For the 2005 edition of Art Santa Fe, Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins presented an experimental solo booth. Their solo booth represents a form of self-curation and featured flags that read: Conceptualism and Relational Gestalt Marketplace. The booth contained fourteen art works that varied in style and medium – so as to arrive at the appearance that the works were made by different artists. Some of the works that Marman and Borins presented include:
• Perpetual Motion relief sculpture (a spinning diagram of a circle in motion).
• A giant blue astro covered rock in the centre of their booth.
• Kanisza Triangle – a graphic gestalt painting.
• Black Hole – a graphic conceptual painting.
• Presence Meter – a small version of the original. This piece senses the viewer’s proximity and reflects it through an array of analog panel meters (see larger description of Presence Meter in this document). • Small Green Rocks – presented on a triangular shelf in a land-slide formation.
• Untitled (Louis F. Polk), a multi-media piece that references the movie Zabriskie Point (see detailed description below). The overall effect of Conceptualism and Relational Gestalt Marketplace is to illustrate that artists can work within a variety of styles and yet still present a cohesive practice. Marman and Borins privilege their conceptual approach as a formal practice. (images in subfolder)
In the final scene of the Michelangelo Antonioni movie Zabriskie Point, the protagonist of film looks back at a modernist house on a cliff-side and watches it explode. This dramatic choreography of destruction lasts several minutes and is accompanied by a Pink Floyd sound-track.
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins have made a composite image of of about 15 different scenes from the end explosion scene in the film Zabriskie Point, and have done so in both a photographic and illustrative style. The image is printed as a Lambda Print: a technique that uses photographic paper printed from a digital file. The pieces are surface mounted behind plexiglas and are free standing without frames.
The images are a mirror reflection of each other, and represent a tearing apart of the picture plane.
Below the two pictures an Ikea “Lack Shelf” is mounted to the wall and has been modified to contain an MP3 playback device and audio speakers and two push buttons. The buttons on the Ikea shelf, when pushed, play either the explosion sound from the end of the film, or the Pink Floyd sound track.
Marman and Borins have translated the formal aspects from the original film into a sculptural multi-media installation.
Background information on Zabriskie Point:
Antonioni’s leftist politics made the film a controversial project from the start. Groups opposed to the movie’s alleged anti-Americanism harassed the film production: The FBI had agents tailing cast and crew members; the locations were besieged by right-wingers who had come to protest what they claimed was a scene of flag desecration that, in fact, never existed; militant anti-establishment students worried that they were somehow being “sold out”; the sheriff of Oakland, California, charged that Antonioni provoked the riots he had come to film; Death Valley park rangers initially refused to allow Antonioni to shoot at Zabriskie Point because they thought he planned to stage an orgy at the site (which Antonioni had conceptualized but never seriously considered); and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento opened grand jury investigations into both the film’s alleged “anti-Americanism” and possible violations of the Mann Act, a 1910 law prohibiting the transportation of women across state lines “for immoral conduct, prostitution or debauchery,” during the Death Valley shooting. The investigation was dropped, albeit reluctantly, when it was learned that Zabriskie Point was at least 13 miles west of the California-Nevada border.
This Piece Untitled (Louis F. Polk) is a work in progress. A three dimensional video animation has been made to go with the piece. The video depicts a rumoured last scene that Antonioni intended for the film, in which a skywriting airplane would spell out the words “Fuck You America.”