Thursday, July 2, 2015

Peter Coffin at Herald St

Peter Coffin at Herald St
(link)

Along with Mungo Thompson, Coffin surfing the mid-late 00's vogue for pop inflected conceptual art, cultural forms stressed into 70's reflexive systems. The artists wanted to be cultural pranksters, using the devices of conceptual art's powerful navel strip-mining on the world at large who might finally be made to care about art's tools. But they didn't and so found refuge in the lobbies of museums to friendlify their interiors with symbols the common-man would recognize, but with the value added of a wall-text able to explain why they didn't, and justifying educational budgets, the oldest, blandest, trick in the book.