Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have worked in the field of large-format sculpture, mixed media, installation and electronic art since 2000. The work of Marman and Borins is often intervention based - situating the visual arts within the context of everyday life, while simultaneously referring to aspects of the history of twentieth century art. Marman and Borins fashion these interventions as propositions on the status of the contemporary avant-garde. Their projects identify tensions that arise in the politicization, historicization, and visuality of the artwork, often within the context of mass visual language, mass media, and consumerism. These tensions are presented as a confrontational platform, whereby the aesthetic and ideological perceptions of the viewer are challenged, and the role of the artwork institutionally is put under scrutiny.
Marman and Borins art works employ a diverse formalist vocabulary utilizing materials from the commercially designed and industrially built world. The physical style in which Marman and Borins present their projects often conflates mass-produced design and communications, with references that deconstruct the history of political and ideological movements in twentieth century art. Another approach that they pursue is a form of mimicry and formalist mutability of their style, so that the intention of the artist is not relegated to individual style, but rather to the style that is appropriate to the subject matter that the artist is engaging with. Marman and Borins adopt this varying authorial approach to art-making to illustrate, as symptomatic affect, the reflections they are engaged in with regard to contemporary meaning-making. It follows that they posit strategies of visual resistance, paradox, and authorial de-centering, amidst the ambiguity of a globalized political landscape where ideological stances are dissipating.
On a strategic and propositional level, Marman and Borins present projects that self-reflexively provide commentary on the work of art, and manipulate perceptions about art and art history by adding to this discussion the increasingly relevant aspects of contemporary visual culture along with the residues of mainstream forms of communication. They express these themes within concurrent and contrasting formal and thematic presentations, for example: the combined style of post-minimalism and electronic art; the paradox of presenting visual culture as a de facto institutional presentation of art; and the strategy of modernist formalism and ideology transliterated and altered into popular aesthetics, and then contemporary political critique. The thematic references that Marman and Borins make change the perceptions of viewers solely seeking formalism or an affirmation of accepted academic approaches in art-making, because Marman and Borins are known for their ability to insert new meaning into the original intent of the movements that they refer to, and they are known for coining new approaches on a theoretical whole. The act of injecting new meaning, of commenting, of mimicking, of newly theorizing, opens the door to a destabilizing, and re-ordering force. And the act of communicating through several layered visual approaches, entices a wide spectrum of viewers.
While it is unorthodox for artists to grapple with such divergent approaches, Marman and Borins see this tension-producing device as precisely the impetus of their practice. The heterodox thrust of their style expresses philosophically and formally a dissenting and experimental outlook. The artists practice a form of confrontational aesthetics that responsively answers to the modalities of exhibiting and manifesting art works. They often aestheticize the political or situational concerns that they are confronted with in the art world, or draw from outside of it, and present this aestheticization in the format of a transliteration of formal styles in twentieth century art. One result of this approach is to prove a persistence of aesthetics even when subject matter has been destabilized, and to illustrate a poetics through their heterodoxical methods. Consequently, Marman and Borins are producing as their work paradigms on the possibilities for artistic commentary and construction, more so, than incremental changes in authorial style.
Recently, the artists have engaged in theatricality of presentation, elegiac impulses, and more pronounced forms of repudiation (of, for example, the art historical and contemporary political climates that they dissect). Complimenting this approach, the mixed-media works of Marman and Borins address these features of twentieth century art practice and ideology through the use of contemporary visual culture and mainstream forms of communication. When addressing twentieth century art practice, (and when they present projects that self-reflexively question the object’s existence as a work of art) they thereby destabilize the ideological intent of the historical movements they engage with. Marman and Borins manifest this strategy by punctuating historical surveys of art with contemporary references to mass culture. They also re-write known artistic approaches, and from this tactic produce new works. When contemporary art movements and mass culture are being challenged by Marman and Borins, their strategy is to identify the foundation of a said movement and to produce critical works as a bi-product of the artists’ analysis. The result of these experiments and propositions is a visual incision into the story of art, and a depiction of how symbols of art can be used as a form of visual commentary. This kind of pursuit can be exemplified by the polemical scenario where the morality of twentieth century art is thrown into turmoil in the same manner that utopianism is confused with the promise of consumerism. Another interpretation of this approach is the observations Marman and Borins make in the identification of paradigmatic strategies in art-making; the outcome of their projects existing as a series of proofs in terms of what can exist in the contemporary sphere as art – what the thresholds of art-making are – and what should be confronted and critiqued. It follows that new forms of visual syntax and expression arise as the faults and fissures of contemporary art are shifted by the changing landscape of contemporary mass culture. In a consumerist world where ideological axioms are dwindling, former pillars of truth give way to the realization that everything is not figured out. Those pillars also falter when the illogical and irrational aspects of mainstream culture exist as manias and urges rather than as pronounced, accepted and institutionally recognizable forms of culture. Marman and Borins are unapologetic in their presentation of a complex network of ambiguities, while formally adhering to the aesthetics of the subjects that they critique. The artists utilize this web of destabilizing forces as the axiomatic basis for new truths to arise.
With regard to their electronic and multimedia works, Marman and Borins pursue issues of subjectivity, the beholding of the work of art, and the formal strategies required for the engagement of the viewer. They pursue interactivity with the intention of creating a generative space between the viewer and the work. The artists invite the viewer to become a public participant in the work, thus creating two levels of reception: the participant and the observing audience. This division in how the work is beheld destabilizes the singularity of a viewer’s subjectivity, and opens the possibility of a mutual form of reception by the various viewers who behold the artwork. The purist aesthetics of Marman and Borins’ electronic work hearkens to a post-minimalist impulse that counters hermeticism in favour of a broadening vocabulary of the viewer as performer – the viewer as related to the work- as generating the object. Formally, their electronic works are performative stages for the interactive expression of aesthetic scenarios, ideologically concerned with issues of subjectivity, realized in an exquisite and understated manner. In recent projects, Marman and Borins are bridging the themes of their interventionist works with the strategies inherent in their earlier electronic art. Their interactive works are shown as-and-beside projects that explore notions of transliteration, mass media, and the historical avant-garde.
Since 2006, Marman and Borins have worked in the field of public sculpture. Within this forum they adapt their experimental gallery practice to the public sphere. Within this format they present themes of scale, visuality, formalism and the architectural, while addressing the scruples that inform the manner in which public sculpture should exist within public space. Their sculptures are formally comprised of commercial materials fabricated in large-scale industrial formats. The sculptures that Marman and Borins make are governed by different contexts. The artists have exhibited in temporary forums for public art, opting in these cases for confrontational and conceptual forms of sculpture. Permanent sculpture, commissioned for publicly owned institutions provides the opportunity to address issues of locale and context to site. Commercial commissions are often met with issues of visuality, form, and symbolism.