Real Peter Coffin
Bosko Blagojevic
It’s easy to say that Peter Coffin is a populist, and it’s also not untrue. He makes ambitious projects for a wide audience, often eclipsing the cloistered halls and communities in which and for whom contemporary art is usually exhibited. Many of his works draw us in by appealing first to the senses, and then to the intellect. There is certainly a vein of the spectacular in some of his works. One can think of his Great Dane sculpture, an extremely lifelike taxidermied fiction, dilated to what would be about three or four times the depicted animal’s real size. Or we can think of his well-known 2007 untitled work in which a miniature roller-coaster track slowly guides helium-inflated balloons along a path before mechanically releasing them at the end of the ride to float away through a hole in the gallery ceiling. Rather than disengaging or pacifying critical thought, these works, in all their material richness and chatty components, operate as thought’s catalyst. How does the artist achieve this? With a careful (but confident) prick at the fabric of that which is known and familiar—a prick that often renders that knowing suddenly (strangely!) novel.
Consider Untitled (UFO). At a young age, Coffin was interested in the ways UFOs and aliens were represented in popular culture. He returned to this theme as an artist first in 2008. In his informal research of reported UFO sightings, of the social and psychological perspectives on the phenomenon, and finally of its cultural manifestations, Coffin arrived at Carl Jung’s Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. One of Jung’s central observations in the text is that UFO sightings increase dramatically during times of collective duress or strife: during wartime for instance, or economic depression. Taking this collective projection as a point of inspiration, Coffin realized his own project by creating a full-size replica of popular culture’s flying saucer. Coffin then flew his saucer over several locations—near the Baltic sea region around Gdansk, over the south west coast of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro, and more recently over the Mojave Desert—all in well publicized, public events. The saucer was created to appear as a familiar (but not vintage) fantasy image that might recall similar sightings encountered previously in films, believed or imagined accounts, comic books, or the sensationalist covers of dimestore sci-fi paperbacks.
For each incarnation of the piece, Coffin worked with a PR company to ensure that the residents of each host city were aware of and anticipating the arrival of the UFO. This was in part to ensure that the piece was not a “shock and awe” event, in Coffin’s words. If the UFO had been misread as something besides artifice, for example, it might have provoked the kind of disturbance that make contemplation and reflection impossible. The fact that his unidentified flying object indeed could be identified quite clearly—immediately animating images from the collective cultural memory—is the conceptual payload of the work. That many members of his audience may also have first encountered these images in childhood is also not without significance. In that encounter with the past, when something so familiar is rendered anew, the artist invites us to look at that which we know with less experienced eyes, with the eyes of a child.
When one thinks of the fantastic, it is easy to relapse onto fantasies about our own childhood. It is through stories one encounters as a child, after all, that mythic figures and supernatural beings are introduced and propagated. The anthropologist Michael Taussig has written about our own fascination with this in terms of the adult’s fascination with the child’s imagination—or, in Taussig’s recursive parlance: the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination. A child, we imagine, may be frightened of a dream that an adult finds only mildly discomforting because the child can imagine the images he conjures actualized in reality. And so confronted with an artwork such as Coffin’s—one in which we see a fantastic image suddenly manifest itself in the material world—we relapse into what we imagine to be the unrestrained imagination of the child, of our former selves. This kind of fascination with the child’s imagination is what drew surrealists to the idea of the child’s way of seeing—and as we’ll soon see—is an important historical legacy for Coffin.
In dreams, people often describe the sensation of being in places or situations that are familiar and yet somehow fundamentally distorted. We were trying to get across the yard—a few of us actually, you and me, and my brother—into this building, which was sort of like my parent’s home. The building was a giant, fossilized squid…but actually, it was my parents home, it just didn’t look like it. The reason that dream images function in this way may be because they are often incomplete amalgams of our wakeful experience. Portions of dream images are often metonyms for bigger pieces of our subconscious life—in dreams we allow these things to be all that they are to us. This is also how Coffin’s work often appears to us: constituted by familiar objects or ideas, yet fundamentally recontextualized and distorted, it brings the eyes in harmony with truths already perceived by the mind.
When Coffin talks about artistic traditions that inspire him, he’ll often invoke California funk art of the 1960s and 70s and the various conceptual approaches to art making that were developing around the same time. He’ll also often talk about continental surrealism that came a few decades earlier. The central protagonists of surrealism in particular were of course artists and writers preoccupied with dreams and dreaming. For the surrealists, dreams were not so much a break from reality, but rather a domain from which to examine reality in order to see it again for the first time: to reveal in the everyday the radically new, not unlike what conceptual art set out to do again later. In painting and literary projects, the surrealists took up a tradition that runs through Western art history like a nerve, seeking to give form to the invisible realities of life. One can think of the end of Byzantine iconoclasm and, several centuries later, the appearance of God as depicted in the French illuminated manuscripts of the 12th century, to the full culmination of the illustrated divine in Renaissance painting. The surrealists strove to depict the dream world and the realities of the subconscious, but not through poetic evocations or indirect reference. Rather, their work often seeks to unequivocally reproduce images encountered in dreams, or to create dream-like experiences in our encounter with art. This necessarily requires a dialog with the real world. Surrealism, unlike later strains of modernism, was never about a complete break with reality. Rather, reality had to be reconstituted in a distorted field, a field where meaning simply couldn’t constitute itself as whole or sovereign.
For Coffin, an artwork will often begin as a thing familiar to us, which the artist then distorts in often deceptively simple yet affective ways to produce a kind of Freudian unheimlichkeit. In some cases this distortion will be an amplification: his widely reproduced 2005 photographic work Untitled (Rainbow), for example, presents two dozen or so found photographs of naturally occurring rainbows and patterns them to create a spiral reminiscent of Nauman’s mystic truths neon or Smithson’s Spiral Jetty—both metonyms for the greater correlations between the different parts of our existence. Less often, but no less significantly, Coffin’s distortion will be achieved by a kind of muting or muffling. In a more recent untitled work, for example, he presents a 1980s-era futuristic sports car completely covered in bumper stickers. The stickers—an American trope of loudmouth sloganeering—shout their messages from a surfeit of positions and temperaments across the ideological spectrum: everything from Northern California environmental leftism (“Viualize Whirled Peas”, “Question Authority”) to southwest pro-gun libertarianism (“Grow your own dope—Plant a politician!”, “Freedom of Speech means the freedom to disagree”), to the deliberately, stupidly irreverent (“Eschew Obfuscation”). One can’t help but ask what the common drive of these subject positions is and what it tells us about ourselves. Together, this cacophony of affected and attention-grabbing voices seem only to drown each other out. In their density and proximity, the oppositional, seductive messaging becomes strangely sedate, in turn, creating a space for a more contemplative objectivity, a time for critical examination.
In a new series of works, Coffin shows a number of circular mirrors, installed vertically at various heights. Each mirror is fixed on a precision electrical motor that rotates it in place continuously. The movement, while constant, is just beyond the reach of visual perception—it is difficult to observe, lest one focus closely on the very edge of the mirror, or perhaps peek behind it at the animating mechanics. The motion does not disturb the mirrored reflection of the view to those who gaze upon it. When the works were made, Coffin insisted on this aspect to his fabricator: that the movement must stalk the imperceptible like its shadow. The result is a strange presentation of two chronologies operating in parallel. The first is the mirrored image itself. When we look upon it, we see time’s passing in its most austere nakedness. That is, when we stare into a mirror—as opposed to a photograph—we see the figure in the reflection endure time’s passing, however imperceptibility or slowly. If we look carefully at our own reflection in this way, we see ourselves age. The second chronology of Coffin’s mirror works is the forever-time of mechanical, pre-determined motion: the indifferent motion of the rotating clock dial, marking the flow of time. This is a time without the uncertainties and unevenness of biological aging, of each organism’s singular path into and through life, towards death. It’s a time that will continue until it is extinguished by outside forces—whether it is mechanical breakdown or the suspension of electrical current. I don’t mean to be macabre in my reading of this work, and I don’t think Coffin means that either in its making. In this new work, the artist may well be presenting us with a new use model for relating to the clock. Rather than anxiously watching a spinning second dial, Coffin invites his viewers to see themselves whole in every moment.
Great art, like great cinema or a great journey or adventure, has the power to change us. I’m certainly not the first to suggest this, but when I say change, I mean in a profound if sometimes subtle and persistent way—the way experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky outlines in his brief but moving 2003 book Devotional Cinema. In his treatise on the transformative power of great cinema (and the maleficent hazards of bad film), Dorsky relates experiences of seeing movies like Rosselini’s 1953 Journey to Italy and being set emotionally adrift along with the rest of the audience with which he saw it. He describes feelings of vulnerability, openness, and most importantly, the sensation of being changed. Psychoanalysis, in many varieties and under the guidance of a talented analyst, also has the power to persistently and powerfully change us. The principal difference is how this change is achieved. In cinema, at least if we are faithful to the historical term, we sit in a darkened and immersive environment with strangers and submit to a predetermined (and often singular) guidance of vision. We see through another’s eyes, our freedom of motion limited to the dimensions and composition of each film image that appears before us. In analysis, we have no such determinacy to guide us. We have only an analyst to prompt us when it is time to pause and reflect on a passing moment, and when it is time to move on to the next.
Like a skilled analyst, Coffin will never overstate his intentions. Queried about his work, he may respond that his goal is simply to engage, to make something simple, to create a kind of “dumb” model of something complex he’s trying to understand or believes is significant and worth consideration.
In his older and well-known Music for Plants installation, Coffin constructs a greenhouse in an exhibition space and creates an accompanying program of music performances. The piece seems to nudge exhibition visitors to think about the subjectivity of flora. Reflecting on how the plants in the gallery may be responsive (or not) to the music they are suddenly forced to live with, the exhibition viewers enter a kind of speculative universe where we temporarily construct and inhabit the seemingly impossible: the space for a responsive plant consciousness. As the artist-director of this particular context, Coffin certainly cannot imbue the flora with auditory sense or the cognition to appreciate its response to deliberate sound. And herein lies the elegance of the work, and in fact his larger strategy as an artist. Rather than concretize the world he suggests for us with material exposition, it is enough for Coffin to simply lead us to construct that world ourselves. Not unlike the forebears of conceptual art, one might say. But rather than the material starkness of the approach of someone like Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner, Coffin takes the opposite approach and indulges the sensorial, allowing the senses to lead the intellect.
There is another, final, approach I would like to suggest for understanding the work of this artist now. In discussing the link between the sensorial and the intellectual, it’s a bridge that is difficult to avoid: that of the recreational drug experience, the journey of the drug user. One could think for instance of the user of narcotics or downers, someone who consumes drugs to numb experience and insulate oneself from the world. These are the users of opioids and tranquilizers—heroin, methadone, etc.—the high that slows the body and the mind into a euphoric state of tranquility and sedation: the user nodding off, alone or with other junkies. More interesting for the present discussion is the seeker of the psychedelic high. This class of drug users has an equally wide variety of drugs to ingest in order to temporarily alter his perception of the world rather than simply shelter himself from it. This is the acid day tripper, for example, who journeys into nature with friends for a temporary communion with the world of plants and animals. Regardless of whatever spiritual value or dimension this class of drug user places on his trips, there is a key distinction between him and the seeker of the opioid high. The day tripper, in his journey through nature or the city streets or the nightclub, seeks essentially to be a part of the world, rather than apart from it. This dimension of the psychedelic high cannot be understated, for the goal is without question to look into things more deeply, with greater curiosity and enthusiasm—rather than simply shut one’s eyes in numbing resignation. The experience of the day tripper on his journey will be firmly rooted in the things seen or experienced in the material world around him: inanimate objects will develop personalities and speak, colors from nature will bleed and transform themselves, latent emotions and memories will be uninhibited.
When one dreams, one is necessarily alone. To unleash a dream image into the social world, then, allows it to inhabit memory in a way the dream images we encounter in sleep cannot. Reflection and thought are suddenly (miraculously!) possible in a way that they simply aren’t in the quickly disintegrating and lonely realm of sleep. What a mysterious pleasure it is to be able to point to the hovering spacecraft, drifting above the city, and exclaim to the man standing next to you that, yes, there it is, but what is it….?
In Coffin’s Untitled (Dreaming Seagull), we see a life-size taxidermied seagull in quiet repose. Its eyes firmly shut, the bird assumes the posture of sleep. Rather than crouching in a sheltering stance, burying its beak in its feathers (as some sleeping birds do), or hiding itself, Coffin’s seagull instead stands fully erect, seemingly as alert as any wakeful creature. The seagull’s eyes, however, remain firmly shut. Coffin’s bird is one that dreams actively—willfully suspended in a state between, on the one hand, a poised wakefulness, and on the other, a rejection of the reality and artifice by which it is both surrounded and constituted.