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

American Century 2009 Mixed media Dimensions variable ALL

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

They are skeptical of chimeric promises of change... history, for them, is a fuzzy proposition

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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

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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

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The PrisonerPhilip Monk

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9

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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