the art of jennifer marman and daniel borins engages with multiple
TRANSCRIPT
The art of Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins engages with multiple media from photography to sculpture, painting, electronic and public-art projects. Their work is exciting to the mind and eye and uses unusual and common devices – like mechanized window blinds and custom software – that create complex combination of color, geometry and material that celebrate minimalism and abstraction. They explore ideas of surveillance and viewership, mass culture and media politics, and they play with recognizable art history themes. Marman holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and Borins holds a BA in Art History from McGill University, both artists have also obtained advanced degrees from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where they first began collaborating producing works in multiple dimensions. Architect Gabriela Amerio chatted with the duo this past month and recorded this conversation.
What was the spark, the thing that made you start working in public art? We started working in public art because of an opportunity that arose from the Toronto Sculpture Garden. The organization seems to be on hiatus now, but for over twenty years it commissioned semi-permanent installations that would last six months in duration. We did a project called In Sit You – a rotating billboard with a matching multi-colour park bench. From there opportunities arose in public art competitions through the one percent for public art program that the City of Toronto administers. The advent of one percent programs comes from an understanding of the role that creative professionals play in an urban context, as well as the need to identify new areas a city and to create a sense of place.
The idea of bringing new artists from other parts of the world to exchange and collaborate with, is this a strategy for your practice to go global? Bringing artists from other parts of the world has existed for several hundred years; obviously with the advent of air travel, this movement has become accelerated and global in reach. We do
not think of this as a globalist agenda in a negative sense, but really more of a patterned sense of circumstances relating to exchange of ideas and commerce. Cities, as city states, need to illustrate that they are open to ideas, and in doing so, they illustrate that they are open to business. Traditional alpha cities have reflected this tendency for quite some time – perhaps for as long as international expositions have been in effect. Cities in developing nations want to show that they can participate in international exchanges of ideas and business too. As practitioners, our perspective is different from this cursory analysis. We tend to position ourselves within an understanding of creativity in urban settings, and the ways in which well thought out urban planning can come to fruition. We think that quality of life is paramount in good cities. Good design and good art reflects a commitment to public space that fosters a sense of belonging and a sense of place. We would argue that public spaces, bicycle networks, and connective paths for mobility function along side public art. So really, our position is that public art emanates from the good ideas surrounding new urbanism. Have you had commissions for public art pieces outside of Canada? Most of our opportunities for public art have arisen in Canada. However, we are interested in doing projects internationally. Open calls for artists internationally are not that common. A way in which we can promote our practice is to build on our portfolio and for awareness of our work to grow.
When you design a special commission project, do you team up with architects, landscape designers, others? The nature of a project informs how we decide to response. If a project has a definite site that is prescribed, and the footprint is designated clearly, we might decide to compete as a duo. If the site is large, and it already involves a landscape architect, then essentially a greater collaboration will form. In some cases, a site involves complex engineering, or has even called for us to participate in an architectural sense; for example, Simon Fraser College Bridge that we completed in 2015. For that project we chose to work with architect James Khamsi, and he has collaborated on other projects with us like The Water Guardians. Another form of work that we are interested in is integrated art and landscape architecture. In that case James might work with us, or recently we have worked with the firm DTAH in Toronto.
Would you say that your knowledge in philosophy and history complements your art design? It cannot hurt to have an understanding of philosophy and history, but in a contemporary sense, well informed art might not function solely on that basis in a public setting. We try to reach a broad audience first, and then if there are viewers who are more informed about art history, we think we speak to them as well. Our project Speech Bubble is simultaneously about abstraction and speech. While the project looks contemporary and electronically inspired in form, it also literally refers to the history of
geometric abstraction and the manifesto writing artists of the avant-garde. The videos that play on Speech Bubble are paintings from the 1920’s and 1930’s are re-imagined by us as digital animations.
When you define colors and materials, do you make it to standout or become part of the landscape? We work site responsively and site specifically, and we usually are working in a stakeholder situation with many different municipal agencies; so it depends on the context we are facing. Implied here is that we do not see colour as deeply personal. On the other hand, we want to get it right! In several projects recently, we could say that we have conducted extensive colour studies. Another matter we consider is material that stands up well to the elements of nature; for example stainless steel is excellent and it can be appreciated for its inherent aesthetic qualities. Probably what we are saying is that we do not do solely further our studio and museum practice with the goal of perpetuating an authorial style in public. The decisions we make are responsive to context – if a site calls for colour, then of course, we will bring out the paint brushes.
Like the Speech Bubble, has the social network become important to the movement and feeling of your art? Social networks have become an important part of public art and all art. We are always happy to see a project become ‘instagramable’, or for people to take ‘selfies’ with a project. All artists should consider how a work will be received by the public and possibly they should see social media as one of many barometers of a work of art’s success. We are increasingly becoming involved in the outreach surrounding a public work of art – whether that is through public engagement in advance, or, through education opportunities once a work is installed. Do you believe that the culture of the place, can that be successful in other parts of the world? Ideas for Toronto work somewhere else? Public art brings art to the public so that it belongs to everyone. Public art also solves the dilemma of social engagement that some museums suffer from. By introducing art to the public we all benefit from proximity to the visual arts and hopefully this encourages good architecture
to perpetuate. Without a standard for art and architecture a place might be relegated to a utilitarian lifelessness. We certainly hope that some of our examples will be influential outside of the cities that they are situated in. In the past year we have received international editorial attention, and here we are speaking to you from Toronto to Milano. How do you approach technology and discovering ways to incorporate it into your work? We would like to point out that we have a studio practice and that we exhibit in galleries and museums. We have always been fascinated by materials and the methods used to deploy them. We have also taken risks with materials and the ways in which they can be used. It is likely that we would not repeat material use too often, or get too comfortable with a certain approach. The situation is much more a case of what is next? What else can we try? Our process is both physical and digital. Recently we have been working with 3D colour printing of sculptures, and currently we are interested in several different forms of CNC machining. Recently we have scanned some of our sculptures. A combination of 3D drafting programs and 2D digital programs helps us to design, but does not necessarily make things easier. In the future, we hope to use Virtual Reality and stylus based 3D drawing tools to assist our designs. We also keep abreast of design and architecture. Of course, we travel to see art exhibitions, and we also visit design stores and clothing stores. Photography credits: Giulio Calisse, Jeff McNeill, Andrew Rowat, and Nicola Betts. Born in Italy but has lived in Venezuela almost all her life, Gabriela Amerio is an architect with a fourteen years experience in architecture development. She has designed, developed, and coordinated commercial, residential and office building projects globally. Her architecture degree is from Jose Maria Vargas University. Today she is studying an MA at the prestigious Politechnico in Leadership in Glocal Design, studying the connections of architecture and design across global cultures.
Delta Toronto Hotel: Revisiting a Landmark in the South Core August 22, 2016 4:30 pm | by Julian Mirabelli It has been nearly two years since the Delta Toronto Hotel opened its doors to the public amid much fanfare, and the cause for celebration has hardly abated since. The gleaming tower has earned recognition from the public and critics alike, having collected a 2015 Toronto Urban Design Award of Excellence, and named UrbanToronto's Building of the Year in 2014 as voted by our readers. We recently ventured back in to take a look at how the building has fared two years after claiming its spot in the burgeoning South Core skyline. Designed by Mansoor Kazerouni of Page + Steele / IBI Group Architects, the 46-storey building comprises an eye-catching tower atop a three-storey base at the corner of Simcoe and Bremner. The sleek glass tower features a recessed zipper-like incision down the centre of the east and west facades, with a heavier stone-clad podium spreading out toward the street at its base. The building is part of a larger complex dubbed the Southcore Financial Centre, developed by bcIMC and GWL Realty, which largely rounded out the newly dubbed South Core neighbourhood along Bremner Boulevard. Taking a closer look at the tower, the reveal of recessed dark blue glass divides the building into two distinct masses. The north portion takes on a simpler, more rectilinear form finished with a plain glass curtain wall that is punctuated by strips of solid white spandrels on the north facade, breaking up the volume with a striped pattern. The southern portion of the tower takes on a more sculptural form, accenting the west facade with an asymmetrical angled edge that acts as a counterpoint in tension with the rectangular mass to the north. The south elevation protrudes slightly outward with a subtle fold down the middle, while the glass envelope extends above the level of the roof, adding a touch of drama to an otherwise flat roof line. Finished with the same glass curtain wall as the northern portion, the south mass is speckled with randomly placed solid white spandrel panels, providing
subtle accents that create visual interest on the monochrome facade. The sprawling podium extends outward from the footprint of the tower to meet Simcoe and Bremner Streets. Clad with black stone panels, the heavy volumes are pierced by large bands of recessed windows, giving the appearance of depth and weight that anchors the airy tower to the ground. Cantilevering over the sidewalk to the south, the podium brings a more human scale to the development. Atop the podium, a landscaped green roof provides additional event and gathering space and offers a more visually pleasing view from the floors above, while also reducing the building's urban heat island effect. (A final landscape design is coming soon for this space.) Incorporating generously large landscaped sidewalks on all sides, the Delta has been lauded for its design of the public realm. Space for a patio is incorporated along the sidewalk, while the treatment of parking entrances and loading docks has placed emphasis on the pedestrian realm. Moving inside the building, striking interiors designed by New York-based Champalimaud Design use simplicity and materiality to create warm, inviting atmospheres. The lobby space is finished with wood on the walls and ceiling, while smartly-placed lighting fixtures accent the subtle reveals in the wood finish. Artwork can be seen throughout the building, including an exterior piece by Douglas Coupland, a three-storey mural by Adrian Forrow, and an installation in the main lobby by Aleksandra Rdest. A look inside a typical room shows minimalist finishes and clean details, with unobstructed panoramic views over the city through floor to ceiling windows. Finally, a notable feature of the building is its western PATH connection via a bridge across Simcoe Street leading to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Dubbed 'Torque', the twisting design of the bridge was conceived by Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins and New York-based architect James Khamsi of FIRM a.d. The simple twisting black band on the exterior and the chaotic triangulation on the interior make Torque perhaps one of Toronto's most interesting components of the PATH network.
View of the Delta Toronto and PATH bridge, dubbed Torque, at night, image by Marcus Mitanis.
Interior of the PATH bridge, image by Forum contributor drum118.
With its prime location sandwiched between two of the city's largest sporting venues, adjacent to the waterfront and financial district and a stone's throw away from numerous tourist attractions, the Delta Toronto Hotel seems poised for a prosperous future. Only time will tell how well the Delta will age, but for now, the shiny new tower has impressed its audiences thus far, setting itself apart in the sea of glass in the rapidly growing South Core neighbourhood.
Urban Confrontations: An Interview with Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins APRIL 14, 2016 | BY THE ARTFUL CITY
Interview by: Ilana Altman
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have been making large-format sculpture, mixed media, installation and electronic art since 2000. Jennifer Marman is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario. Daniel Borins is a graduate of McGill University. Both Marman and Borins are also graduates of the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2001 – where they first began collaborating together.
Amongst their recent public art projects is a newly installed commission The Water Guardians for the Toronto’s West Don Lands, a pedestrian passageway SFC Bridge in Toronto’s Southcore Financial Centre, and an animated video sculpture Speech Bubbleon Toronto’s John Street. In the spring of 2016 they have a solo show with Cristin Tierney in New York, and the final installment of their touring exhibition, The Collaborationists at the Art Gallery of Windsor. Marman and Borins are represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York. Ilana Altman: You have a diverse and far-reaching practice including painting, sculpture, electronic and video work. At what point did this practice extend into public art projects? What was your motivation to work in the public realm? Daniel Borins: As artists around 2004-2005 we thought to imagine some large format projects. One of them was a tri-vision rotating billboard (the In Sit You installation at the Toronto Sculpture Garden (TSG)). Rina Greer of TSG was very encouraging. We were wondering, “Is this a way for us to work?” We met with a couple of consultants, and asked them, “What would it take?” They quite simply said that you have to do some work in public. We completed In Sit You for the TSG and then the following year we did a piece for Nuit Blanche. It was a start in public projects.
Marman & Borins , In Sit You, 2007. Photo by Marman & Borins
Prior to 2001/2002, the possibility wouldn’t have even been there. It was much more of a patron-artist scenario. Somebody would get a direct commission from a developer. It was more traditional. But public art became a City-led policy initiative around 2008.
Jennifer Marman: Rebecca Carbin was also instrumental. At the time she was working with the City. She had come back from England and had the perspective that public art projects should be integrated and responsive. It wasn’t necessarily about the perpetuation of the artist’s authorial style. This approach happened to dovetail well with our practice.
Sometimes it’s about timing, having the right work at the right time, but we also have an institutional practice and a commercial gallery practice. Public practice is about improving quality of life in an urban social context. You have to work in all of those fields in order to draw from a logic for public concepts. You can’t just leave school and say, “Hi, I want to be a public artist.“ And you can’t just make a style in the gallery space and then enlarge it for the public space. Public art now includes precepts about urbanism as a larger whole. IA: Do you think it’s necessary to differentiate between modes of practice? You speak about your practice as generative, where each work feeds the next. How does your public art practice influence and inform your studio practice and vice versa?
DB: It is more interesting to be involved in various practices. Do they feed into each other? Yes. We often re-contextualize previous works, and mine our own practice to find new expressions – so different modes of practice can be reflexive and cause new works to arise. Public art encourages us to distill our studio ideas, not just scale them up.
Public art has been good for us because the kinds of commissions we usually win are the one’s that are problem solving based… daunting site conditions, major engineering challenges, or those that require an understanding of architecture and materials. For us, some amount of prior experience in a wide range of materials, a basic understanding of engineering, physics, and fabrication has been important. What’s right for a site, how’s it going to play to the audience, and so on. Indeed, they feed into each other. It is important to note that projects are also a process involving planners, key stakeholders and dialogue
with a local community. IA: Two of your early public art projects include In Sit You for the Toronto Sculpture Garden in 2007 and the house installation for the Leona Drive project in 2009. They were both temporary pieces. Can you speak to these projects and programs? What did you learn and how did they influence your subsequent public art work?
DB: We have been told that our practice has a lot to do with confrontation. As well, we set up scenarios where visuality and agency factor into the composition of our works. We imagine our viewer looking at the work. What are they experiencing? Both projects (In Sit You and Leona Drive) are perplexing at first. In-Sit You caught people off-guard. A knee jerk reaction was “How could you put a billboard in a park!” But when viewers saw that we had also placed a park bench that matched the billboard, they saw a sort of symbiosis at play. What ensued was a challenge of complicity, combined with confrontation and intervention. JM: In the case of In Sit You I suppose we learned about site and context and the tonal intricacies of intervention. We also learned about our audience, that symbiosis really worked – people enjoyed the bench – sitting in it – and completing the scene. We could see that from how worn out the grass was in front of the bench. At that time it was the start of web based viral image sharing – there were many digital images circulating of the project. We learned that our culture had moved toward sharing public art through social channels as well. DB: With Leona Drive we were trying to portray sculpture as an event or narrative. This car has gone into the house. Literally combined with it, as some form of a crash. The idea was that we were making a commentary on the car. There’s this strange instance where every two or three weeks, a newspaper somewhere runs a story, “Car Crashes into House,” and I don’t think newspapers are even aware of the frequency of it. It was an interesting commentary on suburbs, commuting, car culture, house design, suburban design, built form and different areas of the city, how the city is defined by arterial roots, and so on. Unbelievably, Toronto would be mired just after this project in ridiculous discussion about the ‘war on the car’.
Marman & Borins, Etobicoke House for The Leona Drive Project, 2009. Photo by Marman & Borins
JM: All together, both projects highlight a continuing understanding we are attempting to build about confrontation, symbiosis, site, site responsiveness, and scale. We are interested in narrative, and we think about making the right choices about place and what art should go into it. For permanent public works we think a lot about our greater audience first, and how to balance artistic precepts with the public good. IA: Your work is very informed by architecture, and architectural traditions. Do you think there is enough dialogue between artists and architectures during the design process? How could this relationship be improved?
DB: No. It should be improved. The two disciplines don’t understand each other well enough. For whatever reason, the two fields are not integrated enough in our visual culture curricula. They’re separate schools. That needs to change. The push for specialization occurs too early in creative disciplines. That is one of the reasons that we have sought to work with architects. Our ongoing collaboration with James Khamsi has made the point that artists and architects can work together.
On a municipal administrative level, we have raised the issue that the public art process should start earlier in the application process. Yet, under the 1% for Public Art policy there is definitely a lag as to when the sculptural element is introduced. The order is developers, then architects, then landscape architects, then art consultant, and lastly the artists.
A professional in our field said: “You really expect artists could have a valid opinion at any other stage other than the very end.” I just said dryly, “Of course, artists are always last to be valued for their opinion.”
JM: It is an administrative issue. We know that everyone involved is doing their best professionally, but we wonder if sociologically there are some patterns in how projects are handled that could benefit from some new ways of thinking. Artists are enthusiastic urbanists, they have a lot to offer to how our urban setting should be inspired. IA: I also want to talk about your most recent works. Speech Bubble, Water Guardians and SFC Bridge were all completed within the same year. They are vastly different projects – from video to sculpture to infrastructure. Are you actively working to push new media, new techniques in your public art practice?
JM: As you can see, responsive, project-specific, site-specific art is what we think is most relevant. The repetition of signature style is on the wane, and that is probably a good thing. We do not require this kind of plop-art. What we need is place-making, locale defining gestures that identify neighbourhoods. Toronto has entire areas that are new, not just new buildings – but new neighbourhoods of several square blocks. So, in the case of each of these projects, we were trying to say something about place. John Street is ostensibly going to be entirely redesigned as a pedestrian friendly cultural spine from the Front St. all the way to the Art Gallery of Ontario. It is a media corridor, and calls for multimedia projects that provide excitement. The mini plaza surrounding Speech Bubble, has become a major social hub.
Marman & Borins, Speech Bubble, 2015. Photo by Giulio Calisse
Marman & Borins, Speech Bubble, 2015. Located in the plaza at The Pinnacle on Adelaide designed by Janet
Rosenberg + Studio. Photo by Jeff McNeill
SFC Bridge, is about mobility and pedestrian focus. Our train tracks, and the Gardiner Expressway historically have limited pedestrian movement. The architectonic exterior, and tessellated interior of the bridge expresses a zig zagging, yet moves the pedestrian into a time where we have realized the need for greater individual mobility.
Marman & Borins in collaboration with James Khamsi, SFC Bridge, 2015. Photo by Andrew Rowat
DB: The Water Guardians imposes some of our ideas about symbiosis and confrontation into a child friendly scheme. It is not a playground, but it is a social space. The Water Guardians acts as a warning as well: that we are a Great Lakes city defined by water ways – the guardians are the sentinels of the Don River, but they also greet the new-comers to the new West Don Lands neighbourhood.
Overall, part of these recent works is about us answering in an artfully versatile manner, but also in a socially aware stance. And with regard to new media, yes, we think the public will see more new media projects in Toronto. Understanding of new media is lagging a bit right now as a whole, but definitely we are interested in this kind of an approach. New media is much more common in Europe and Asia. IA: What is the role of public art for the city?
DB: Public art represents a holistic urban vision from the macro to the individual level. When people hear of walkability, or public transport, or parks and plazas – they are receiving information about a new way of thinking about urbanism. Discussions about our city are now about livability and quality of life. In the way that we think our citizens have the right to clean air and a clean environment, we also think they have a right to culture and a well planned integrated and beautiful city. On a systematic level, public art in Toronto represents the results of this sort of thinking.
Torontonians could benefit from more thinking about the city within an international context. Our city should be an idea that inspires other cities, and we should invite people from different cultures to come here, to visit with us, to exchange ideas. Building a great city, one that sets an example, is way for Toronto to grow in an intelligent manner.
JM: Public art is just one factor, but it is a major one. By thinking about development from a planning perspective that has precepts, the scope of our planning has become more intelligent. By encouraging exemplary architecture, landscape architecture, public art, and then a whole host of ideas about accessibility, functionality, uniqueness, and the inspired, we are beginning to sow the seeds of good contemporary ideas about urban life. The public art program in Toronto has given artists the opportunity to identify with the public. It has provided artists with the opportunity to play a role in designing public space. It is no secret that anywhere artists have lived in Toronto has become a desirable community. Public art extends the artist community to the city and vice versa.
DB: But public art is not just a local concept. Toronto has by far, the greatest amount of public art by international artists compared to the rest of Canada. This is indicative of a new cosmopolitanism in Canada. By inviting internationally acclaimed artists to complete works in our city, we are welcoming an exchange of ideas and opening up trade winds with the rest of the world. So while there is strong support for local artists, we have recognized that Toronto is a world player too. We have also recognized that public art plays a role in defining place, and making a place. While these terms are ‘buzzwords’ they are not without significance. Just think of places like the West Don Lands – what comes to mind? Probably nothing, because you haven’t been there, or seen it yet. But you will. Hopefully Corktown Common will become one of your favourite parks. Maybe The Water Guardians will stand out from far away. Maybe people will realize that the site is on a former wasteland of brownfields, remediated and cleaned up into a model of what our city should look like, with huge sidewalks, green space, and public places of culture. Public art has a way of defining place and embodying its values.
Marman & Borins, The Water Guardians, 2015. Photo by Nicola Betts
JM: We think The Water Guardians will make people realize that the Don River is just about 30 seconds walk from the site of the sculpture. And in the next several years the mouth of the Don River will be reclaimed and restored. As you can see, public art can represent more than just an authorial artistic gesture. More likely is about place, the reflexivity of activating a place, and an awareness of building the new kind of city that we want to live in. Image credits (top): Marman & Borins in collaboration with James Khamsi, SFC Bridge,2015. Photo by Andrew Rowat Ilana Altman is a curator, designer and editor based in Toronto and founder of The Artful City initiative.
The Artful City is a bi-weekly blog series exploring the evolution of public art and its role in the transformation of Toronto, both the city fabric and the community it houses. For more information about The Artful City visit: www.theartfulcity.org
On the Waterfront: Building public art collections in Toronto’s newest neighbourhoods MARCH 17, 2016 | BY THE ARTFUL CITY
Photo: Nicola Betts for Waterfront Toronto
By: Rebecca Carbin Previous articles in The Artful City series provide a thorough overview of Toronto’s approach to commissioning public art. In recent years, the proliferation of public art in the downtown core has intensified. Thanks to rapid development and city policies
mandating investment in public art, the city now boasts over 500 unique pieces located in the city’s public parks, open spaces and privately-owned, but publicly accessible areas.
There is clearly a lot of public art in Toronto, and much of it is very good. The city is home to works of internationally renowned artists such as Anish Kapoor, James Turrell and Mark Di Suvero. It is questionable, however, whether the city has a coherent public art “collection”. Arguably, the very policies which have supported the rapid growth in individual public art installations, also make it difficult to take a city-wide approach to building a collection and ensuring that art works are situated in ideal locations. Toronto boasts a large number of individual works, but what does it all add up to?
More often than not, despite art being commissioned as a “community benefit”, the policies in question tie art to a specific building more than to a community. This gives the developer considerable say in the artwork selection, and the developer sees their building as being in competition with the building on the next block. They want their artwork to distinguish their building from, not work with, the building next door. Theoretically, there is always the option to channel funds off-site to a nearby public park or open space, but in practice, this option is not often encouraged by the City. This situation exists, in part, due to the lack of coherent plans that prioritize or qualify potential public art sites within city neighborhoods.
By contrast, the Waterfront Toronto Public Art Program operates on a scale and in a space that allows for a more strategic and curatorial approach.
Waterfront Toronto is funded by, and accountable to, three orders of government, but in its arm’s length role as master public developer of the city’s waterfront, the corporation is able to operate differently than the government bodies it answers to. While Waterfront Toronto adheres to the policies and rules set out by its government partners, it is also able to navigate a space of public and private partnerships that enables some ambitious moves in the realm of city building.
In many respects, the Waterfront Toronto Public Art Program is able to work outside of the limitations of the City’s typical system. Why?
The following conditions set the stage for an organizational commitment to art and culture as key elements in city building: first, scale of development – in the West Don Lands, East Bayfront, and Port Lands, Waterfront Toronto is building new communities from scratch; and second, design expectations – Waterfront Toronto seeks to work with innovative architects, designers and developers. Rigorous design expectations mean buildings need to stand out for their architecture, not rely on public art as dressing or distraction from architectural mediocrity.
Viewing public art as a vital part of a dynamic public realm, Waterfront Toronto plans for art from the earliest stages of planning a neighbourhood. This sounds obvious, but is amazing to think how much of a departure this is from usual city practice. All too often, art goes in the spot where nothing else will fit or nothing else has to happen.
By planning for art from the outset, art is not only allowed room to breathe, but it is sited with intention and with an understanding of its role and value to a place. Waterfront Toronto works across both City public art programs outlined in previous posts with a program for public art that aims to conceptualize collections for entire neighbourhoods. The approach to planning and commissioning public art is built on two main principles: Waterfront Toronto works with private development partners to pull public art contributions out of individual development blocks and into the high profile locations that have been identified in the planning process. Also, the organization articulates a curatorial vision, nothing restrictive or prescriptive, but a loose thematic thread that will weave the neighbourhood together with works that respond in various ways to a common narrative.
Artworks are commissioned with full acknowledgement of other artworks in their vicinity; each piece is considered in relation to those other artworks and also with respect to a broader neighbourhood identity and curatorial vision. Because all of these commissions are on public sites, these pieces are handed over to the City, along with a maintenance endowment, to be cared for in perpetuity. So, unlike pieces owned by condo associations, these valuable public assets become part of a maintenance program and have the long-term advantage of an identifiable custodian, a recognizable body who is accountable and contactable if work needs to be done.
The intended result is something akin to a typical fine art collection: a connected group of works that is acquired, interpreted and maintained with clear intention and purpose and which as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
This summer Torontonians will be able to see the results of the first few years of work when the newest neighbourhood on the waterfront becomes accessible. In the West Don Lands neighbourhood (a former derelict brownfield site, transformed into a thoughtfully planned, vibrant new mixed used community and last summer host to the Pan/Para Pan Am Games Athletes Village) a Public Art Strategy was approved by City Council in 2009 after extensive consultation with the community and City of Toronto. The first phase of the West Don Lands Public Art Strategy is now almost complete, and the results are compelling. Seven artworks – six new commissions and one major restoration – at strategic sites across the neighbourhood form the first chapter of a new collection. The works tell a story of human, natural and industrial history that reaches into the past and looks to the future.
Within the West Don Lands, the newly built and generously scaled Front Street promenade, serves as a case study for this approach. From early design stages, this new stretch of Front Street was envisioned to have a series of art sites. While walking along Front Street from Cherry Street to Bayview Avenue, one will encounter at each block one of the following three new works, each offering a bold and unique take on an overall vision and all visible from one to the next:
Photo: Nicola Betts for Waterfront Toronto
Paris-based Tadashi Kawamata’s Untitled (Toronto Lamp Posts) acts as a landmark to those coming east to the neighbourhood from downtown and, in the artist’s characteristic style, uses existing materials (lamp posts like those seen in neighbourhoods around town) to collapse history and geography with one playful gesture.
Photo: Nicola Betts for Waterfront Toronto
Toronto-based Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins won the commission which sought to engage children. The Water Guardians does so both aesthetically and conceptually: with bold colours, cartoon-like forms, and bouncy variegated terrain, the piece nods to the nearby Don River and reminds us that resources such as water are not possessed but merely stewarded for future generations.
Hadley+Maxwell artist rendering
Berlin-based Hadley+Maxwell’s Garden of Future Follies, was commissioned as a legacy of the Pan Am/Parapan Games. The intention with this commission was not to commemorate the games literally but to celebrate the event as a moment in the neighbourhood’s ongoing story, as a catalyst for immense and positive change. Their concept extends their gallery practice and, working with existing historical monuments and architecture throughout the City, creates a new series of monumental characters for the future. To read more about the specific pieces commissioned to date within this strategy, please go to the virtual tour on Waterfront Toronto’s blog. The successful implementation of these and other pieces in the West Don Lands provided the final incentive needed for the City to officially endorse Waterfront Toronto’s to other major move in Toronto’s public art landscape: in December 2015, City Council approved the East Bayfront Public Art Master Plan. This document builds upon the precedent set in the West Don Lands and applies it to another area of development, where typically the public art would all be commissioned block by block through the City’s standard Percent for Public Art program. The East Bayfront Public Art Master Plan sets out a vision for public art in the neighbourhood beside the lake (bordered by Jarvis Street to the west, Parliament Street to the East, Lake Shore Boulevard to the north, and Lake Ontario to the south) that once again pools percent for art development contributions into meaningful, high-profile sites, with a view to forming a public art collection that will define the neighbourhood.
The document sees art employed as a magnet: a magnet that fuses the identity of the Lake to the identity of the neighbourhood, one that stitches the neighbourhood together and adheres the neighouboorhood to the city. Water is the thematic thread that can be variously interpreted within a program that calls for three types of commission: Thresholds, Connections and Destination.
Thresholds will be major commissions at the railway underpasses at Jarvis, Sherbourne and Parliament. These are immersive artworks that will offer a glimpse of what lies south of this barrier, and compel movement towards the lake.
Connections will be commissions sited mid-block both north and south of Queens Quay. The pieces will engage visitors, but their focus is primarily with the community members that will soon reside in this area, providing moments of reflection and contemplation.
And the Destination piece is the one we envision will draw people down to the waterfront; the one people will take pictures of, bring their out of town guests to see and really take time to think about. This is a major commission that will engage both literally and conceptually with the hard edge boundary that is our shoreline in downtown Toronto. Something that invites Torontonians and our guests to think about, or experience, this hard edge differently.
That, after all is the role of art in the city. A place has no meaning without human experience and art in public is the most human element of city building. It is the opportunity to tell a story, maybe even a joke, ask a question, put forth another possibility and provoke discussion. It is the opportunity for busy urban dwellers to take a pause, however brief, from the demands of daily life and think about something bigger, something that connects people to each other and to a place.
With the first few years of the Waterfront Toronto public art program behind us, we are able to point to some achievements that we hope will ignite change in Toronto’s public art landscape and our expectations for art in public. Image credits (top): Nicola Betts for Waterfront Toronto
Design / Designer Profile: Jennifer Marman, Daniel Borins & James Khamsi
Designer Profile: Jennifer Marman, Daniel Borins & James Khamsi Terence Dick
A team of three – two artists and an architect – is making waves in Toronto’s public art realm and the built environment.
Amid Toronto’s ongoing densification, an elbow-shaped overpass has gone up, providing an elevated shortcut 46 metres long between the Metro Convention Centre and the Delta Hotel. For a city in deep-freeze at least four months of the year, it’s surprising that there aren’t more covered routes like it, rising above the traffic and letting the walking
masses experience sub-zero temperatures through windows instead of wind tunnels. SFC Bridge is also visually striking – more art than architecture. Two of its creators, Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman, are better known for their gallery installations, but public art has formed a part of their practice for years. In the past 12 months, they and their newest collaborator, James Khamsi, have added three commissions to the urban landscape.
Backstory Borins and Marman met 15 years ago, at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. There, they collaborated on interactive projects that required more than one person to realize, on a scale beyond what most commercial galleries had room for. Their first public installation, In Sit You (2006), utilized a tri-vision billboard, the kind typically seen alongside a highway, and mounted it inside a tiny city park. The ads were replaced with strips of bright colour that changed angles with each rotation. A matching striped park bench invited visitors to immerse themselves, quite literally, in the project and contemplate the morphing op art as if watching TV.
Toronto’s subsequent condo boom has brought with it a keener interest in energizing the city through art, and Borins and Marman have grown right along with the changing tide. In 2012, as part of a city-wide discussion of public transit, they were invited to wrap a commuter train car with vivid abstract graphics. A year later, a municipal directive mandated that developers commission artists to enliven construction sites. The regulation led them to create a colourful, 10-metre-long abstract work on a stretch of hoarding on Bloor Street, not far from the Royal Ontario Museum. They based the graphics on a timeline that traced the history of the area, from prehistoric times to the present.
Tipping Point In 2011, a serendipitous meeting at a gallery opening brought New York architect James Khamsi into their practice, and gave them a chance to work more closely with architects and builders during the development stages. Khamsi shares their interest in optical effects, and, more importantly, he says, “We all agreed on site specificity as an important
aspect of public work.” Borins concurs: “We’re more about context building than intervention.”
The partnership has culminated in three new works, including the SFC Bridge, which presented numerous structural challenges, given its sloping path and mid-air turn – geometries they’ve exploited by exaggerating them with black and white zigzags that mimic the inner structure. “We treated it like a painting scheme, to echo the trusswork and unsettle the interior,” explains Borins. Meanwhile, Khamsi has been tracking the response to the bridge on Instagram, where skateboarders and fashionistas are finding it to be an ideal photo backdrop.
Water Guardians, their second project, is a trio of ominous yet welcoming sentinels installed in the Canary District, Toronto’s massive multi-use redevelopment project along the waterfront. Made of cut metal and standing 7.2 metres tall, the blue giants keep watch with glowing LED eyes. “We were asked to create an outdoor living room,” says Marman. “It had to be something playful that appealed to children and families but wasn’t a straight-up park.”
A similar response to the local community is at work with Speech Bubble, an installation mounted last summer within a multimedia park-ette on John Street, designed by local landscape architecture firm Janet Rosenberg & Studio. The developer wanted to incorporate an LED screen, but the artists, wary that the technology would date the work, morphed the screen into a universal symbol – the cartoon speech bubble – by adding a white frame, then combining it with a slow-moving animation that gradually traces the history of hard-edged abstraction. “We’re adding to the animation on an ongoing basis,” says Borins, “and we’re now at the 1930s.”
What’s Next Speech Bubble also serves as a bookend to what began almost a decade ago with In Sit You. Despite the intervening years, both projects engage the public through mechanisms of mass media stripped of commercial content and infused with art and pure colour.
Oddly, the team’s first public commission, in 2007, is just now reaching the construction stage. Part of the new Downsview subway station, their latest is a steel sculpture that turns Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome into a giant dandelion with seeds dispersing into the wind. “We want to get more involved with cultural master planning,” says Borins. “Toronto is building entirely new neighbourhoods of 10,000 to30,000 people at a time. We’re hoping that a cultural sense can prevail, where we can have a voice in what we think works, what we think is vital.”
Public Art Speaks Up on Peter St
There’s a new speaker’s corner in town By Eric Mutrie
Artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins designed this 4.5-metre-tall speech bubble–shaped sculpture in collaboration with New York architect James Khamsi. Located near King and Peter, the metal statement-maker is the star of an urban plaza by Janet Rosenberg + Studio, which is located in front of the Hariri Pontarini–designed Pinnacle on Adelaide Tower. The cartoonish art work’s LED screen displays a looping video of abstract sequences inspired by the idea of things left unsaid.
The SFC Bridge is a project that combines public art and architecture to transform a pedestrian access point into a striking landmark.
As cities collaborate with private developments to install pedestrian friendly access in areas that are dominated by industrial and transportation infrastructure – how to make human-scale access inviting, sustainable, and vibrant is a typical problem. Marman, Borins, and Khamsi answered the challenge presented by the developers of Toronto’s Southcore Financial Centre with a design that is an energetic addition to the emerging district. The team won the commission through an international competition in 2012.
The SFC bridge is part of Toronto’s underground PATH network, that recently expanded above ground to create year-round elevated pedestrian walkways over rail lines and under raised expressways in the area south of Union Station.
Connecting the new Delta Hotel to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the SFC Bridge offers a unique pedestrian experience in the south edge of the city’s financial district. Sloping upwards from the Delta Hotel, the bridge takes a 120-degree turn to connect with the existing Convention Centre SkyWalk (built in 1989).
Dark aluminum panels wrap the bridge’s exterior, following its structural trusses, to bind its integral slopes and bends. The kinetic material interplay of wrapping and binding reflects the bridge’s role in connecting disparate realms of the city. Between the bands, triangular windows cast graphic shapes of light and shadow on the bridge’s interior. Stimulating the curiosity of passersby, they frame views of the urban backdrop, offering pedestrians a dynamic visual experience while crossing the bridge.
As a contemporary spin on disruptive camouflage, a digital designed, handpainted mural treatment that extends across its walls and ceiling echoes the trapezoids, diagonals, and triangles in the bridge’s structure to produce a dynamic, multi-perspectival experience.
Artsy
Marman and Borins Take Window Decoration to a New Level Artsy Editorial October 25, 2013 Featured by Art Toronto
Following their first career survey at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and on the very day the doors close on their first New York solo exhibition at Tierney Gardarin, Toronto-‐based collaborators Marman and Borins will again share the spotlight as the curtain lifts for Art Toronto – though all eyes will be on their abstract paintings. If you stopped by the Chelsea gallery for “Pavilion of the Blind,” you’ll remember the title piece, a kinetic sculpture made of colorful, motion-‐triggered window blinds rearranging in endless variations. Perhaps you’ll also recall that
feeling of wanting to freeze the frame to remember the fleeting configurations beautifully, Marman and Borins’ paintings do just that. At Georgia Scherman’s booth at Art Toronto, the related paintings catch the multicolor blinds and cascading window shades in fixed compositions, echoing the sculpture while playfully hinting at both artistic practice and abstraction. After the pair stopped by Artsy’s HQ for a happy hour toast to their recent success, we couldn’t help but follow up with a couple questions on
their works as they’ve moved from NYC to Art Toronto:
Artsy: Can you describe, in a few sentences, how your paintings at Art Toronto relate to the sculpture, Pavilion of the Blind?
Marman and Borins 2013
Marman and Borins Pavilion of the Blind, 2013
Marman and Borins: Our paintings both compliment and exist in tension with the Pavilion of the Blind sculpture. Simultaneously they are vignettes, single frames of an animation, studies of light and colour, while symbolizing both the blueprint for, and the record of the sculpture. Prior to assembling Pavilion of the Blind we made the paintings. We were imagining the structure and its allusions to modernist utopian architectural space. The paintings ruminated on the physical space of the sculpture and we realized that they could exist in an interesting plane between abstraction and representation. Concurrently, the Pavilion of the Blind installation proposes and installation that is kinetic, interactive, sculptural, electronic – but also a large-‐format mixed-‐media painting.
Artsy: Moving from Tierney Gardarin to Art Toronto, the painting works will be shown on their own. How might they be perceived differently without the context of the kinetic sculpture?
M&B: Alone and separated from the kinetic sculpture the Pavilion of the Blind paintings stand as a record or an ode, for something of grandeur, yet mythic. The two-‐dimensional works carry an air of historical authenticity and rationalized conclusions in them. They also carry atmosphere and light in the spaces between their compositions, suggesting notions of memory, and a cognitive dimensional impression. So in Art Toronto the paintings achieve exactly their purpose, to be both the original and the referent of the Pavilion of the Blind.
Marman and Borins 2013
Marman and Borins 2013
LVL3
Artist of the Week: Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins September 16, 2013
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have practiced sculpture, installation and media art inToronto since 2000. Jennifer Marman is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario. Daniel Borins is a graduate of McGill University. Both Marman and Borins are also graduates of the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2001—where they first met and began collaborating together.
Marman & Borins currently have their first solo show in New York with Tierney Gardarin Gallery. In the fall of 2012, they had their second solo show at Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto. Upcoming public projects include a large-format sculpture for Downsview Subway Station commissioned by the City of Toronto and the Toronto Transit Commission, and a public sculpture commissioned by Waterfront Toronto to mark the opening of the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games in 2015.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. We are a collaborative duo basedin Toronto, Canada. Our practice is multi-disciplinary and encompasses a variety of media including painting, sculpture, interactive electronic work, site-specific installation, and public art projects. We recently added architecture to the scope of our artistic practice - through a combination of landscape projects and hybrid art and architecture permanent public commissions.
We have been collaborating on projects for over ten years. This year marks one of our most exciting to-date, proving to be a milestone that represents a furthering of our artistic practice on conceptual, formal, and physical levels.
What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on? Opening this week, we have our first solo New York exhibition, Pavilion of the Blind, at Tierney Gardarin Gallery. This show features a large-scale, kinetic sculpture anda series of related paintings touching upon abstraction, representation, formalism, industrial design, surveillance, visuality and viewership. It represents a distillation of our ideas and interests from recent years. Presently, we also have a major touring institutional exhibition, The Collaborationists, currently on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Our most ambitiousproject to-date, this exhibition will travel to the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Windsor. In 2014, Pavilion of the Blind will travel to the Dunlop Museum, we will complete a publicart project for the Toronto Transit Commission, we will install a public sculpture for Waterfront Toronto (for the Pan Am Para Pan Am Games in 2015), and we will realize a pedestrian bridge in downtown Toronto that we co-designed with our colleague, James Khamsi.
What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other artists are struggling with these days and -how do you see it developing? We cannot really speak for other artists, but if we were afforded some observations: we are finding that it currently could
be more difficult for younger artists to have a peculiar or different style. Trends in artistic production are forcing a form of visual homogeneity and it seems as if the influence of the Internet and its various channels (which we are participating in here) are both a form of peer recognition and support. But it is also a form of social influence that seems to be leading younger artists to work in similar styles and reinforce current trends. Maybe this is just the nature of digital connectivity, but we would like to know if there could be more curious or subversive styles allowed into the mix. We would hope so.
If you had to explain your work to a stranger, what would you say? It is difficult to describe our work in one sentence because we are project based - so there is not one singular idea, or style that we could reduce to a snippet. To put it plainly, we have a multi-faceted base of concerns that we are currently describing as “project art.” There is however a consistent methodology in our approach, themes, and interests, such as: power and dominance, subversion, formal codification, and references to modernity to name a few. And then we could say that there is a lot of cross-referencing that we do in our own work, rather than small incremental updates to a singular form. Think of it as an encyclopedic approach that is growing in a non-linear manner.
What materials do you use in your work and what is your process like? Our materials range from basic items like canvas and paint to complex equipment like custom circuits and electronic controllers. Our process has matured to a point where we are able to create multiple studies - with us not being forced to execute a finished product immediately. We now spend more preparation time thinking, writing, planning new ideas, and developing new approaches and seeing them through. Early in our collaboration we had discussed the idea of a think tank or an idea lab as the basis for our practice - it didn’t completely turn out that way, but it was a good point of departure for us to begin our working method.
How has your work developed within the past year? One of the biggest misconceptions about our work is that is that it is too heterogeneous. However, we just needed a bit more time to lay out some grand plans. We think that in the past year, we have been able to present exhibitions that show a cohesion which may not have been so apparent before. Our touring institutional show, The Collaborationists, currently at theArt Gallery of Hamilton, has allowed us realize many ideas and has allowed us to edit. We have major pieces on show, and their elaborations. Context for smaller works is now reinforced. For example, we feel that Pavilion of the Blind is a distillation of many aspectsof our work – it encompasses our multidisciplinary vocabulary while simultaneously dwelling on certain themes yet in a variety of media in a cohesive manner. In a way, we were able to take many ideas further and yet distill those ideas to into strong, poignant, and balanced realizations.
What is your snack/beverage of choice when working in your studio? Our studio is in a bit of an industrial area - so we began several years ago to produce something that we jokingly referred to as the “Studio Diet.” It started out as food that could easily be transported and grew into a pretty intense form of health food and vegetarian-like preparations. (Sorry, no pastrami. No brisket.)
DB: Plus, if I did not prepare food, we would probably go hungry. For example, Jennifer might prepare a lunch of four raisins and an almond (and we’d probably split the almond).
The “Studio Diet” also includes a weekly trip to the farmer’s market where we get a large jug of natural ginger beer brewed by a group of Caribbean guys at their stall, “Fish Shack.”
What are you really excited about right now? It’s an exciting moment for us. Our most extensive exhibition to date, The Collaborationists, is currently on view at the ArtGallery of Hamilton and we have just completed the installation of our show, Pavilion of the Blind, at Tierney Gardarin Gallery in New York City. With these exhibitions showingin tandem, it has been very enjoyable for us to see the dissemination of our ideas. It feels like the culmination of 3-4 years of work, especially with the publication of a catalog. Plus, it has been great working with Cristin Tierney, Denis Gardarin and the gallery staff to realize this exhibition. It is nice to know that we have the support of the gallery after years of hard work and rumination on specific ideas about form and aesthetics. We feel that our base for some of our ideas has been established with Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto. Our family and support team has grown andwe are excited about that.
Can you share one of the best or worst reactions you have gotten as a result of your work? A critic once wrote, “Take it from a critic, there’s nothing to see.”
What is your ideal studio situation/workspace? The ideal studio would have southern exposure and is facing east/west. It would be on the ground floor and have a large garage roll-up door and large storage racks up high (most likely equipped with a hydraulic arm). The studio would have a dirty shop space, a medium clean production area, and then a clean office like space that is pristine and white. It would have an immaculately level polished concrete floor with radiant heat (and stylish yet industrial mats for added comfort in the workspace to stand upon). The mostly white space - with grey accents and stainless steel hardware - would be illuminated by a series of frosted skylights. It would have a kitchenette and a separate large slop sink. It would also have an apartment above it, and should somehow straddle the line between city enclave and county outpost. Maybe a vegetable garden on the roof to coincide with the “studio diet.” But farming is difficult…You said ideal…
What past trends in art would you like to see be brought back? It would be fun to bring back re-skilling, manifesto writing, intellectualism, and scale.
See more at: http://lvl3.tumblr.com/post/61402955154/artist-of-the-week-jennifer-marman-daniel-borins - sthash.C3FjEIUY.dpuf
Art Market Monitor
New York: Top 10 Shows to Watch This September By: Elena Soboleva September 5, 2013
Marman + Borins, Pavilion of the Blind, 2013. (Courtesy of the Artists and Tierney Gardarin Gallery, NY. Photograph by Rafael Goldchain, 2013.)
Elena Soboleva is a Specialist at Artsy, an online platform for discovering, discussing, and collecting art. You can follow her on Twitter @ElenaSoboleva
As autumn falls upon the city, the familiar ritual of collectors, artists and gallerists herald in a plentiful season of openings, art fairs and events. A cycle of aspiration and momentum unfolds. Unlike last spring, when the art world was absorbed into the gravitational pull of blue-‐chip names, trumped by the Koons bonanza, the highlights of this fall gallery season feel fresher and brimming with new energy and excitement.
Here are the artists who will be making a mark on New York this fall. Of significant note, all but one are presenting their first solo shows with the respective gallery. As well, the attention is much less Chelsea-‐centric and diffused across the city.
Marman + Borins – Pavilion of the Blind Tierney Gardarin Gallery 546 West 29th Street September 12 – October 26, 2013
Newly merged Tierney Gardarin Gallery is starting their fall season with Canadian duo, Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, whose talent at home has earned them steady critical praise and growing recognition abroad. The show is called Pavilion of the Blind and will feature works which deconstruct perception, surveillance and the relationship of the viewer to the art object. Their wickedly smart Kosuthian approach playfully pokes fun at the nature of art and incorporates interactive elements into their installation. Title piece, Pavilion of the Blind will be a structure made of colorful array of window blinds, panels and shades whose movement is triggered by motion sensors. The mechanical installation arranges and rearranges itself into a series of constantly changing abstract compositions.
Jon Rafman – You are standing in an open field Zach Feuer 548 W 22nd Street, New York September 12 – October 26, 2013
The works of Rafman will be familiar to those who saw him transform the lobby of Hannah Barry’s Peckham Pavilion at the Venice Biennale by covering every object and interior entirely in a Georgia O’Keeffe motif. Known for his Google Street View image appropriations, the artist will have his first solo show at Zach Feuer this fall. You are standing in an open field presents an odyssey through virtual landscapes, exploring online worlds, hybrid cultures and manifestations of memory through sculptures, videos and mixed media installations. It is bound to be a sensory feast.
Lucien Smith – Nature is my Church Salon 94 243 Bowery, New York and 1 Freeman Alley, New York September 13 – October 25, 2013
There are very few contemporary art collectors who have not heard of, and begged their art consultants for a Lucien Smith. The momentum which has surrounded this young artist is incredible and he’s had shows at OHWOW, Half Gallery and Suzanne Geiss in the last year and a half. A west coast transplant, closely associated with the Brooklyn artist-‐run organization The Still House Group, he is part of the new New York generation re-‐envisioning conceptual and process based art. The show at Salon 94 Nature is My Church, continues his multi-‐media aims to transverse a ‘spectrum of styles and concepts’ by creating works which both explicitly comprise and embody the greater entity of his oeuvre.
Cary Leibowitz – (Paintings and Belt Buckles) Invisible Exports September 6 – October 13, 2013 89 Eldridge Street, New York
This LES gallery’s program has been on my radar and certainly not surprising that Invisible Exports is moving to a new space on Eldridge Street. They are inaugurating it with their first show of Cary Leibowitz, the artist also known as Candy Ass. Leibowitz first established himself as a prankster-‐critic and part of the ‘Pathetic Aesthetic’ in the 1990s. His reductionist paintings present “everyday experience not as objects of reverence but occasions for scrutiny and absurdity” through the use of cheek text and repeating canvases in array of play-‐dough colors. The buckles are a nod to fantasy dress up and a childlike view of the world. The canvas works feel fresh and preserve a self-‐deprecating naivete, which makes them as befitting a LES space as any RISD grad.
Ben Wolf Noam, Greg Parma Smith and Korakrit Arunanondchai – Digital Expressionism Suzanne Geiss 76 Grand St, New York September 5 – October 19, 2013
This three person show of new works by Ben Wolf Noam, Greg Parma Smith, and Korakit Arunanondchai promises to “explore the half-‐life of material art objects in an age dominated by digital forms.” By both mimicking the online realm and using it as a point of departure to their process, the artists strive to translate the binary back into analog. Part performance, part template for the digital age – this show will clash processes and aesthetics in one grand spectacle.
Bjarne Melgaard – Ignorant Transparencies Gavin Brown’s enterprise September 14 – October 26, 2013 620 Greenwich St, New York
Bjarne Melgaard is a New York-‐based, Norwegian artist who writes novels, like big cats and avoids any form of categorization. Last year he showed tiger cubs at Ramiken Crucible, built a Mary Boone shrine at the Armory and his vivid playroom-‐like solo presentation at Gavin Brown’s Frize NY booth had every fashion editor rushing there for ‘street style’ inspiration. The show Ignorant Transparencies is sure to be equally unpredictable. If you need more reason to see it, The New York Times best attempt at describing Melgaard was that he “has been called the most famous Norwegian artist since Munch.” That’s saying something.
Elad Lassry Gallery 303 September 13 – October 26, 2013 507 W 24th St, New York
Kicking off the fall season in the two-‐year temporary location, Gallery 303 will be presenting the first exhibition with the Israeli-‐born, LA-‐based artist Elad Lassry. The show is based on his fabricated, reproduced pictures, which breach parameters of photography and morph into sculpture, yet remain uncertain of which realm they occupy. Lassry works with images culled from advertising, films, illustrated magazines, and commercial catalogues – altered from their original context to create destabilized signifiers. His works are often compact and his photographs are rigorously formatted to never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page.
Gladys Nilsson and Julia Benjamin – New Works The National Exemplar September 9 – October 19, 2013 381 Broadway, 2nd floor, New York
This show will pair two artists from varying generations. Gladys Nilsson born in 1940, is an original member of the Chicago Imagists, a group who turned to unique pop-‐representation and surrealism after the war. Julia Benjamin, born in 1984, is a recent graduate of the Columbia MFA and makes abstract paintings with dabs of color. The charged interplay between the two is bound to be wonderful. This gallery is not one to lack vision and what show is next is always a surprise (and a treat). Last year presented exhibits with Adam McEwen, Dan Colen & Nate Lowman, Sebastian Black and Peter Coffin, so doubtless this will be a great season ahead.
Harold Ancart – ANACONDA STANDARD C L E A R I N G Gallery September 13 – October 27, 2013 505 Johnson Avenue #10, Brooklyn
Although this is the only artist on the list for whom the show is not their first with the gallery, this exhibition marks the start of the sixth season of the Brussels-‐Brooklyn space, and has be excited. Ancart’s works are encounters of traces, surfaces and physical space. They often take the shape of stressed paintings, off-‐kilter minimalist objects and color photographs with flame licks burned across them – objects instilled with vast amounts of agency. Ancart uses chance and repetition to coerce this material force with great skill.
Hayv Kahraman – Let the Guest Be the Master Jack Shainman Gallery September 10 – October 12, 2013 513 West 20th Street, New York
Jack Shainman Gallery will present the first New York solo show of Iraqi-‐born, San-‐Francisco based artist Hayv Kahraman. Her delicate works echo Islamic and Persian traditional motifs and are painted on wooden panels with flat planes filled with pattern. Her practice grapples with issues surrounding female identity of her homeland while embodying a stoic poeticism and lyrical elegance. The figurative painting depict women and weave narratives with deep cultural resonance. In this show she “explores private and public spaces through the lens of the disenfranchised, specifically women and immigrants.”
Entertainment / Visual Arts
Marman and Borins: The CollaborationistsToronto art duo playfully capture anxiety of the information age in their first career survey, at the ArtGallery of Hamilton
Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman have a mid-career survey show, The Collaborationists, on at the Art Gallery ofHamilton until Sept. 29.
By: Murray Whyte Visual arts, Published on Tue Jul 30 2013
For what seems like a long time now — which is what a decade-plus is, depending on how long in the
tooth you might be — the Toronto art duo of Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins has been offering up
works, ideas and environments that alternate between heady visual confections loaded with art-
historical references, and efforts supercharged with conspiracy-theory politicality, mired deep in
oppressive esthetic dullness.
For all appearances, it's always seemed that the twain never actually met — the expression, one
imagines, of two minds functioning not entirely as one, at least not all the time. But at their current
mid-career survey show, The Collaborationists, expertly mounted at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, a
holistic view of things is less challenging to divine.
Marman and Borins have always been engaged with Modernism, and the parallel esthetics of their
oeuvre dovetail nicely with the rift between the idealism and reality of that philosophy. Rising with the
industrial era at the turn of the 20th century, Modern art evolved, by mid-century, as a way to wipe the
slate clean, to cast off historical narratives and explore the elemental realms of proportion, material
and colour (abstraction being the best-known, best-loved and most-criticized expression of this).
Ditto architecture, which, following on the Bauhaus school of Walter Gropius in Germany, was
retooling itself from baroque neoclassicism to clean lines and simple materials in the same effort to
find something essential, spiritually and formally, at the core of the built environment.
Noble goals, though, can have ugly ends, and Modernism gave us plenty of those. Le Corbusier, one of
the movement's high priests, coined the phrase that a house was a “machine for living”; it was a
romantic notion, believe it or not, but in the dystopic fallout of such structures — housing projects,
prisons, not looking all that dissimilar — something was clearly lost.
Running alongside this evolving esthetic were great leaps in information and communication
technology, and this is where the threads of Marman's and Borins' practice braid together.
At the AGH, there's a friendly playfulness to the duo's colour-filled works and, at face value, they can
be taken as no more than that. A gaggle of 11-year-old girls stood in rapt amusement in front of Flip
Out, a mechanical installation piece that noisily flips its grid of colour chips several times a minute,
recalling old digital clocks and train station info boards.
This little scene struck me as great: totally engaging, accessible fun. The same goes for The Pavilion of
the Blind, an outsize pun, in that the piece is a great, big motorized installation of various kinds of
colourful window blinds — vertical, venetian, roll-down — that open and close on a regular cycle. On
the wall hang a series of paintings derived from its shifting form: the products of an automated
abstract painting machine.
On first glance, Pavilion looks like something you might find at a trade show, displaying various wares
for Hunter Douglas. But think a little harder. Taken together, Flip Out and Pavilion are a taut little
bundle of recent art history. Post-painterly abstraction, for one, where material concerns were
subverted for the purity of colour and form, as in the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt (and
Guido Molinari, particularly in Pavilion, if you want to Canadianize a little). Then, they knock the pins
out, evoking its antithesis, Minimalism, which looked to deflate Abstract Expressionism by making art
out of everyday stuff.
This all starts to read a little like one for the art nerds, but the works are utterly redeemed by their
seductive, colour-filled dynamism. It's a chide and a critique — Flip Out and Pavilion do nothing if not
subvert the esthetic spirituality of a movement bent on esthetic purity, by making the process random
and mechanical — but it doesn't stop them from being pretty.
In the same room, you find their complementary foil. Input Output is a boxy black industrial printer
that alternately spews and regorges a long, blank sheaf of paper. Cheekily conspiratorial, a kind of
black-ops anti-information device, the pair lash it to the same abstract project with two black and white
paintings behind it. The works echo Minimalist line drawings – one is squared off, the other curling –
but in context, you realize these aren't abstractions but likenesses of the paper swallowed and
regurgitated by the machine.
It's both a clever tie-in and a hint of what's to come. If it all seems like a lot of insider baseball, you can
head over to a room down the hall where things are more explicit . . . and more covert. A cartoony
sculpture of a surveillance camera points the way: Inside, an enormous reel-to-reel projects a tape
slowly on the wall; a set of headphones offer nothing but static. On the wall, two Plexiglas cases contain
a dense swirl of black and white shreds of paper, looking for all the world, from afar, at least, like
paintings Jackson Pollock might have made if he were incarcerated at Guantanamo.
Then the coup de grace. Through a door, a half-dozen identical black steel cases, each with a tiny
glowing red light, sit in a locked cage, thrumming ominously (take the hint: they're computer servers).
It's around here that you realize Marman and Borins have dropped the ceiling, carpeted the floor with
institutional grey broadloom and have abandoned museum lighting for the unforgiving glare of
fluorescent tubes.
What this might have to do with its colourful companions down the hall, you might wonder? Again,
think a little. For all their play, Marman and Borins are ultimately dealing with transparency and
opacity, and the endless tools modernity has given us to mechanize and dehumanize in the service of
deflecting truth and accountability.
Modernism, philosophically, was meant to democratize, to make everything better in an all-for-one
kind of way, boiling humanity down to an essential core of purity; instead it dislocated, ghettoized and,
for the most part, estranged. The pair make this plain by stealing the undeniably hokey spiritual centre
of Modernist art making and automating it into a process of random chance. Then they conflate it with
the sinister control mechanisms that modernity and the information age have wrought.
I started to think of those servers as containing the algorithms by which Flip Out and Pavilion run: an
infinite-permutation opiate for the masses, dazzlingly distracting while the real work gets done in
locked cages, under fluorescent lights. We're all part of the machine; here, at least, Marman and Borins
are the ones pushing the buttons.
ARTINFO Canada
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: the Accidental Activists Discuss “Art Train No. 9” By Sky Goodden October 18, 2012
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have been raising the political stakes in their artistic practice for several years, now, with projects evoking the visual language of authority, security, terror, and statehood, while dressed in a formalism both minimalist and pop. However it wasn’t until they engaged in their most recent project that they acknowledged themselves to be verging on activism.
In a collaboration with No.9: Contemporary Art and the Environment, Marman and Borins’s “Art Train Conductor No.9 “ links contemporary art, the environment, and social-‐minded engineering in a GO Transit train car. “No.9” tracks Toronto’s environs wrapped in the artists' signature abstract pop aesthetic, while plumbing the vagaries of transit itself. A site-‐specific yet mobile work, the train car, titled “tetAtet,” offers an App that engages in issues of public transit, social engineering, sustainability, and community.
As Marman and Borins realized in an interview with ARTINFO Canada, this summer, the project pushed them to acknowledge their newly activist agenda. “It occurred to us that you can have the traditional artist-‐as-‐activist archetype, or that, simply, an artist can be a facilitator towards activism,” Borins reflected.
Art Train Conductor No.9, is a moving, mobile public art project accessible to GO riders until December 1st, 2012, and operating on various corridors of the GO Transit Greater Toronto and Hamilton area networks. The design-‐wrapped train offers its riders an App featuring video clips of a cross-‐section of diverse and informed individuals discussing transit issues. From literary intellects like Margaret Atwood, to architect Bruce Kuwabara, Spacing editor Shawn Micallef, and transportation expert Eric Miller, subjects speak on issues pertaining to public transit, sociologic engineering, and community.
The project was originally conceived as a facet of MOVE: Transportation Expo taking place at the Evergreen Brick Works this summer, but, in the hands of a University of Toronto PhD seminar, and artist collaborators, Marman and Borins, it became something much bigger.
Says Borins, “we realized that a lot can be done with the right resources.“ Art consultant Andrew Davies “had thought about raising awareness around transit, so he got a hold of a GO Train coach, and wanted to have a multimedia component to it. We were working with grad students at U of T at the time, in the former Faculty of Library Science (now called iSchool), and they had done a term project around integrating a train and tablet computing.”
On the subject of their own established art practice, Borins says that “although we've made a lot of political artwork, featuring critical of power structures, or surrounding issues of the authority or oppression tied into it, we're not necessarily environmentalists.” However, he notes, “we ended up thinking about sustainability, urban planning, architecture, and the integration of art into it. It seemed like a good starting point.”
What Doesn’t Work
“It doesn't work to do a project that's an obtuse juxtaposition -‐-‐ you can't just put a picture of fried eggs on a train, or turn it into a goldfish. It's not going to work that well. We had to think about strategies around working with a public service, and
turning a platform of transportation into a space for debate.”
Marman adds that “another factor was that the project runs five months, and we needed something that would endure for a five month period, not just be a game you play a couple of times and be done. So the App we developed has new content each week.”
Arriving at Ideal Candidates
Borins: ”There's a tendency in media, like television -‐-‐ and even more so on the web -‐-‐ to reduce a talking head to a sound bite. Thirty years ago, interviews would be long and expansive, and people assumed there'd be an audience for what was being said. Our format is unusual, now, because there's a 90 second segment, but also a longer 15 minute segment available. We’re suggesting content to a range of attentions.”
Marman: “We wanted to get people who were recognizable public figures, but from a cross-‐section.”
What They Didn’t Want
Marman: “We didn't want to represent just one view point; we didn’t want just hardcore environmentalists, we didn't want a conversation just about transit, because that's just a part of the whole. In our research, certain names came up again and again, and grew from subsequent interviews.”
Borins: “We weren't trying to be partisan. We were reaching out to a lot of different people. But the consensus is really high! Everybody really wants stupendous service, and everyone knows there are problems with it as it is.” Of course, the current municipal government has proven relevant. Says Borins, “the way it's reported is quite different, but Rob Ford was probably elected on a $60 vehicle registration tax -‐-‐ that was the big issue.”
Regarding Toronto
Marman: “There should be an ongoing discussion, rather than just having these issues brought-‐up at elections.”
Borins: “Torontonians have a lot of aspirations for their city; ten years ago, public space started coming up in conversations. I don't know that people ever articulated what that was supposed to be, at the time. But it’s been an issue of particular concern for the community for a long time.”
He goes on, “livability, quality of life: these kinds of metrics became part of urban geography.” He notes that “now we have regular columns being written about urban development, which is totally amazing. You have increased numbers of
neighborhood activists, who have great intentions, but might not have it all put together. People have begun to understand that the city is an ecosystem.”
Marman: “Just by starting a conversation, you're getting people involved already. There's a greater level of action if there's debate around issues.”
The debate needed an engine, and Marman and Borins’s catalogue of experts is rapidly growing, “There's an ever-‐growing library of videos,” Borins says, “and we are continually collecting people's thoughts.” Simply put, “the project is supposed to be about awareness, and also to aestheticize the part of public space that doesn't normally get aestheticized.”
Aesthetics vs. Politics
When asked how they approached balancing their aesthetics with elements overtly political and sociological, Borins replies that they “were looking for a visual logic, something that came out of our own art. Fragments of our paintings are in the train design. We were also looking at elements that exist in nature, like camouflage,” a common element to their more political work.
Onto this, Marman notes the project’s continuation of their aesthetic. “We were thinking of camouflage as a form of adaptation, and adaptation as a form of innovation or survival in an urban environment.”
However, Borins notes, their use of camouflage couldn’t be too convincing. “We wanted to express digital communication and disruption of everyday life. So we have this very loud and complex design that will be eye-‐catching. Andrew Davies put it simply: ‘I want people to think riding on that train car is cool, so they'll choose that one’. So we were looking at art historical references, references from nature, subtexts of adaptation and survival, the current cultural phenomena of mash-‐ups and digital mixing, but also historical moments like Vorticism and Cubism. I think Metrolinx/GO Transit wants to show that these agencies aren't so rigid that they can't change and develop in dynamic ways; that they're not one-‐sided, that the public can speak to them and they'll listen.”
He adds, “it's a humongous task for an independent artist to work on. It's hard to work for an independent art agency -‐-‐ there's always a lack of resources, and it's difficult to integrate with the bureaucratic intricacies of an agency like Metrolinx. It's hard to produce a project that's worthwhile to the public.”
But, Marman says, “we did all the steps ourselves.”
Who’s Their Favorite Talking Head?
When asked which of the featured experts had most impressed them, Borins quickly replied, “Gil Penelo. His interview bowled us over. It never occurred to us that
mobility is a right, beyond the idea of accessibility. As in, if we don't provide universal mobility, then people will be cut-‐off. The low-‐cost solutions that he wants to offer...“
Marman interjects, “and that he has successfully implemented in Bogota (the difference he made in that city just with bike lanes and walkability),” she trails off, shaking her head.
“Ideas of Innovation Expressed Differently, Uncomplicatedly, Pragmatically,”
Borins: “These things are happening, and it's nice to have someone talk about them that way. We didn't know this would happen, but we kind of became activists because of it. We have much stronger awareness levels, and we've shared that knowledge with a broader audience.”
Has This Changed Their Future Practice?
Borins: “We’ve experienced an unintended consequence -‐-‐ we're getting asked to do things that have ridiculous levels of technical problem-‐solving. It seems like people are coming to us to do difficult projects, which is nice, but there never seems to be a project with a simple answer.”
He reflects further, “studio practice is an amazing part of being an artist. It's an incredible privilege to have. I don't know what artists are talking about when they say they want to be ‘post-‐studio’. People don't realize how complex and difficult it is to implement a multi-‐partner project in the public sphere. You don't have the administrative resources a corporation would have. But it's nice to be recognized for that. We're being referred to as project artists now. And we’re thinking of ourselves, more and more, as activists.”
Toronto Star
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins’ Formulation Articulation Pixilation: Review By: Daniel Baird November 8, 2012
A visitor to the Georgia Scherman Projects views Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins paintings while in the foreground, their structure, Wire Ball, dominates.
We live in a society that is saturated with images and information, created and stored on digital devices, to the point where it’s almost impossible to traverse a downtown street without being inundated with information while bumping into people using their smartphones, iPads and laptops.
But Toronto-‐based Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins are less concerned with the spectacle of this everyday worldthan with exploring the underlying digital infrastructure in their installation at Georgia Scherman Projects, “Formulation Articulation Pixelation.”
Marman and Borins are cerebral artists and their design sensibility is more often than not pitch perfect.
Marman and Borins enable us to envision the digital world, with all its strings of zeros and ones, and its impact on us in bright, living colours and sharply defined shapes.
For example, digital information is typically stored in various locations on a computer’s
hard drive; the more dispersed bits of information are, the more fragmented it is and the longer it takes to retrieve and use. To “defrag” a hard drive is to consolidate and streamline the information.
So in the painting Frag 7 (2012), squares of green, blue, purple and black are arrayed from one edge of the painting to the other, the black occupying a central position. While the painting’s title suggests the degree to which our lives and minds have become distracted, the dominance of black implies a kind of amnesia: not only is information fragmented, but some of it sinks into darkness.
Defrag 7 (2012), on the other hand, consists of stripes divided into smaller units moving from warm colours like yellow and red to cooler ones like blue and grey, creating at least the appearance of greater order and compression.
Corrupted Defrag 7 (2012), by contrast, suggests the fragility of the information infrastructure on which we all depend. Marman and Borins took the sequence of stripes in Defrag 7 and covered them with stripes of grey, leaving behind only glimmering fragments of colour.
Marman and Borins are keen on irony and the playfulness of rendering digital processes with ordinary acrylic paint on board or canvas is surely not lost on them, nor is the strangeness of painting pixels. Pixelated Painting Block (2011), for example, consists of rows of coloured squares with the bottom of the canvas squeezed into narrow rectangles, giving the painting a sense of vertical hierarchy.
Marman and Borins’ paintings are compelling in part because of their combination of esthetic and conceptual precision. Their sculptural work, by contrast, is prone to degenerate into clever one-‐liners. Google 2.0 (2010), for instance, consists of a pair of nutty, black, googly eyes rigged with a hard drive and motion sensors so they follow an unsuspecting viewer around the gallery. Kneeling Sculpture (2011) is a chair upholstered in purple vinyl and set at a steep angle that resembles someone kneeling; Reclining Slab (2011) is, not surprisingly, a reclining chair fashioned from a slab covered with purple vinyl that would be singularly uncomfortable to recline on.
Marman and Borins are at their most self-‐assured in their paintings, which owe a significant debt to American abstract painters like Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt. Blue Green Red (2012) is virtually a tribute to Kelly.
The show’s single most beautiful work is For Ad (2012), in which light orange squares are arranged against a background of deeper orange; one assumes the painting is dedicated to Ad Reinhardt, though the reference to advertising is there as well.
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins’s Formulation Articulation Pixelation is at Georgia Scherman Projects until Dec. 1, with an opening reception Nov. 8. www.georgiascherman.com
The Collaborationists: To Avant-Garde or Not To Avant-Garde By Christian Viveros-Fauné
Some day it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism, which started out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art’s sake and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.1 —Clement Greenberg, “The Late Thirties in New York” (1960)
A specter is haunting art today—the specter of the avant-garde. All the powers of postmodern art and industry have entered into a holy alliance to enthrone this specter: Art Basel and the Frieze art fair, October and Artforum, the mass media and newangled global financial powers, as well as several generations of artists, curators, gallerists and museum directors for whom facile market ironies routinely prove an uncritical pole star.
The avant-garde today remains one of the least understood, most easily accepted verities in a vast sea of received cultural assumptions. The truth, of course, is that there has long been little agreement amongst cultural theorists as to its actual meaning. At its most essential, the avant-garde is a military metaphor, a vanguard—the shock troops of art making. Groundbreakers, pioneers, progressives, the cutting edge: whatever its euphemistic replacement, the avant-garde is expected to lead the way from the past into the future of art.
Yet the very idea of the avant-garde has been in flux for more than a century. A term commonly used to refer to people or works that are experimental, innovative or even bizarre—particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics—the avant-garde also refers quite early and explicitly to the promotion of radical social reforms. This, in any case, was the primary meaning invoked by the phrase’s inventor, the Saint Simonian Socialist Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues. Writing in his 1825 essay, “L’artiste, le savant et l'industriel,” (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”), Rodrigues utilized a then familiar term of revolutionary politics to speak to what was a primarily literary-artistic context. Let the artists “serve as [the people’s] avant-garde,”2 he wrote, arguing further that “the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way”3 to social, political, and economic reform.
Since then, assorted authors like Renato Poggioli, Clement Greenberg, and the German literary critic Peter Burger have dissected the ways in which the avant-garde has slowly but actively ditched the ideal of social reform—first for aesthetics and, more recently, for a love of the market. Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), for example, speaks to one of art’s last attempts to justify progressive art on the grounds of an extremely limited idea of social activism: namely, institutional critique. Arguing that the cultural establishment’s embrace of socially critical artworks suggests an active complicity with late capitalism,
1 Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 3. 2 Matei Calinescu, The Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 103. 3 Ibid.
Burger wrote simply that “art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work.”4 Harold Rosenberg, writing at about the same time as Burger, proved even more final when he quite correctly observed that by the 1960s so-called progressive culture had ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Flanked by what he called “avant-garde ghosts” on one side, and a rapidly evolving mass culture on the other, art in his words had instead become “a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it.”5 Fast forward five decades. At a time when the global state of the arts is best described by the phrase “the commercialization of the avant-garde,”6 few artists or artist collaboratives would seem better prepared to deal with the past ideals, present day fictions, and future possibilities of the avant-garde than a Canadian duo with the oddly officious handle of Marman & Borins (they sound at once like a law firm and a Las Vegas lounge act). A pair of artists who have outright decided to title this exhibition The Collaborationists, they embody what Robert Storr—in a discussion about the merits of certain artist careers vis a vis the market and mass culture—has characterized as the elusive position of the necessarily wily, autonomous contemporary artist. Referring to what the critic and curator has termed the working paradigm of “being a fox within your own aesthetic,”7 Storr has characterized the shifting stances of artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Dave Hammons as belonging to a creative type he has christened “Mr. Inside-Outside.”8 In the case of Marman & Borins, this exhibition presents the cagy case of a savvy Canadian duo offering a collaborative variant of Storr’s famously self-directing exemplars: Mr. and Ms. Inside-Outside. But let’s start by taking Marman & Borins at their word. “As the title suggests,” the artists asserted in one communication to this writer, “The Collaborationists combines the artistic act of collaborating with the narrative insinuations and overtones of collaborating with the enemy. A series of confrontations ensues: the artists position works that face and efface each other; connote and quote each other; all through an extended set of art platforms acting as thematic references… in the context of these symbiotic relationships.”9 I have quoted at length here because the idea of symbiosis among critically discursive art works in a single exhibition is key to understanding Marman & Borins’ method—especially if one considers the possibility of expanding that metaphor of critical symbiosis beyond the exhibition to art and its institutions, institutions in general, and finally to the social field itself. The result easily turns both maddening and exhilarating: per Rosenberg’s diagnosis, Marman & Borins relegate the act of critique to an “effect,”10 enacting the tropes and figures of the avant-garde while displaying a studied historical skepticism in the process.
4 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 1984), 90. 5 Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 6. 6 Christian Viveros-Fauné, “Artmaggedon: How Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art,” The Village Voice, February 6, 2013. 7 Robert Storr, conversation with the author, January 24, 2013. 8 Ibid. 9 Marman & Borins, communication with the author, February 12, 2013. 10 Ibid.
For the duo, art and politics at the start of the 21st century is not merely “post-revolutionary,”11 it is elusively post-political—at least in the sense in which orthodox North American conceptualism and political art continues to propound the illusion of activism through mere art world critique (for it’s opposite, consider the current politics of a contemporary artist like Ai Weiwei, or the 1960s artistic interventions of Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas). According to Marman & Borins “art is a project, and we are project artists, working within our own vocabulary,”12 which for them means, essentially, that they treat art as a generative process, an evolving practice of problem-solving that in turn gives way to a daisy-chain of visual and critical confrontations. Within that practice, one thing stays steady: their desire to bring the unquestioned ideological tenets of contemporary visual art and visuality into full visibility. “On a thematic level,” Marman & Borins have declared, “we wish to express an underlying tension in the exhibition of ideas surrounding anti-capitalism/imperialism and our discomfort with the indifference that broad sections of the art world has with issues of power and subordination. Yet we have been critical of anti-capitalism, and anti-form as a way of critiquing globalization, capitalism, and marketization in an indirect manner—by continuing to produce art with a style that is somewhat peculiar to our practice.”13 That style is often playful, accessible, object-centered and mercifully free of the sort of radical pretense that accompanies work with orthodox avant-garde pretensions. (Greenberg’s quote regarding the lineage of Trotskyism, through art for art’s sake, and onto so-called advanced art is particularly germane here.) Consider, for example, a work like Google, a kinetic interactive sculpture whose cartoon eyes follow people around the room the way the gaze of the Mona Lisa is supposed to mysteriously track a viewer’s movement. A work that makes a capacious, humorous metaphor of current notions of surveillance, the invasiveness of data mining, and even of the illusions of renaissance perspective, Google provides what Marman & Borins call a “mechanized scenario that works,”14 while drawing age-old connections between art and technology that remain relevant to this day (consider, for example, the connections between gaming and drone technology). The end result is “a critique of a critique,”15 where the utopia of total information access itself engenders the purportedly friendly pop-eyes of total surveillance. A second work to confront the ideas of the artistic avant-garde with technology’s expanding real life control is Black Boxes—a room-sized installation containing six humming, metallic black boxes fenced off by wire mesh and set under bright fluorescents. Equal parts mock computer terminal and minimalist death star, the work alludes to the necessary hermetism shared by both avant-garde art and technology in an environment increasingly pitched away from radical social
11 Ben Portis, “Finders Keepers: Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins’s Post Revolutionary Take on the Vernacular,” Canadian Art, 116-120. 12 Marman & Borins, communication with the author, February 12, 2013. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid.
thought and toward capitalist instrumentalization. A potent visual metaphor for an inversion of values in both science and art, a work like Black Boxes represents, above all else, the latent possibilities inherent in any human advance to engender its opposite. An argument made even more literal in Shredded Rectangles—redacted and shredded data in paper form encased inside clear plastic rectangles—Marman & Borins’ work make actively explicit the connection between the official repression of knowledge by governments to the once elite codifications of Jackson Pollock’s allover paintings. Marman & Borins go so far as to suggest that the latter’s paintings, created during the heyday of the American avant-garde, contain the authoritarian kernel of the former. Both argue physically and virtually for control of access over knowledge—a position that may be avoided only by the constantly refreshed lesson that, in art as well as in life, extremes meet and, in so doing, radically change their respective natures. An artistic position remarkable for its flexibility and continuous self-scrutiny, Marman & Borins’ artistic practice at once seriously questions and advances the age-old avant-garde project. No so much privileged as selectively interrogated for inevitable gaffes and inconsistencies, their extension of artistic and social critique proves mobile, open-ended and constructively skeptical. As conditional as any other kind of knowledge, the revelations this duo arrive at on a project by project basis establish a shifting position that constantly questions its own radical premises. Few evolving artists projects establish better footing for a reflexive, clear-eyed adoption of a forward-looking, historically astute, 21st century avant-garde.
As last winter passed into spring, the artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins were intent on making every minute count. They had just fi nished an immense installation for Canada Blooms, Toronto’s annual fl ower-and-garden show, hard on the heels of exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of York University. Several other projects were in varying states of completion or looming on the horizon. Because Marman and Borins do not yet say no, either to them-selves or to others, a daunting set of commitments stretched out over the next two years. They keenly sensed the clock ticking away. Another rite of spring, fi ling tax returns for Implosion Post Media Ltd., the registered legal entity of the Marman-Borins collabora-tion—something that would pull them away from their preferred tasks for the better part of a week—also pre-sented an opportune occasion to reassess their resources and refl ect on their practice.
It was a shared obsession with the act of being artists, disbelief in buzzwords like deskilling, post-studio and relational aesthetics, that bonded Marman and Borins a decade ago at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Each came with a prior university degree, hers in phi-losophy, his art history. Their decisions to return to Toronto and study sculpture had everything to do with forming materials and the creative setting of the studio. In 2000, while students, they formalized their collabora-tion under the moniker Marmco International. Like N.E. Thing Co.—Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s Vancouver-based corporation, active from 1966 to 1978—Marmco steeped
LEFT AND ABOVE: Installation views (details) of Project for a New
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PHOTOS COURTESY GEORGIA SCHERMAN
PROJECTS PHOTOS COREY GOODYEAR
FindersKeepersBY BEN PORTIS
JENNIFER MARMAN and DANIEL BORINS’S post-revolutionary take on the vernacular
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itself in information, communication and models of transaction as strategies to bridge the divide between art and life. It backfi red. “We spent all our time maintaining the website,” they recall. They eventually dropped the corporate posturing and began working under their own names in 2003.
Marman and Borins also share a history of provocation. They were part of a clique that in 1999 took control of the Ontario College of Art and Design student council and put its operating funds into Art System, a radical exercise in collective exhibition-making and artistic free agency, initiated at a moment when Toronto’s established artist-run organizations were burrowed into niche agendas and institutional discourse. Art System was “such a motley crew of people,” the artists recall. “Everyone was highly individualist, with totalized styles, nothing to do with the others. There was no pressure to conform into a movement.”
Borins imaginatively correlated Art System’s successive incarnations into a progression of geopolitical statements. Some found his style brash; the experiment expended itself within three years. The instigators moved on (Marman and Borins graduated in 2001) and political orthodoxy was restored at the college. Since Art System was anti-bureaucratic, anti-document and anti-archive, scarcely a trace of its activities survives today, but it was a watershed in Toronto artist culture. One upshot was that in 2005 the newly launched Drake Hotel hired Borins as its visual-arts programmer. He implemented a non-stop mix of underground exhibitions, performances and critical forums that remains the hotel’s template for cultural engage-ment. Meanwhile, he hung tight with his Art System co-conspirator, the digital nihilist Jubal Brown, and produced a number of computer-crafted,
ultra-saturated, didactic/sardonic video works. These culminated in Borins’s Wigga of Mass Deception (2003), a 27-minute salvo of bombastic imagery and mandalic structure aimed at the Bush White House and the hubris that thrust America and the world into a miscalculated war on terror.
The video epitomized what has become Marman and Borins’s “post-revolutionary” attitude. Together, the artists restructure imagery and ideas gleaned from the vast and often vulgar fi eld of the vernacular. They are skeptical of chimeric promises of change and even regard the stuff of the present, whether material, iconic or virtual, as transient, a way station to yesterday, a fi nders-keepers wasteland wherein they claim creative domain and divulge no fi xed address. History, for them, is a fuzzy proposition. This profound ambivalence might explain why the work of Marman and Borins poses diffi culties for those who prefer that politics in art be constructive and empowering.
They regard their practice as “generative,” every project a building block that contributes to their technical skills and experience, and also to the set of ideological tenets that are the heart of their repertoire. Consequently, artworks and ideas from earlier stages of their collaboration often reappear in updated guises or reconsidered contexts. In the National Gallery of Canada’s impressive 2008–09 group exhibition “Caught in the Act,” which examined participatory strategies and tendencies in contemporary art, Marman and Borins were represented by a tight selection of works spanning fi ve years, one of a few sideshow elements (others belonged to Geoffrey Farmer and the trio BGL) that peppered a more typically elaborated thematic show. The National Gallery has made an emphatic commitment to Mar-man and Borins: two years ago it acquired the fi rst product of their post-Marmco phase, Presence Meter (2003), a clinical-looking grid of 2,040 dials whose needles quiver according to the proximity of the viewer.
Also part of “Caught in the Act” was the sculpture Beyond Good and Bad (2004), modelled after the alien monolith that incites tribal apes to murder in the “Dawn of Man” prologue to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 fi lm classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Marman and Borins converted the monolith into an arcade game: the viewer who chooses not to be a bystander can plant his or her feet on a pair of cartoon-like pawprints and enter a private column of sound. The gleefully inane reward is Richard Strauss’s Alsosprach Zarathustra—often thought of as the anthem of Kubrick’s fi lm—butin the jazz-funk arrangement recorded by Deodato in 1972. The work’s title alludes to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil; however, Mar-man and Borins bypass moral ultimatums and take on a matter of judg-ment: good art against bad. Another viewer, the one who walks away, is equally implicated. “With Presence Meter and Beyond Good and Bad,” the artists note, “we were gaining control of engagement, seeing how a work controls a receiver, addressing a dismissive culture.” Woe to those who rush to easy conclusions.
Next was an installation that fully exploited the potential of the Art Gallery of York University, which, under the directorship of Philip Monk, was already designated an iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian precinct. The project was intended to be “completely analog, steeped not necessarily in conceptual art but defi nitely built on theoretical premises,” Marman and Borins point out. “It was going to be hand-built. There was going to be something oppressively physical about it.” Project for a New American Century, which was on view in early 2009, positioned the venue as the
Installation view (detail) of Project for a New American Century 2009 Mixed media Dimensions variable PHOTO COREY GOODYEAR
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symbolic nucleus of the university’s intellectual-ideological-architectural complex. Outside, York teetered through a protracted strike, adding time-liness to a show designed as a monument to crisis.
At the heart of Project for a New American Century was a cell contained within the cube-shaped base of a simulated-concrete turret. A passageway behind the turret formed the cramped and foreboding threshold of an exhibition that sculpturally emulated York’s brutalist 1960s campus master plan. The octagonal top of the tower ambiguously met or intersected with the ceiling plane, its front facade containing three high, refl ective “win-dows” that visually extended twin rows of bare fl uorescent bulbs (made to look like permanent gallery fi xtures) into infi nite vectors of light. The cell was visible through a lower, similarly proportioned glass window laced with fi ne wire; as one shifted to survey the details inside, it was like looking through a grid. As a viewer approached the window, the view expanded from a coherent Josef Albers–like geometric abstraction on the back wall to a jumbled, four-sided homage to Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt and Al Held. The sole item of furniture inside was a sloping, brushed-aluminum bunk/bench that jutted out from the mural. All of this, plus assorted black-and-white cubes on the fl oor and more fl uorescent lights on the ceiling, was optically encompassed and distorted by a quarter-sphere security mirror. Notably, there was no door.
The environment was fashioned after penal chambers rumoured to have been devised by anti-Franco anarchists during the Spanish Civil War—Cubo-Futurist habitats inspired by avant-garde art and intended to erode the captive’s grasp of reality and subjectivity. Marman and Borins push this
ABOVE: Momento Monkey 2007Lambda print 73.6 cm x 1.02 m
TOP: Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins with a collection of ephemera assembled by the artists and Castor Design PHOTO COREY GOODYEAR
Borins_Marman_09_19TSLR.indd 119 8/12/09 5:02:32 PM
120 C A N A D I A N A R T • F A L L 2 0 0 9
speculation—which runs counter to our assumptions about evil fascism versus noble socialism in the 1930s—forward in time to compound with late modernism and the incipient postmodernism evident in the painting, sculpture and architecture of the 1960s. The volume of the cell approximates that of the architect and artist Tony Smith’s six-foot-tall steel cube Die (1962), which he famously insisted was neither “monument” nor “object,” suggest-ing that hollow minimalist forms conceal psychosis and therefore are fi gura-tive. The apparatus of suppression is an obscure motif in contemporary sculpture; examples such as Barnett Newman’s Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley(1968) and Hans Haacke’s U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 (1984) remind us that Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are only the latest in a long, igno-minious line of form-follows-function horrors. The tower’s architectural double entendre was echoed at the other end of the gallery by an ornamen-tal concrete screen that also described an upended penitentiary fl oor plan.
In the adjoining gallery, elements derived from the cell and miscella-neous handmade sculptures that recall Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and Richard Artschwager, related but dissimilar artists, were laid out. Any of the pieces might also be an architectural fragment. Marman and Borins land equivocally between Morris’s dialectics of contingent form (Permutations, 1967) and anti-form (Continuous Project Altered Daily, 1969). The mandate of Project for a New American Century (titled after a neo-conservative American think tank) demanded that no rearrangement ever occur. Thus this was a tactical rep-ertoire, fi lled with instruments of inquisition rather than inquiry. Similarly, four immaculate square canvases elegantly abstracted the four major com-
ponents of the installation—tower, cell, screen and object layout—under-scoring the simultaneous conditions of hypothesis and realism.
The duo’s mammoth project at Canada Blooms, largely unseen by the contemporary-art constituency, was on view for a mere fi ve days. Still, Land-Escape hardly looked ephemeral. Built using a forklift, pallets and baling straps, the piece consisted of artifacts extracted from the reconstitu-tion cycle of post-consumer plastic waste—in this case discarded and recycled fl owerpots—arranged to imitate natural forms. There were mul-tiple horizons, eccentric topiary, blue sky and billowing clouds—classic artistic signifi ers of landscape. Land-Escape teased the garden show’s supreme artifi ce, showing us fl ora and fountains in the last days of winter, subtly baiting the onlooker with a comforting composition before posing ques-tions like: what’s wrong with this picture? Or sculpture?
The artists’ fi rst outdoor work, In Sit You, which was presented in 2006–07 at the Toronto Sculpture Garden, relied on similarly good-natured passive-aggressive tactics (the duo think of this in terms of “payoff”). A colour-coordinated set comprised of a park bench and a mechanized bill-board lured viewers onto and before a pair of striped abstractions, one static, the other kinetic. The artists will further refi ne their critique in their fi rst “site-generative” permanent public sculpture, due for installation at Downsview subway station in Toronto in summer 2010. Dodecadandy will crown a pedestrian pathway reclaimed from a long-neglected bus right-of-way with a monumental geodesic dandelion, its metal fl uff strewn down the lawn—ashes to ashes, weeds to weeds.
“It’s the investigation of potential, outcomes,” Borins and Marman say of their work. “We’re pushing out the boundaries of what space is. Every once in a while we go too far. But it comes from imagining ourselves in space, viewing the work and discussing what effect that has.”
See more works from these artists at canadianart.ca/marman
Land-Escape (detail) 2009 Mixed media Dimensions variable
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The PrisonerPhilip Monk
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2.12 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a
state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be
written into the thing itself.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
Modern description, on the contrary, at least that of painting,
arrests the viewer and releases the spectacle, adjusts it in several
tenses to his vision; . . . modern canvases leave the wall, they come
to the spectator, oppress him with an aggressive space: the painting
is no longer a “prospect,” it is a “project.”
— Roland Barthes, “Objective Literature” (1954)
— Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mikrophonie I (1964–65)
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Think Tank Scenario
1. I confess: I am starting this text as if I were writing a novel.As if I were writing a novel parallel to this exhibition, a novel dividedby what is parallel within it. But only as if this writing were a conjectureon how to write about an exhibition — in other words, a proposal forwriting on this exhibition.
2. For the exhibition itself is a proposal: Project for a NewAmerican Century it titles itself. The artists Jennifer Marman and DanielBorins have not invented the title but, like all of us, inherited the effects,so to speak, from what it originally titled. Their title has been liftedfrom the mission of a think tank, which the artists, perhaps, want usto hear as if it were an avant-garde manifesto. “The Project for theNew American Century (PNAC) was an American neoconservativethink tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from early 1997 to2006. It was co-founded as a non-profit educational organization byWilliam Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC’s stated goal was ‘topromote American global leadership.’ Fundamental to the PNAC werethe view that ‘American leadership is both good for America andgood for the world’ and support for ‘a Reaganite policy of militarystrength and moral clarity.’ Critics claimed that it exerted strong influenceon high-level U.S. government officials in the administration of U.S.President George W. Bush and strongly affected the George Bushadministration’s development of military and foreign policies, especiallyinvolving national security and the Iraq War.”1 Signatories to its“Statement of Principles” were amongst the roster of the Bush admin-istration, indictable war criminals, etc.
2.1 The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was anAmerican neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. thatlasted from early 1997 to 2006. It was co-founded as a non-profit edu-cational organization by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC’s
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stated goal was “to promote American global leadership.” Fundamen-tal to the PNAC were the view that “American leadership is both goodfor America and good for the world” and support for “a Reaganite pol-icy of military strength and moral clarity.” Critics claimed that it exert-ed strong influence on high-level U.S. government officials in the admin-istration of U.S. President George W. Bush and strongly affected the GeorgeBush administration’s development of military and foreign policies,especially involving national security and the Iraq War.
2.12 Communicating this to you, I cannot say everything that I wouldlike without fear of censorship. Fiction is a better model.
2.2 With its policies in disarray a mere ten years into the newcentury and its credibility crumbled after the fiasco of the Iraq War,restaged here Project for a New American Century points to anotheragenda. Hijacking a title, the artists engage in their own fiction —another think tank “what if?” scenario.
2.3 Not that this fiction does not have an historical basis. Withits multiple references, the artists’ installation is nothing but historical.Marman and Borins add nothing of their own, it seems, in the senseof the progression of contemporary art working its way to its futureas the next stylistic step. They repeat what is already historically givenbut bring it to view differently.
We must read into the word “project” the nuance of its forward-looking and looking-forward in order to see how one is implicated inthe other: the projection of forecasting and the perspective of vision.
Prospective is perspective, but perspective is retrospective here,as well. The artists look at what is thrown forward by conjecturallycasting a look back. They look backwards to an earlier point in timein order to chart a conjectural new path forward to the present asanother narrative of it.
Casting back makes the past into something of a fiction, too.
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The artists reconstruct the future of this past (our present) as aconjecture. That it appears to be what we know does not lessen itsconjectural status.
2.4 The artists, however, do not want to give any of this away yet.They prefer to imprison and censor themselves, us too, in a particularhistorical and aesthetic determination. They would prefer that I donot leak what they have already written, that I cross it out instead.Covertly, I resist.
The foundations are set for a scenario wherein the artists actas players in the landscapes of political radicality both pastand present, while simultaneously imprisoning themselveswithin their own formalist devices. The socially utopianbrutalist architectural scenario that oversees the installationcarries within its walls the clashes and harmonies of theideologically charged art of the twentieth century interwarperiod, and the hollowing ideological clashes of the culturalwars that have ensued since this period. What better way tousher in this disillusioned century than to imprison us in theprevious one.
2.5 The perspectives of logical progression, narrative points ofview, stylistic trajectories, or historical determination all figure inwhat follows.
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The Cell
3. All of this does not come to sight immediately, though our visionwill be guided. But first it is constrained architecturally. Architectureis the first presentation here. An intrusion into the gallery space, itsstructure also is means by which we are inserted into its vision.
3.1 The moment we walk through the gallery doors, our visionis directed, if only by an impasse. We enter a dark passageway lit byindustrial lamps where we are confronted by a blank cement wall thatnonetheless signifies, however brutishly: its surface almost painterly inits effects yet darkly oppressive. This wall also supports a weight as itsplane balances or, rather, transforms into a polyhedron that cantileversand encloses the space from above, pressing down ominously on us.
3.12 If architecture can insinuate itself in and as our vision, so toocan a description direct our seeing. (Perception has its own historyalthough it cannot be “visible” in its own time.) Ideally, my descriptionhere should be dated to the architecture itself by being produced inits era. How is this (return) possible? How could we recreate such aperiod description in the present in order to understand the contem-porary effects of past architecture? My fiction would be to see throughthe eyes of the time. To do so here, I retrieve an analogous description,something contemporary though at a remove since it discusses fictionnot architecture: that of the mid-1950s nouveau roman. I inviteyou to imagine walking through the gallery space guided by thisdescription offered by one of the new novel’s very own practitioners,Alain Robbe-Grillet:
It is not rare, as a matter of fact, in these modern novels, toencounter a description that starts from nothing; it does notafford, first of all, a general view, it seems to derive from atiny fragment without importance — what most resembles a
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point— starting from which it invents lines, planes, an archi-tecture; and such description particularly seems to be inventingits object when it suddenly contradicts, repeats, correctsitself, bifurcates, etc. Yet we begin to glimpse something, andwe suppose that this something will now become clearer. Butthe lines of the drawing accumulate, grow heavier, cancel oneanother out, shift, so that the image is jeopardized as it iscreated. A few paragraphs more and, when the descriptioncomes to a end, we realize that it has left nothing behind it: ithas instituted a double movement of creation and destructionwhich, moreover, we also find in the book on all levels andin particular in its total structure.2
4. We turn a corner and all, seemingly, is revealed in the fauxbrutalist architecture that dominates the gallery space, where inside isturned outside. A cantilevered concrete structure rises up from a cubicbase as if it were thrusting through the ceiling of the gallery, imposingits authority on us. Disciplinary here, at one time in the mid-1950s and1960s Brutalist architecture was utopian — the dominant style of thelarge-scale development of new university campuses built in the 1960s,such as Toronto’s York University. Now the style is associated with thefailed urban policies of social housing, especially the estate housing ofpost-war Britain.
4.01 Filmmakers immediately recognized the dystopian character ofthese architectural environments and used them as locations in sciencefiction films. Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (1971) was filmedin the new London housing estate of Thamesmead, while DavidCronenberg’s Stereo (1969) was filmed at Toronto’s Scarborough College,designed by John Andrews and built in 1964. Marman and Borinselaborate another fiction, just as conjectural as science fiction, but, likethis genre, fabricated from what already exists.
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4.02 Brutalist architecture was intended to be, at a glance, bothsculptural and signifying. In 1955, at the start of this stylistic phenom-enon, British architectural critic, Rayner Banham, wrote:
This concept of Image is common to all aspects of The NewBrutalism in England, but the manner in which it works outin architectural practice has some surprising twists to it. Basi-cally, it requires that the building should be an immediatelyapprehensible visual entity, and that the form grasped by theeye should be confirmed by experience of the building in use.Further, that this form should be entirely proper to functionsand materials of the building, in their entirety.3
4.03 While duplicating it at full architectural scale, Marman andBorins have returned brutalism to its sculptural form, where itsignifies as well. Starting from lines and planes, they invent a fictionalarchitecture, but as in Robbe-Grillet’s description, as an object thatcontradicts itself.
4.1 The monolith is so dominant that its contrasting interior isnearly concealed — contradicting Banham’s injunction of visiblefunctionality. The interior is fully enclosed with one sealed aperturethrough whose safety glass we can only peer. Inside, there’s a riotgoing on: a visual confusion of objects and images of blindingly brightcolour patterns and optically conflicting geometric forms. Areas wecannot see are reflected back to us through a parabolic mirror thatcondenses and further distorts the space. The grey mass is belied bythis vibrant enclosure from which there is no escape. There is noescaping its solitary confinement. Apparently.
Peering in, we realize that, on the outside, we still inhabit thedomain of this architecture — within the perimeter of its prison yard.Below is the prison cell, above the cantilevered guard tower withtwo-way mirrors. The cell is secreted within this structure. So, too, are
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observational points of view.
4.12 Within this disciplinary laboratory hidden from sight, not onlythe psychology and very subjecthood of the absent prisoner is at stakebut space itself is under threat of dissolution. Both subject and spaceare tortured as means to an end. As if a continuum existed betweenspace and consciousness, the cell anticipates its own effects on theprisoner: we can read the absent subject in the actuality of the cell itself.In this overconstructed and hyperreal space, which has been given thesheen of digital technology, the purpose is to deliberately confuse bya systematic exaggeration of rational coordinates.
The “tyrannical recourse to sight” is also parodic. It intends to“assassinate the classical object” and classical space with it. AnalyzingRobbe-Grillet’s fictional techniques in 1954, Roland Barthes statedthat the aim was:
to parody classical space, to disperse the concretion of substance,to dissolve it under the pressure of an overconstructed space.Robbe-Grillet’s many [directional] specifications, his obsessionwith topography, his entire demonstrative machinery has theeffect of destroying the object’s unity by hypersituating it, sothat initially substance is drowned under an accumulation oflines and orientations, and subsequently the abuse of planes,though endowed with classical denominations, explodestraditional space and substitutes for it a new space, furnishedas we shall see with temporal depth.4
The recourse to parody in Project for a New American Centuryis not “one-off” as so easily could happen in contemporary art. Itsprojections, too, are temporal.
4.2 Merely looking in and not seeing ourselves reflected in the cell’sparabolic mirror, we are not necessarily exempt from the cell’s effects.
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We do not fully know how we inhabit this disciplinary space dividedbetween the upper and lower architectural registers of guard tower andprison cell, split between two regimes of vision. How do we reconciletheir parallax vision? Where are we within this scenario? When are weimprisoned? When are we free?
4.21 Not seeing ourselves in the mirror: The mirror reveals a lookseemingly without this look being seen, even by itself, whereas we (thesubject of this look) are nothing but looked at in this installation.
5. Hidden from sight, the cell has a back-story, nonetheless. Totell the truth, I don’t know whether this story is apocryphal or not.
5.1 In January 2003, the Madrid newspaper El Pais publishedan article, subsequently reported by The Guardian, that anti-fascistrepublican forces operated torture prisons in Barcelona during theSpanish Civil War. Here is The Guardian article in full:
anarchists and the fine art of tortureSpanish art historian says they put enemies in disorienting cells
Giles Tremlett in MadridThe Guardian, Monday 27 January 2003 08.48 gmt
A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged tobe the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture,with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were builtby anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country’s bloodycivil war.
Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as wellas the surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel and his friend SalvadorDali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secretcells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere,yesterday’s El Pais newspaper reported.
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Most were the work of an enthusiastic French anarchist,Alphonse Laurencic, who invented a form of “psychotechnic”torture, according to the research of the historian Jose Milicua.
Mr Milicua’s information came from a written account ofLaurencic’s trial before a Francoist military tribunal. That 1939account was written by a man called R L Chacon who, likeanybody allowed to publish by the newly installed dictatorship,could not have been expected to feel any sympathy for whatNazi Germany had already denounced as “degenerative art.”
Laurencic, who claimed to be a painter and conductorin civilian life, created his so-called “coloured cells” as acontribution to the fight against General Franco’s rightwingrebel forces.
They may also have been used to house members ofother leftwing factions battling for power with the anarchistNational Confederation of Workers, to which Laurencicbelonged.
The cells, built in 1938 and reportedly hidden from foreignjournalists who visited the makeshift jails on Vallmajor andSaragossa streets, were as inspired by ideas of geometricabstraction and surrealism as they were by avant garde arttheories on the psychological properties of colours.
Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making themnear-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ftcells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocksto prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards,according to the account of Laurencic’s trial.
The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, whichwere curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes,squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour,perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress.
Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzyingpatterns on the wall were moving.
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A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisonersliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua said.Some cells were painted with tar so that they would warmup in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.
Laurencic told the military court that he had been commis-sioned to build the cells by an anarchist leader who had heardof similar ones used elsewhere in the republican zone duringthe civil war, possibly in Valencia.
Mr Milicua has claimed that Laurencic preferred to use thecolour green because, according to his theory of the psycho-logical effects of various colours, it produced melancholy andsadness in prisoners.
But it appears that Barcelona was not the only place whereavant garde art was used to torture Franco’s supporters.
According to the prosecutors who put Laurencic on trialin 1939, a jail in Murcia in south-east Spain forced prisonersto view the infamously disturbing scene from Dali and Bunuel’sfilm Un Chien Andalou, in which an eyeball is sliced open.
El Pais commented: “The avant garde forms of the moment—surrealism and geometric abstraction — were thus used forthe aim of committing psychological torture.
“The creators of such revolutionary and liberating [artistic]languages could never have imagined that they would be sointrinsically linked to repression.”5
5.12 Such a report of the avant garde’s intrinsic link to repressionupsets cultural expectations or expresses a contradiction — a blind spot—within them: the assumption that leftist or democratic culture is onthe side of progress and incapable, for instance, of violating humanrights. When we think of the left’s response to the Spanish Civil Warwe picture Picasso’s Guernica, not modernist decorated torture cells.
Culture, supposedly, is in no way compromised by politics,even by aberrations within democratic regimes. Recent scholarship,
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however, has complicated the relationship between modernism andfascism. As Mark Antliff writes:
We now recognize that many of the paradigms that spawnedthe development of modernist aesthetics were also integral tothe emergence of fascism, and that the internalization of theseparadigms as operative assumptions was a stimulus for alliancesbetween modernists and anti-Enlightenment ideologuesthroughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6
Project for a New American Century restages this dilemma for us.
5.2 For Project for a New American Century, the artists recreatedLaurencic’s cell while redecorating it at the same time, a means by whichwe are implicated as contemporary viewers. Having been reproducedin the present, there are differences: minimalism and Op art (broughtup to date by the virtual reality of High Definition) replace construc-tivism and surrealism; the military prisons of Abu Ghraib andGuantanamo Bay become the unavoidable political references.
5.21 If, as suggested by the architecture of Marman and Borins’brutalist prison, a structural homology exists between Laurencic’s celland those of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, then one exists as well,the artists further suggest, between the two artistic periods (1930s and1960s — with the practices of the 1960s continuing to influence thoseof the present), implying moreover that both are primarily related bytheir compromise with politics, whether politics is stated as a principleof the art or not. As viewers, it is left to us to derive this implication.
5.22 The two artistic and two political periods are four faces ofa structuralist figure from which we could derive a variety of implica-tions. Together they construct their own architecture.
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5.23 Tracing a relationship between these two periods on the same“site,” our archaeological investigation is mediated by architecture, byits own contradictory form that is simultaneously utopian and repres-sive. Brutalist architecture is thus an aesthetic model for compromisedpolitical forms: for instance, democracies toppling a dictator in turnto torture in his prison cells.
5.3 We are victims here of what Slavoj Zizek calls an “insurmountableparallax gap,” which he defines as “the confrontation of two closely linkedperspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”7
Indeed, the parallax gaps of this exhibition make us all parallax prisoners,although they are expressed firstly by the gap between the viewpointsor perspectives of tower and cell.
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The “Exhibition”
By doctrinaire position is simply meant a new musical language,
appropriate to the age, structurally coherent, abstract, objective,
unconta minated by nationalism, and offering unbounded creative
potential.
— Robin Maconie, Other Planets: The Music of
Karlheinz Stockhausen (2005)
Some day it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism which started
out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art’s sake and
thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.
— Clement Greenberg, “The Late Thirties in New York” (1960)
Never, in modern art, has such a “purist” enterprise been deployed
without recourse to utopian or “futurist” justifications, and it was
perhaps because of its very muteness on this point that color-field
abstraction now seems to us, in terms of American self-imagery on
the world scene, the stick behind the carrot.
The antiseptic surfacing, the compressed, two-dimen-
sional designing, the optical brilliance, and the gigantism of this art’s
scale, invoke a far more mundane awe than the sublime. And yet,
no one can categorize the sources that stimulated this openness of
space, or say of such painting that it refers to a concrete experience.
Nothing interferes with the efficient plotting of its structure — in
fact, efficiency itself now becomes its pervasive ideal. The strength,
sometimes even the passion of this ideal, rescues the best of this work
from the stigma of the decorative, but only to cause it all the more
to seem the heraldry of managerial self-respect.
— Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War”(1973)
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6. Walking into the second gallery it is as if we were walking outthe gates of a prison to our freedom—into the value-free realm of abstractcontemporary art. But are we free there?
6.1 Clearly, a relation exists between the works on display and thedécor of the prison cell. But what exactly is it?
6.2 On an aesthetic level, the second gallery duplicates the deco-rative principles of the cell but as the elements of a contemporaryart exhibition — a generic exhibition that we could place in the 1960s.Both painting and sculpture are exhibited respectively repeating thetwo- and three-dimensional elements of the prison cell.
6.21 On the one hand, the paintings pick up motifs from the prisoncell produced in the style of hard-edge abstraction typical of the 1960sand 1970s (what Kozloff above more widely calls color-field abstrac-tion). On the other hand, the floor-bound sculpture implies the strategiesof a complementary 1960s minimalism. Yet, its composition actuallyseems no more than a basic inventory of forms found in the cell withthe addition of some architectural elements molded in cement commonto Brutalist buildings, such as ceiling coffers. Rather than following thestrict, reductive logic of minimalism, these referential elements play aquasi-figurative role — theatrical indeed, pace Michael Fried.
6.22 The paintings, moreover, do not function simply as they appear.While they perfectly replicate the painting of the period, within theirseamless appearance and surface cohesion they are divided. Surface andsign no longer are one as Annette Michelson claimed in 1969 of“abstraction’s single level of articulation” in “contemporary paintingand sculpture, which resist the notion of any authority or model, anynotion of code and message in their stubborn claim for autonomy,immediacy, and absoluteness.”8
In the present case, this is an abstract art that yet depicts what
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is in the cell while also functioning as a type of period painting, thatis, standing secondarily for it.
Replicating the look of this art, does one reproduce its repressedideology, presuming that this “purist” enterprise too was divided oth-erwise (by economics and politics)? How can this ideology be broughtto visibility? Moreover, could it be any more visible than it was in itsday when it was not seemingly apparent in the period’s abstract art?That is, are the minimum conditions of creating the look of this arttoday the minimum conditions for reproducing its accompanyingideology as well?
6.3 On closer inspection, these abstract paintings categoricallycontradict themselves by referring outside themselves. So doing, theycreate a narrative of looks. The push-pull of the first painting showsthe positive-negative, see-through pattern of the “concrete” screen thatseparates — or mediates — the two galleries. The second paintingsimplifies our view into the cell, reducing the back wall to a few sym-metrical figures. With its “compressed, two-dimensional designing,”the third painting departs from the cell to foreshorten our reverse viewof the floor sculptures. The fourth painting recalls our view of the guardtower from below (while also suggesting the mushroom cloud of anatomic blast: Guernica to the nth power — an implied but unstated totemicsubject of the anxious, existentialist Abstract Expressionist paintingsof the late 1940s and 1950s).
6.31 The paintings bring the space into order, visualizing itaccording to privileged sightlines, such as that from the window of theprison cell, from which the scattering of the sculpture inventory, forinstance, is brought into line, foreshortened as if through the contrarydevices of Renaissance single-point perspective painting.
6.4 This exhibition within an exhibition is, thus, a perfect rendi-tion of past abstract painting. To what end do Marman and Borins
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reproduce this style of painting that, in its time, was not just stylisticbut possessed the ethical and aesthetic authority of both its momentand the progress of art?
6.41 The artists’ strategy of mimicry differs from the postmod-ernism of the 1980s whose artists made symbolic recourse to theabstract painting of the 1960s, especially Op art, such as PeterHalley’s simulacral synthesis of Michel Foucault and Frank Stella inhis emblematic paintings of “prisons, cells, and walls”; or who madedirect reference to preceding abstract expressionism, such as PhilipTaafe reproducing Barnett Newman’s paintings with a decorative scrollreplacing the metaphysical “zips.” Such mundane decorative intrusionundermined the transcendental aims or illusions of the “heroic”period of American painting. Marman and Borins do not appropriatepast masters in order to ironically comment, through an artboundcritique, on their privileged aesthetic authority (à la Sherrie Levine).Nor is theirs postmodernist painting’s mournful or gleeful endgamestrategy.
Their art is purely quotational without referring to any artistdirectly. This logic of quotation, moreover, is a temporal disruption,a distortion that complicates art’s relation to a history that is not justits own formal development. The “exhibition” quotes both the styleand its larger context — not just the white cube of the commercialart gallery (and by extension the museum system) but also art’sunacknowledged historical compromises. That this “exhibition” isprojected from the prison cell is a condition that contaminatesabstraction’s “autonomy, immediacy, and absoluteness.”
6.42 Coincidentally, the writers of this period questioned the“heroism” of the “triumph of American painting” and its value-freeaesthetics, seeing it tied instead to Cold War machinations. An art thathad willfully purified itself of political contents and effects was viewedas ripe for ideological appropriation to political ends — by covert
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American government agencies such as the CIA acting through variouscultural fronts such as the Museum of Modern Art.9
6.5 A secret iconography to modernism, this purist enterprise?What exactly are Marman and Borins implying, drawing a relationshipbetween modernism and torture? I don’t want to be Kozloff’s “radicalphilistine [who] correctly senses systems support in American art,but reads its coded signals far too crassly as direct statement.”10
These are difficult questions that I am loath to answer here on behalfof the viewer: What are the aesthetic consequences of politics and thepolitical consequences of aesthetics?
Nonetheless, we can partially answer this question by sayingto modernism, this purist enterprise? What exactly are Borins andMarman implying, drawing a relationship between modernism and tor-ture What exactly are Borins and Marman, drawing a relationshipbetween modernism and torture What exactly are Borins and Marmanimplying, drawing a relationship between modernism and torture Whatexactly are Borins and Marman imply, drawing a relationship betweenmodernism and torture What exactly are Borins and Marman ying, arelationship between modernism and torture What exactly are Borinsand Marman implying, drawing a relationship between modernism andtorture to take an example of this “suspect” logic: purism and exter-mination in abstraction and Nazism operate according to the same prin-ciple.11 What exactly are Borins and Marman implying, drawing a rela-tionship between modernism and tortureI don’t want to be Kozloff’s“radical philistine [who] correctly senses systems support in Americanart, but reads its coded signals far too crassly as direct statement.”12
7. The aesthetic consequences of politics and the political conse-quences of aesthetics: Are these formally reversible statements? Isthe predicate of one to be read in its absence within the other subject:politics in aesthetics, aesthetics in politics? Both structuralism and puristabstraction demand reversibility of their procedures. Structuralism
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likewise demands a closed system, but the question here is whetherabstraction is open to historical processes that exceed its formalistoperations, especially as now played out in the narrative of ourreception of Project for a New American Century.
7.1 Torture, like art, is an impure science. Rational input has anirrational outcome. Results cannot be determined ahead of time, norare there quantifiable measures for each. In torture, ensuing statementscan only partially be verified, although torturers believe confessionis verification. In art, we can only read a logic backward not forwardin time.
7.2 Is there a secret communication between the prison cell andthe “exhibition” as there might be in time between these historicaleras, transmitted by code as if telegraphically? The concrete screenbetween the two galleries functions perhaps as a filter to purify thenoise (history’s contaminations), communicating these purist paintingsas a result.
7.3 Communication might also be the tap, tap, tap of a prisoner’smessage.
8. Consider another “what if” scenario. What if the “exhibition”in the second gallery is imagined by the prisoner and created out of theconditions of his or her cell?13 From the point of view of the prisonerinside this cell, the consequent artwork would be imagined at a distance—both spatially and temporally. As viewers, however, we are free to wander amongst that future exhibition (which, at the same time,remember, is our past).
8.1 Not that we have no relation to this artist within his or herlocked-in point of view. In the first gallery, we look through the cellwindow but in no seeming communication with its prisoner. Rather
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our cross-gazes — or parallax views — play out in the second gallery“exhibition” in what we bring of the past to it (both what we recallfrom the cell and from actual history). We have a freedom there thatthe artist-prisoner does not possess but which, however, he or shesupplies us in time— the narrative time of our viewing where we piecetogether the relation between the two galleries. Or, at least it is thecontemporary artists, Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, who supplyus both the time of their narrative and timeframe of their temporalinversions, which potentially collapse the separation of art and politics.
For the prisoner, perspective is determined in space and timeby the constraints of the cell, whereas for us point of view is relative.Narrative point of view and perspective combine but relative both tothat of the prisoner and what plays out in time in our perception ofthe “exhibition.” No longer is this necessarily a parallax gap. Interpre-tative possibilities are dependent on narrative point of view whereparallax temporarily dissolves. Interpretative possibilities, however,are neither political nor aesthetic judgements or commitments.
8.2 This gives us advantage over the guards, equally locked in theirpoint of view as their prisoner, but with a difference. If the guards’view is immediate and all seeing, ours — offered yet not fulfilled by theprisoner — plays out over time. One is panoptical, the other phenom-enological.14
8.21 In the master-slave relationship, to use the favoured Hegelianlanguage of the 1930s, only the prisoner, through the surrogacy of ourparticipation, overcomes reality, not the guards who, in the end, remainimprisoned in their point of view.
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Notes
1. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_a_New_American_Century>. Accessed23 March 2009.
2. Robbe-Grillet continues: “The concern for precision which sometimes borders onthe delirious (those notions so nonvisual as ‘right’ and ‘left,’ those calculations,those measurements, those geometric points of reference) does not manage to keepthe world from moving even in its most material aspects, and even at the heart ofits apparent immobility. It is no longer a question here of time passing, sincegestures paradoxically are on the contrary shown only frozen in the moment. It ismatter itself that is both solid and unstable, both present and imagined, alien to manand constantly being invented in his mind. The entire interest of the descriptivepages — that is, man’s place in these pages — is therefore no longer in the thingdescribed, but in the very movement of the description.” Alain Robbe-Grillet,“Time and Description in Fiction Today (1963),” For a New Novel, trans. RichardHoward (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 147-48. I refer the readers to descriptionsin Robbe-Grillet’s novels The Voyeur (1955) and Jealousy (1957).
3. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism.” Architectural Review (December 1955),reproduced in David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain andthe Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press,1990), 172.
4. Roland Barthes, “Objective Literature” (1954), Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 16, 19.
5. “Anarchists and the fine art of torture,” The Guardian, 27 January 2003;http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/27/spain.arts/print.
6. Mark Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,” The Art Bulletin 84:1(March 2002), 149. The opposition between leftist and rightist notions of culture,allying aesthetics to politics, in fact, stems from this period. For instance, considerthese two contemporary statements from 1936 and 1939 respectively: “This is thesituation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds bypoliticizing art.” (Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books,1969), 242.) “Here, as in every other question today, it becomes necessary toquote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look toward socialism for anew culture — as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Todaywe look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we haveright now.” (Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg:
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The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1986), I, 22.)
7. Slavoj Z izek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA and London, England: TheMIT Press, 2006), 4.
8. Annette Michelson, “Art and the Structuralist Perspective,” On the Future of Art(New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 56, 51.
9. While not delving into the CIA connection, Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stolethe Idea of Modern Art set the context for much of this debate. Serge Guilbaut,How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983). A decade earlier,Eva Cockcroft dealt with the direct relationship. “Abstract Expressionism,Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12:10 (June 1974), 39-41. Reprinted inFrancis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper& Row, 1985), 125-33.
10. Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War,” in Franscina, Pollock andAfter, 108. The original article appeared in Artforum 11:9 (May 1973), 43-54.
11. Compare Alain Badiou’s comments on the Moscow trials of the 1930s: “To cutshort any anti-political interpretation of these dark deeds, bear in mind that,among other things, purging, or purification, was also an essential slogan forartistic activity. There was a desire for pure art, an art in which the only role ofsemblance would be to indicate the rawness of the real. There was also a call topurify — through axiomatics and formalism — the mathematical real, to purge it ofthe entire spatial or numerical imaginary of intuitions. And so forth. The idea thatforce is attained through the purging of form was by no means monopolized byStalin.” The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), 53.Consider as well Badiou’s comments on the twentieth century’s project of thecreation of a new man shared by both communism and fascism: “Creating a newhumanity always comes down to demanding that the old one be destroyed. Aviolent, unreconciled debate rages about the nature of this old humanity. But eachand every time, the project is so radical that in the course of its realization thesingularity of human lives is not taken into account. There is nothing there but amaterial. A little like the way in which, for practitioners of modern art, soundsand forms, torn away from their tonal or figurative harmony, were nothing butmaterials whose destination needed to be entirely recast.” Ibid., 8.
12. I make this final statement with obvious reference to Benjamin Buchloh’s 1981October article “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return
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of Representation in European Painting.” We should be careful, however, ofdrawing political consequences from aesthetics, which was common during the1980s, indeed, inaugurated by this article that could be said to have set off theinternal postmodern culture wars modelled, not surprisingly, on the debates ofthe 1930s.
13. A man alone in a room writing was a literary conceit shared by existentialism andthe nouveau roman. My fiction here: I would like my text read as if it werewritten as period art criticism of the “exhibition” in the second gallery and as ifequally projected from a prison cell, perhaps this one. If the “exhibition” could beconsidered as projected by the prisoner of the cell, so could an art criticism of itsproduction. Furthermore, I would like it read as if written by a fellow traveller ofthe 19 50s and 1960s new novelists and electronic composers such as KarlheinzStockhausen, written in a comparable formal or notational style, as if the writeralso was a researcher in cybernetics and semiotics at the Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique in Paris.
14. The guards’ view could be likened to the dissolution and transformation ofperception brought about by war technology, particularly evidenced by the aerialphotography of World War I. “[Ernst] Junger argued that the camera’s cold anddistanced view reflected the structure of the modern battlefield and that in turnhuman perception was changing and adapting to the view of the camera lens. Inthe process of an unlimited unfolding of modern technology on the battlefield, theanthropological condition of human apperception was changing.... The war killedthe natural landscape and replaced it with a highly artificial and, within its ownparameters, functional spatial arrangements. Aerial photography then, creatinga metalevel of artificiality, further abstracted from the ‘reality’ of this artificiallandscape.... The morphology of the landscape of destruction, photographed froma plane, is the visual order of an abstract pattern.” Bernd Hüppauf, “Experiencesof Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Perception,” New German Critique 59(Spring – Summer 1993), 42, 57.
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