Yes, taken on a bloody mobile!

The Barbican deserves an arse-licking. Amongst the smotherings of the city’s suits its Brutalist concrete village and confusing internal architecture give a good welcome slap; an ideal preparation for seeing art. Although their exhibitions are often brilliant but pricey, the free and accessible Curve  downstairs has been host to a consistent and varied range of commissions, the current Peter Coffin installation particularly worth visiting.

Unusual and laudable too that the Barbican doesn’t spoil its shows with dozens of meaningless installation shots on the website, although this video is a juicy taster. An array of Coffin’s past video works and informative text provides a context for those unfamiliar with the New York based artist, since this is his first major UK project and runs concurrently with his projected animations at the Tate Triennial.

The installation at the Curve breaks down into three constituent parts. The swooping outer wall is divided into screen-sized projection areas, where woozy videos in vivid tones show a swirling collaged viewpoint around a garden. The rest of the space is dark with selective lighting, and speakers spaced far apart emit surprise sounds of somebody whistling as they stroll, or so says the press release. It’s more like nutty birds or a Clangers tune in its harmonic irrationality, and in tandem with the videos’ huge portion of the space create a mood difficult to describe as anything other than ‘trippy’. Not as in the perpetuated cliché of monkeys in hats or trousers on wheels, but a genuinely bizarre and disorientating assault on the senses.

Better than nothing surely

Scattered through the long narrow space are also a dozen or so pairs of plinths with a real recognizeable object sitting on one of each: there’s a skull, a trumpet and a compass for starters. Alongside, a companion plinth proffers greyish pixellated and crystalline sculptures of their real counterparts. These non identical twins invite spot the difference – a shoe becomes a foetus, a trumpet develops a teeny tiny mouth piece and a skull is turned inside out.

A chubby vase of flowers is both satisfying and repulsive, looking something like a pile of swollen guts. Think of Claes Oldenburg‘s ridicule of function in his floppy sculptures and elegant drawings, laughing at the objects’ deformation as they take on complex and absurd logic through their own rules. It’s explicit in the presentation of coupled plinths that the readymade has been scanned and excreted into odd misshapen lumps in a specific way unique to each sculpture.

The rules applied are not necessarily important in and of themselves, as the press release almost articulates in stating “for Peter Coffin, art is an alternative to rational thought” although I’d add that they aren’t mutually exclusive. The implication of ‘experts’ often comes across as an authoritative correctness that can make art look like a shrunken second fiddle to the rules of Science. This is avoided here through the mathematician’s collaboration with Coffin and their rationale to the modifications explained in a booklet at the gallery entrance, rather than running commentary or text throughout the installation itself.

You might guess that the crushed Budweiser can has been made into 3D double vision and the pine cone has been seen through a Rubiks cube, but it isn’t the explanation for why they are so formally arresting. It’s enough that they are playful and imaginative explorations, engaging and complicated.