Simple Procedures
by Joao Ribas
A bird in the Australian forest displays peculiar courtship behavior: it amasses and arranges blue objects--feathers, fruits, bottle tops and drinking straws. Behavior acquires an aesthetic dimension in this ambiguity between declared intention and listless play. One can't resist wondering, of something so overtly symbolic lest it seem preposterous: but what does it mean?
Peter Coffin's artistic practice is akin to this elusive aesthetic game. The New York-based artist connects, literalizes, and reiterates disparate forms and ideas, working them over to evince how simple procedures can invoke deep significance. His work confronts that particular human foible of catalyzing meaning from even the most perfectly useless, meaningless, or self-fulfilling phenomena. Coffin suggests this deep-seated desire for poetic resonance is perhaps the source of art itself, ultimately providing for a confrontation with the reflexive, self-effacing neutralities through which we organize and make sense of the world.
Take Untitled (Tree Pants), in which Coffin fits a pair of custom denim pants onto a tree. The obvious and overtly literal view of nature -the anthropocentric conceit of trees 'wearing' pants-belies a substantial phenomenological shift. The logic of nature as an object that makes sense only in relation to our own subjectivity suddenly appears senseless and disconnected, but only through Coffin's admittedly "self-reflexive expression of stupidity," one that allows for a more objective reflection on how we understand. Coffin's work evades habits of thinking through such analogous and absurdly simple visual procedures, often using one-to-one scale and wry humor. Studied dumbness is embraced as revealing the rational, ordered understanding taken as normative; parsing the grammar of experience in this way is to make us wonder whether we are learning anything, or indeed, getting anywhere with the limited frame of reference through which we organize experience.
Yet we are never led to a conclusion, but rather forced to think about the interpretative moment itself--this shedding light on the limited perspective brought to understanding. What do we do when faced with a precarious supermarket stack of oranges, as we are in Coffin's Untitled (Orange Pyramid)? Brought as much to a pleasing accumulation of objects-akin to that bird's abstract but amorous play-as to the concept of 'sphere packing' in physics, we're thrown into the realm of the non-declarative and intuitive. Coffin uses these particular qualities of the aesthetic as a heuristic; meandering juxtapositions circle around ideas connecting studio practice with scientific speculation.
Both are held in dialectical tension and playful deferral. Coffin seems to have an aversion to received forms of knowledge that seek defined, situated, or consolidated 'truths,' most of all those having to do with consciousness and the perceiving body. As numerous philosophers of mind have suggested, human reasoning, including most informal plausible thinking, cannot be reduced to algorithmic or formalized processes following logical rules. Coffin's response is to function as an iconographer, one with a facility for synthesizing disparate models of the world, even if just to push fuzzy logic against the grain. In this sense, art becomes a rejoinder to T.S. Eliot's question of "where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
In fact, much of Coffin's recent work has stemmed from trying to come to terms with complex physical and conceptual models through images or analogous forms (as in his stack of oranges). Coffin's images of photographed books juxtapose images to create a possible but undetermined synthesis in the mind of the viewer. His Untitled (Rainbow) uses the formal consistency of a rainbow's curve to create a spiral out of found images-a simple elaboration of the metaphysical beauty of this ur-object of human fascination. If this is to propose that scientific explanations can be understood intuitively or through visual analogy, one need only be reminded of the importance of the 3-d molecular model in the discovery of the unique alphabet of DNA. Francis Crick and James Watson's investigation of DNA structure at Cambridge University reputedly did not largely depend on experiments; rather they relied on intuitively synthesizing information into chemical models, including drawing the base structures of DNA on cardboard cutouts, and moving them around in pairs to see how the structure might fit together.
To treat the production of visual forms as a field of inquiry, a search for the "horizon of experience" as Heidegger would say, is to turn to the constitutive origin of the aesthetic as the science of sense knowledge (or "the rules of reasoning by analogy" as Baumgarten first deemed it in the 18th century). It is to draw on the form of knowledge that only aesthetics can convey, a return to the notion of art as an essentially hermeneutical process, fundamental to the way we create meaning and make sense of the world. For Coffin, this extends to a belief--oddly reminiscent of Scholasticism--that abstract ideas might themselves take on an inherent, significant form, with the correlate that they might also, in essence, posses their own entelechy.
This drives an often tedious but necessary process of deploying appropriate forms to manifest simple procedures. These can trace the evolution of a thought: an indirect path toward the most direct communication. Or they can reproduce and therefore fix ephemeral moments we encounter as contingencies-as the 180 feet of track of Untitled (Red Balloon) replicates the tortuous and lyrical flight of a balloon around a room. At the highest point of the track the balloon is released, disappearing into the Paris sky-an intimate moment of fleeting significance poetically reprised every dozen or so minutes.