Marcel Duchamp Peter Coffin Advice and Verse in London In Brief: Christie’s When in... Berlin Subodh Gupta The Persistence of Time Guggenheim Gala Lights Up the Night

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For video footage of Peter Coffin’s UFO in flight over Gdansk, Poland click here.

This summer, artist Peter Coffin visited Poland, where he supervised the construction of an artificial UFO in a hangar once used by the Nazis to build U-boats. The 24-foot-wide and 4-foot-high disk was studded with 3,000 rhythmically flashing LED lights and closely resembled the spaceship in Spielberg’s 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As it orbited the harbor city of Gdansk and sped out over the Baltic, Coffin’s flying saucer mesmerized its art-festival audience with a symphony of throbbing Technicolor. The UFO was so incandescent that, in the darkness, the luminous structure often eclipsed the helicopter from which it was hung.

When we met at a café near his Brooklyn studio, Coffin explained that the bottom surface of the UFO was “essentially a video mesh on which you could play movies,” and he had chosen a series of clips for their ethereal effects: a Philip Glass animation from Sesame Street, for example, in which six colored circles rotate and intersect to make vibrant geometric patterns. When the UFO broadcast a film of a Marcel Duchamp roto-relief, an optical illusion composed of spiraling irregular spheres, it assumed a jolting rhythm, as if powered by a mysterious pulsating energy.

Coffin, who will fly his UFO again at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, did not plan his artwork as a hoax. “I didn’t want to scare people,” he says. “I was not trying to have a War of the Worlds effect with this project.” Instead, inspired by Richard Dawkins’s idea of “memes,” Coffin wanted his art to take on a viral life of its own, independent of the mother ship. To this end, he gave a press conference announcing the flight in advance, and invited his audience to document the happening by sending their grainy, blurry photographs to his website. Coffin exhibited a selection of these raw, amateurish shots at Manifesta 7 this past summer.

He had hoped his UFO might make its inaugural flight over New York, but the Public Art Fund rejected his application for sponsorship, deeming it inappropriate after 9/11. Coffin told me that, in fact, he intended his piece to refer to 9/11, since it is at precisely these historical moments of exacerbated threat and fear that sightings of UFOs peak. He pointed me to Carl Jung’s 1958 treatise on flying saucers, in which the psychoanalyst argued that UFOs were neurotic projections of Cold War anxieties of imminent apocalypse.

Though Coffin was not able to dazzle New Yorkers with his display of airborne lights, he is currently planning a project to transform the Empire State Building into an enormous light organ that will flash in sync with the music played by a local radio station. In Close Encounters, it is through such color-music that humans discover they can communicate with a superior alien intelligence. The Empire State will broadcast a synesthetic symphony over the city, and into space, like a sort of interplanetary beacon. "Ufology" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.