Peter Coffin, Between Prosopopoeia and Mary Poppins

by Ann Hindry for Artpress


It was Albert Camus who said that we “live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life." In a way, the protean art of Peter Coffin is a quest for precisely such upsets. This young American artist goes freely about finding objects to embody ideas, so that we can really put them to the test.

With that typically American mix of scientific pragmatism and mystical aspiration, Coffin materializes personal experiences in the form of objects that can be seen for what they are but also suggest that there is something beyond as well. "I consider art as thought form more than anything else," he says. This is art as heuristics, achieved through the phenomenological metamorphosis of the idea.

What could be viewed as either naivety or megalomania is partially explained by the way in which today's artists just like their viewers/interlocutors-are submerged in a mass of objects, regularly solicited by the appearance of new technologies, and constantly titillated by the frantic circulation of data of all kinds. In order to give their work a chance of connecting in the relentless rush of this world that is flat (no vertical thought) and where knowledge is flooded by proliferating information networks, they are forced to keep reinventing or at least adapting their artistic practice. Coffin seems aware of both the pitfalls and the potential of such a situation. Living in a simpler world, predecessors like Beuys, Warhol and Tinguely exploited the mixture of fear and fascination inspired by the emerging society of mass production. Coffin works with the obsession with information and its exponential accessibility to construct an "art fact" that will lead the viewer to an experience of the object that is free of reticence. For this young American artist, it would seem that art, even when derived from a logical process, is expected to ask those recurring questions for which no logical answer can be found. He navigates between metaphor and open narration, between fact and fiction.

His approach is neatly illustrated by the two works that first made his name in France, back in 2007. At Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin he showed Untitled (Red Balloon), filling the main space under the skylight with a system of rails in aluminum tubing, evoking the structure of a big dipper at a funfair. Along the conveyer system mounted on the tubes there moved a red balloon, which was attached to the structure by a piece of string. At the end the balloon, that familiar feature of so many parties, passed beneath an open window and was released into the sky outside. Obviously, reference to Albert Lamorisse's famous film from 1956 Le Ballon rouge, in which the red balloon magically follows the young hero. In the same way, here it follows the itinerary set out for ti before finally escaping. In both cases, it is a metaphor for conscious ness, and the narrative logic conveys the impossibility of continuity at the same time as it awakens the aspiration to just that.


POETRY AND DREAM

Untitled (Greenhouse) [2002) was shown at the Palais de Tokyo. Coffin installed a small glasshouse where musicians were invited to give a concert to the plants he had installed there. By putting together and suggesting a link between plants, a purely natural product here trained by man, and music, itself a pure product of human genius, he was both amusing us and reactivating our imagination. The incongruity of the mise-enscene should not be taken as a simple resurgence of the Surrealist juxtaposition of heterogeneous objects, designed to jolt another reality from the depths of the unconscious; no, Coffin remains within the reality we know but transforms it into a parable. Were there not, a few decades ago now, some very serious theories about the effect of human behavior on potted plants? But the question reaches even further than that. In 2007, the philosophy question put to candidates for the Ecole Normale Superieure was, "What is dying?" Some of the answers were disqualified simply because they forget to mention animals or plants. The artist-philosopher Coffin is guilty of no such oversight. In his works he tries to establish the conditions for a new relational space, opening onto a form of continuation. Who can say whether or not the plants grew faster because of the music? And besides, is that even the whole question? Untitled (Spiral Staircase) [2007) is an aluminum sculpture six meters high consisting of a staircase winding round a giant hoop. The overall effect is like a Mobius strip or a 30 representation of the DNA helix, but on which the ends have met. Poetic and oneiric, this masterful piece endows the very idea of thought with an undeniable physicality.


PHENOMENOLOGY

Coffin's appetite for life's phenomenological dimension and for translating it into visual signals is a hearty one, and so he does not narrow it down to any one type of form, medium or style. The visible world is too mysterious, malleable and random to be picky about the way one engages with it. Coffin uses everything from hi-tech contraptions to time-honored materials. He is fascinated by the process of realization and will readily use ultra-sophisticated engineering techniques to make, say, a brightly colored flying saucer sail through the night sky, as observed by the dumbstruck inhabitants of several towns. At the same time, he also makes "simple" works on paper, like his very fine Untitled (Rainbow) (2005), a collage of thirty-five postcards of a rainbow laid out in snail-shell pattern so that the rainbows form one single spiral. 

However, while, like many of his contemporaries, he is fascinated by the possibilities of collaboration with specialists in all sorts of fields, and while he certainly enjoys appropriating the specialist knowledge that they bring to the project, the resulting work is always perfectly "comprehensible" for the viewer-something that can't be said for many of his fellows. If he allows himself the freedom to let the idea develop in the course of its materialization, we sense that this must nevertheless remain coherent and be communicable. Again, it is fairly frequent nowadays to see artists who produce work of varying degrees of complexity that is packed with personal references that are impossible to generalize, manifesting a kind of autism that may or may not be deliberate. Others exhibit works that require long texts or instructions for use, without which the viewer is at a loss. Now, it may not be the role of contemporary art to comfort or reassure, but nor should the power to intrigue and provoke thought be confused with the simple fact of exasperating the viewer by the total lack of visual communication. Coffin sticks to his idea but always produces works that communicate with the viewer through a shared element, whether that relation is established via the punctum or by the studium, as defined by Barthes, or by a conjunction of the two. His works appeal at once to the subjecVviewer's own idiosyncrasies and to a shared culture.


LOGICAL AND ICONOCLASTIC

Quotation is one of the most widely shared modes of reference used by the current generation, and Coffin is no exception. The reference to past art clearly expresses the aspiration to continuity, which aspiration reminds us of what Barthes wrote about Warholian iteration and Pop Art in general, which signify a refusal of the delimitation of the work's time: appearance, life, death. We should also mention the loss of the idea of completion, which is manifested by a loss of interest in the conditions of the work's longevity, but accompanied by a determination to inscribe the work in a historical dimension.  Coffin has his own logical, iconoclastic way with quotation.  In 2007 he started the series of Props, which are totally flat sculptures with very graphic outlines.  These are in fact "Chinese shadows" made of black (or sometimes gray) steel, of emblematic sculptures from our great western tradition.  Flattened and raised vertically.  The series has no end, especially since the artist presents the pieces in a different way for each setting, be it the closed space of a gallery or the open space of a garden.  Always held up by fine rods, like placards or ephemeral theater sets, the sculptures seem to float in space, as fleeting as shadows, which they are, in spite of their physical reality.  Whether or not we recognize the original sculpture, the contours of something familiar but forgotten thus stand out fugaciously against a ground, like an unexpectedly returning memory.  Coffin thus tries to materialize how and why certain images or events come back to mind, flooding back out of context.  This notion of passage permanently informs his practice.  Following Umberto Boccioni, whose sculptures he remakes as silhouettes, Coffin establishes the equation of speed and time.  He attempts to wrest objects from their meaning and their temporality in order to retain only their memorable visual essence. It is a form of ontological research. His continuous series of photographic portraits, erased by the speed of movement of the camera, also brings to mind the work of Gerhard Richter. In a splendid exhibition at Credac, lvry, in 2010, entitled Qualunque Light, he presented his Transformation Sculptures (2009) in what was a deliberately conventional arrangement borrowed from archaeology museums. These small terracotta sculptures were paired and positioned at eye height on individual slabs. One sculpture in each pair represented a banal object (an empty, crushed can, a sneaker) and the other an object that looked like the result of its morphogenesis. This piece of visual trickery was in fact mathematically calculated by topographers, confronting us with a bundle of realities that are as unexpected as they are irrefutable (as a good AngloSaxon realist, Coffin provides us with a manual explaining his scientific approach). So, why Mary Poppins? She too represents both consciousness and dream, while demonstrating that the former does not alter the latter, constantly keeping open the doors to parallel worlds where other possibilities can be revealed and affirmed. And what else have we ever asked of art?


Translation, C. Penwarden
Ann Hindry is an art historian and critic. She is the curator of the Renault modern art collection.