Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: Finders Keepers
"Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: Finders Keepers" by Ben Portis, Fall 2009, pp. 116-120
As last winter passed into spring, the artists Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins were intent on making every minute count. They had just finished an immense installation for Canada Blooms, Toronto’s annual flower-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 themselves 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, filing tax returns for Implosion Post Media Ltd., the registered legal entity of the Marman-Borins collaboration— something that would pull them away from their preferred tasks for the better part of a week—also presented an opportune occasion to reassess their resources and reflect 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 philosophy, 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 collaboration 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 itself in information, communication and models of transaction as strategies to bridge the divide between art and life. It backfired. “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 engagement. 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 “postrevolutionary” attitude. Together, the artists restructure imagery and ideas gleaned from the vast and often vulgar field 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 finders-keepers wasteland wherein they claim creative domain and divulge no fixed address. History, for them, is a fuzzy proposition. This profound ambivalence might explain why the work of Marman and Borins poses difficulties 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 five 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 Marman and Borins: two years ago it acquired the first 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.
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