Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins
"Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins" by Rhonda Corvese, Fall 2008, pp. 147-48
Wha Happened?”—finally, an exhibition that questioned the very essence of exhibition-making, a double entendre of exposure intentionally produced by artists in an artist-run centre. Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins’s exhibition at Gallery TPW was an audacious statement of a self-reflexive “practice is production” methodology. “Wha Happened?” was an exposition about showing and not showing—a brilliant manifesto of interwoven visual strategies and tautologies set within an artful yet playful exposé of art, culture and exhibition practice.
“Wha Happened?” presented an alternative to the status quo. In making this exhibition, Marman and Borins challenged the institution of art and the authenticity of the art object in a radical remix of iconography and iconoclasm. The resulting production was a total installation—an operatic display of the vanguard presented in the vernacular.
The magnitude of “Wha Happened?” cannot be overlooked. Marman and Borins fabricated an exhibition of 16 works containing myriad references: to cultural icons, art history, politics and the media. In a nod to Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel, Spielberg, Michelangelo’s Pietà, Star Wars and the war on terror, the sculptural installation Untitled reconstructed the iconic image of a terrorist from the Black September Organization (BSO), the group that engineered the 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis, overlooking the scenes in the gallery below, which included the miraculous PiETa. Momento Monkey, a staged photograph, depicted a fictitious meeting of apes from the 1968 films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes in an exploration of man’s evolution. In the sculpture Double Negative0 . , the raised-fist Black Power salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, the gesture now neutered in the form of a fisting sex toy, could be seen alongside the supposedly neutral sans-serif typeface Helvetica, which ironically became the power font of the business elite and bureaucratic officialdom.
In this manifestation of a proliferation, “Wha Happened?” juxtaposed image-making and meaning-making in a compounded statement of obfuscation. The works intentionally mirrored our cultural confusion in a contorted dance of conceptual aesthetics.
As an expression of a non-signature style and non-prescriptive practice, “Wha Happened?” was unmistakably, quintessentially Marman and Borins. No doubt this is a paradoxical statement, but therein lies the genius of their work. They continuously confront the accepted modalities of art-making while simultaneously reconsidering its frame. Their practice is without reservation, daring to declare the avant-garde.
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