD # 1 was recorded in Tokyo and edited by ART iT in collaboration with Peter Coffin.
We had almost completed a full circuit of the Japanese garden at the New Otani Hotel, including a detour up a service road and a brief stop in front of the garden’s waterfall, plus a hike up a small hill that led past a mysterious installation of an idle projector in a weatherproof case placed across the pathway from a freestanding square glass panel with metal frame, before we finally found a quiet spot to sit.
The weather was sunny with a slight chill, and we were sitting on a bench next to a small pine tree overlooking a pond. Helicopters periodically flew overhead and at other times the din of construction work could be heard from beyond the hotel complex. Peter Coffin had agreed that day to discuss the idea that “things aren’t always what they seem.”
“During our walk you were telling me about your Untitled (UFO) project, for which you worked with a design firm, Cinimod Studio, to create a functioning flying saucer that was then flown on two occasions, once over the Baltic Sea in Gdansk, Poland, in 2008, and again off the coast of Brazil near Rio de Janeiro in 2009. You created an archetypical flying saucer design based on references from various sources and movies, with the result being a disc seven meters across with lights that flashed on and off in geometric patterns. Why did you want to do the project?”
[It’s kind of appropriate that we’re sitting in this Japanese garden, a place where the illusion of space is meant for us to question space and time but also to engage in it the way you would when you enter a space for contemplation.]
[I want to tell you how I come to artworks that I create, what I think about. I sometimes choose a subject matter that isn’t only related to what I want the work to address. In fact, I choose a subject matter because I want it to engage further enquiry from the viewers, and I want to direct the enquiry so that it engages more questions and takes on a life of its own. My reason for this is because I think that art generally offers an important alternative to fixed meaning or closure. I don’t want it to dead-end.]
[I chose to do the UFO project because I wanted to think about collective conscious and how we think unconsciously or intuitively about ourselves and the world - to try to understand how we think, not just what we think.]
[The UFO project was a kind of experiment because I didn’t know how it would be received. I decided to not make the UFO a shock-and-awe kind of experience. I didn’t want it to scare people, so we announced it in advance and worked closely with the press in the Baltic Sea region and in Brazil.]
[We tried as best we could to find out how people who knew and who didn’t know were dialoging with each other and what kind of conversations they were having. We worked with a team of sociologists in Gdansk and they interviewed people and did surveys. It was not scientific but they approached it from a scientific position. I take on these experiments with the seriousness of a scientist even though I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m trying to generate an experience from which we can learn.]
“You mentioned earlier that a reference point for the UFO project was Carl Jung’s treatise on UFOS, “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.” Written in the aftermath of World War II, Jung’s treatise was not concerned with the reality of UFOs. Instead, Jung hoped to understand UFO sightings as a socio-psychological phenomenon, putting forward the premise that sightings increase during times of social duress and war, and that the belief in UFOs reflects a desire to escape the self or one’s present conditions. Was Jung also involved in the Music for Plants genre of music that you referenced in your Untitled (Greenhouse) project that we were discussing just now?
[No. Jung is curious to me. I’m more interested in Freud. I don’t much like Jung’s writing but I like that he was a respected psychologist, and I like this because he’s very much a fantasy person. He talks about dreams in a nonscientific manner but because he’s intelligent people respect his opinions. He allowed many people who didn’t study psychology to think about the mind and their own dreams and take it seriously. And that’s a great thing to have accomplished.]
[The greenhouse project was probably my first important piece. I built the greenhouse in a gallery as a staging area for experimentation or experience. Again, it was not meant to be scientific but it looked like a laboratory set-up. Like, here is an experience to test or try out for yourself, but don’t bother taking notes or trying to prove anything, just experience it. It was sort of a proposition in the way it was presented.]
[And again in this situation I didn’t care for people to think too much about whether plants listen to music or not. The Music for Plants genre was popular in the 1970s, a time that I admire because people were excited about fringe science and new ideas and new ways of looking at the world, because they were tired of what had happened in Vietnam. This is just conjecture but my feeling is that in when people bought Music for Plants records, they weren’t really going to play them for their plants. I think you’d probably find that most of them would just listen to it themselves because they were curious. They wanted to know - really they wanted to know - how plants think.]
[How strange to think about what it’s like to experience music as a plant. The moment you’ve entered into that question - and it is a question, saying, “Would you like to know what it’s like to hear music that plants enjoy?” - you quickly question yourself and project yourself into the imagined consciousness of a plant. You do it automatically and that is a creative act. It’s what I call Creative Self Extension. We do it because we’re human, we mythologize and we make a space program to go to places where we can ask new questions - not even necessarily questions that concern our own reality and put food on the table. We want to expand outside of ourselves, it’s what makes us special.]
Is that also what was going on in your Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes) project, for which you created monumental, flattened silhouettes of famous sculptural works from across art history, ranging from the Venus of WIllendorf to Rodin’s Thinker and contemporary art?
[I wondered why these things are still with us and why they’ve been considered important. I am aware that there are many other factors that determine what gets remembered in art history that are not just the mind at work. They have to do with money and power and all that. But I decided to take it on anyway.]
[I was thinking about what it is that makes sculpture function in reality. We walk around a sculpture and look at it in a way that we might also do if we try to understand an idea. Imagine sculpture as a thing on a pedestal in a white room. We look at it at the moment we enter the room and then we’re excited to walk around it and look at it from many perspectives. And we do this when we think about an idea. If we’re thinking about an idea creatively, we walk around it, look at it from all sides, we pick up an object and look at it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, observe it over time, because we want to know it from all perspectives.]
[I’m always interested in perspective and point of view. And the sculpture silhouettes use, very literally, perspective and point of view to engage people to think about how they look at a thing. You see why it’s a very simple and literal metaphor. I’ve flattened three-dimensional sculptures and made them silhouettes that you can see from the front and the side. They can come in and out of you, just as they slip in and out of memory, so I tried to create that metaphor physically, in a garden or park setting.]
[Can we look at all that The Thinker represents to us and understand it from a different position? That’s the proposal with these works.]
“Let’s return to the UFO project. Gdansk has an interesting history, as it was the first place the Nazis occupied at the beginning of World War II and was the site of production for German U-boats. You mentioned that the hangar where the UFO was built was in fact the same hangar where the U-boats were built, and the UFO was the last project constructed there as the hangar was razed shortly after. How did that history affect the project?”
[Gdansk is an interesting place and it became interesting in the context of the UFO project. In the discussions with the sociologists we talked about Poland’s connection to Catholicism and the country’s experience of having endured so many wars, and so the discussion about war, and Jung’s idea about UFO sightings as a psychological response to war, became part of the discussion, as did the history of Poland.]
“What were the survey results in Gdansk?”
[The simplest thing was that people asked, “Why was this done?” In that question I know exactly what is going on in the thinking process. We announced the UFO in advance, we didn’t want it to be a surprise, and that was very odd to people, “Why would you not surprise us with a UFO?”]
[And it’s that question that led to the obvious next question that people asked themselves. That’s where the piece began in my mind. The moment they asked, “Why would you not surprise us?” they knew that there was something else going on and the next question was, “What is a UFO if it is man-made, and is it man-made to begin with?”]
[There’s kind of this obvious question because if you expect to be surprised by a UFO, you expect that it’s outside of yourself, it’s something else, something not part of yourself or our culture or our reality. So when it originates from us then it’s no longer the UFO that we expected and then we realize maybe the UFO that we thought was always outside of us really comes from within ourselves.]
“That seems to relate to what you said earlier, ‘How strange to think about what it’s like to experience music as a plant.’ It’s funny because the idea of what you call Creative Self Extension, or projecting consciousness, seems to have a counterpart in the sex act, during which your entire bodily and mental frames of reference are suddenly reoriented away from the conscious mind to something that is so intensely physical it can become transcendental or out-of-body.”
[That’s why humor enters my work sometimes, because it seems to be a great way to engage thought about a thing. There’s a great experience that I enjoy when I’m laughing at a joke - and jokes are often more serious than they seem to be, they often seem to be about something else - when the laughter dies down and the thinking begins. And I had to have some kind of a shock to enter into the question first, and a joke can do that.]
[Jokes aren’t only about fun and happiness, jokes are like puzzles. They’re like a gate into something and it reminds me of what I was saying earlier that the shortest distance from one point to another might not be a straight line, it might be this long windy joke or myth or roundabout way of understanding things. It might be the walk around a sculpture when we look at it from all sides and all perspectives. It allows us a new point of view.]
“During our walk the subject of religion came up, and the idea of how in some religious countries people have the option of ‘going through the motions’ and then getting on with their lives, whereas in some secular countries the schism between religion and social life can stimulate extremes in fundamentalism that close people to other perspectives.”
[I like being in the middle, I’m sort of like, sure, why not. My personal spirituality is just, “yes,” or “sure.” I guess it’s more like “sure” is the word. And I feel this way about things around me in general. It’s why I’ve been excited about just letting things enter my mind and using that as what informs some of my work, like my acceptance of art historical icons that are in my mind, that I’ve not chosen to like or dislike, they’re just there so I work with them. And I like to think about how different religions - spiritual modalities - operate and they’re fascinating to compare. The Western idea of separating church and state is not perfect either, but there’s this desire to try and create different ways of connecting to truth, and when we compare these different ways we learn more about how we understand truth and what it is.]
“The artifice of art is one way to communicate that idea. Through its acknowledgment of its own spectacularity, the UFO project encouraged onlookers to engage in profound philosophical questions that they might not have asked if the work had addressed a more sensitive topic like religion, and that they certainly would not have asked if they had been focused on determining the ‘reality’ or ‘truthfulness’ of what they had just seen. It creates a foil for understanding the world as a construct. It reminds me of what someone once told me about Japanese gardens:
‘It is clear that everything is highly manicured. It’s not pretending to be natural; it allows everybody to know that it’s both natural and constructed. That’s why I like the sticks holding up the tree branches, because you can see that the tree never had the idea of growing that way by itself.’”