Vitamin 3-D, New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation, Catalog Text by Melissa Gronlund, Phaidon, 2009


Recalling that there are two types of fools in literature might help to situate Peter Coffin’s disparate and often deliberately contrarian practice. First there is the Shakespearean fool, whose nonsense expresses the real truth of a situation, and secondly a fool who does away with the duality between ostensible and actual expression, and delights in the shifting of appearances simply for the pleasure of it. Coffin is more likely the latter. The works in his practice ooze with humour — evincible even in the titles: Music for Plants (2002), Untitled (Treepants) (2006), Untitled (Log with Model of the Universe) (2005) [To me these particular titles ooze more with humour or vegetation than with enthusiasm.] — and their resemblance to jokes and adoption of mysticism suggests the stoppage rather than elaboration of meaning. Loopy sculptures and conceptual acts are often performed deadpan — farce with no apology. Treepants, for example, a tree clad in jeans, deliberately obstructs the search for any intentions ‘behind’ or any further meaning ‘underneath’ his work. The works give few clues to their motivation; rather, they engineer scenarios in which the impossibility of communication is the key subject.


Music is a recurrent theme, as are plants, mysticism and pseudo-science, all pieced together. In Music for Plants, a CD and live performance, Coffin invited bands to perform for the benefit of the leafy inhabitants of a greenhouse [Didn’t he bring in bands to play? Or did he actually play the music himself?]. In Untitled (Free Jazz Mobile) (2007) cut-outs of musical instruments hang from the ceiling; the title riffs on ‘free jazz’ to here describe the instruments’ suspension from the floor, ceiling or walls. Untitled (Singing Tree) (2006) sets a speaker in a tree so that the tree seems to croon in the forest. Rather than being a sound or genre that creates a community among its listeners, music emerges in Coffin’s practice as one half of a Zen saying, always left without an inappropriate audience; plants meanwhile are forced into the comic scenario of being dumb objects that are asked — pleaded with — to speak.

Coffin’s lo-fi and DIY aesthetic suggests his awareness of the absurdity of his constant demand that inert, nonsignifying subjects be rendered loquacious. In an ongoing series, begun in 2002, he photographed the ‘auras’ of friends and associates, asking the blobby colours surrounding his subjects’ heads to testify to true character and personality. Another portrait series was rendered via Silly Putty, transferring newspaper photographs to new sheets of paper (Untitled (Imprints), 2005). [These two examples are two-dimensional works. Would it be possible to replace them with more sculptural examples? Perhaps the machine he made for releasing a red balloon in Paris?] [I don’t know those works – what is the concern with not having two dimensional works? I’m not trying to be argumentative I’m just trying to figure out what you’re getting at! Thanks m] In his cheerfully appropriated spiritualism, anything is potentially meaningful; at the same time, what is said appears unintelligible. Bruce Nauman’s ironic credo is taken to even further levels of ridicule in Untitled (Line After Bruce Nauman’s The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths) (2007); the tube of Nauman’s neon sign lies in a tangle on the floor, its meaning reduced to disorder. The recent series Around, About Expanded Field (2007) [title? year?] renders ordinary objects and iconic works of art — Jeff Koons’s Bunny, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk — as black silhouettes, lighting them with a spotlight so that the representations of shadows cast shadows themselves. The shadow play, again, puts into question the source of the originary referent, the mystic truth or the inner meaning the forms derive from. Like the UFO he set into orbit over Gdansk, Poland, in 2008 [title?], Coffin’s is intent on keeping meaning at a remove. It’s just called UFO Project in all the documentation I found but I can check with the gallery if you want!