T02-0103
Daddy’s Dead Coin
Jacob Coppedge

Special Object:
Edition of 3, each containing various inherited US coins.

100% Cotton
Do Not Wash,
Dry-Clean Only,
Do Not Iron.

$200.00

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When troubled with the question of locating grief, perhaps it ought best to concern oneself with the trouble of switching orientation.

Here, with Daddy’s Dead Coin, the question moves from ‘Where is my grief?’ towards ‘What use does my grief present to me?’

/ in me / through me / for me

This orientation is Jacob’s alone, brought forth from the loss of the father several years ago. Grief and currency collide in a symbolic act which on the whole is, per chance, a harmonic pairing. What on the face of things seems to be two unrelated sets of objectified phenomena, function instead like two sides of the same coin:
Heads / Tales.

The coin and grief are well suited. Indeed, if it were not so, the use of the coins – such as they are in Daddy’s Dead Coin – would not have endowed the production of the ungirded, unbridled, and, delimited limit of grief. Which is to say, the object afforded the artists to produce some semblance of grief, as is the want of such a loss. Moreover, that very object is that wherein it is inscribed the meaningless sign of price. Rather than price as an invocation of the objective, subjective, or otherwise determined, value for certain goods, prices are inscriptions and meaningless signs without reference to value (Roffe 2025). Neither the subjective pull of the coins nor the objective pull of the coins can refer us to an evaluation of their value with respect to the act of grieving. This ‘… inert (non-evaluative) character of price means that it does not predispose us to any particular action.’ (Roffe 2025). Similarly, the action taken in the use of coins in Daddy’s Dead Coin was never predispositionally given in advance.

As an act, the work becomes a production of purpose. Of savoir faire … of know-how … of the courage to produce one’s own idea of an Ends. Towards which, one will move even in the face of all that will be left out and unattended to in the attempt to meet it.

This may be why it is true that I have heard snippets from Jacob and Joshua regarding the coins to the effect of:

‘It’s only as serious as you make it’

Or

‘It’s not that serious’

These coins… These circles of ossified alchemic production are now the ossification of another production altogether different from the movement of liquid to solid. Or … perhaps … somehow similar. For, as Gillian Rose (1995) says in her seminal book Love’s Work: ‘ ‘Loss’ is a loose description.’ In confronting the looseness, indeed, the utter indeterminability, of either the meaningless sign or Death, there is, nonetheless, never a doing away with the constructing of a response to the problem they both pose to us.

This work is a response, and a response is always an expression of ossification. Insofar as its condition of formulation requires that one must decide what to include and what will be excluded from its utterance. The production of Daddy’s Dead Coin lasso’s the loose, the non-evaluative. In so doing, Jacob and Joshua have coined themselves a sign, so as to speak the trace of grief. That grief which assures us of the unspeakable and that which is radically devoid of a predisposition to a recourse to action. Yet in bringing coins to cotton, there can be heard a note which harmonises with that of Death and perhaps one that is hopefully closer to an Image.

Written by Queenie Carling, Daddy’s Dead Coin : A collaboration between Jacob Coppedge and Joshua Edward.

$200.00

‘It’s only as serious as you make it’ Or ‘It’s not that serious’

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‘It’s only as serious as you make it’

Or

‘It’s not that serious’