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Michael Coyle catalog essay by Katie Anania:
Much of Michael Coyle's work presents the viewer with a dearth of information. In Untitled (Mobius) (2007), for example, Coyle repreatedly writes lines of text around the circumference of a Mobius Strip, going over again what he had previously written, until the text becomes a mass of unintelligible marks. Coyle's unending script leads, paradoxically, to the information's erasure. There is something below the countless texts but no way to access it. The text must be rewritten through an ontological engagement with both too much & too little information; we are thus made to deal with a kind of blindness, that is, the absence of data. A productive way to approach blindness, as Borges suggests, is to replace one set of data with another. Borges solved the problem of his own blindness by learning ancient Germanic languages, this replacing "lost" visual information with another type of data. Coyle invites the audience to construct & finish each work based on what they cannot see. He does not necessarily ask that the audience replace lost information; rather, he does not offer any information at all. This refutation of the artist's sovereign powers comes to a head in Michael David Coyle (2008). A blank Moleskine notebook sits on a pedestal & the work's label invites the public to write Coyle's full name on each of the notebook's pages. As each person writes the same name, individual variations in each person's hadwriting stand in for the social construction of the individual. Many contemporary cultures typically regard the signature as one of the ultimate acts of self-expression; here, however, Coyle asks the audience to express the artist, thus effacing his own identity. Other works harness the information embedded in certain materials, like erasers & wood pulp. Searching for Just the Right Feeling of Incompleteness (2007) consists of two stacks of paper. The paper stacks are small pedestals for a carved eraser figurine & a pile of eraser shavings, respectively. Coyle draws out the aesthetic potential of pink rubber (as a pliable medium sold in small units) & also nods to its attendant meanings (effacement & destruction). We see what the eraser is & what it may become; the artist suggests that we thus view the work as two discrete & semiotically disparate states of matter. This dialogue between object & material constitutes another major prong of Coyle's visual argument & relates to the kind of recursivity common in earlier Minimal & conceptual works of the postwar period. To absorb Coyle's work, one must compensate for a sense of loss with an entirely nebulous & individuated set of data. In front of these sculptures, we meet the loss of information through the accretion of our feelings, actions, & presences, allowing an interchange between Coyle's materials & the narratives associated with them. |
