Installation (Mixed Media)
Toronto Sculpture Garden
2003
Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins
Great Minds Think Alike is composed of four main elements: a modernist table laminated in silver moss Formica, two mouse pad calculators commonly used as promotional gifts in the corporate world, a sleek LCD video display, and an “Oriental” rug. The table design originates from the Bauhaus school and was then refined at Parsons in the 1950s. In Great Minds Think Alike, the table is painstakingly hand crafted by Borins and Marman, yet it appears to be both mass-marketed and mass-produced.
Furthering an undertone of competing tensions, the mouse pad calculators that sit atop a glowing inlaid light-box present an unsettling redundancy: why combine a mouse pad and calculator if the computer that the mouse pad calculator accessorizes is really a super calculator? Placed on top of a light box housed within the table, the solar cells of the calculators are powered by the florescent lights of the light box within the table. The calculators are encased within Plexiglas boxes and constantly flash 666 as a result of a custom designed circuit. This numerical symbol refers biblically to the number of the beast; yet, this number also refers to the pseudo-evil of contemporary popular heavy metal music (such as Judas Priest). Enclosing the calculators in Plexiglas boxes suggests that they are both objects of fear and of value.
On the other end of the table rests an LCD flat screen that plays a video loop. The sun rises in the video as part of a montage quotation from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001. We are witness to the unfolding of the film’s prologue Dawn of Man. On screen, as the proto-humans awaken they become agitated and behold a vision that we are yet see. Instead of the monolith that the ape-humans are presented with in the original film, we see the ultimate symbol of the end of the twentieth century, the World Trade Center shining in the morning sun, digitally collaged into the original film. In the theatrical version of 2001, the Apes wake up to find a black monolith, not unlike the minimalist sculptures that were being produced in the art world at the time of the release of the film. Contrasted in the mind of the viewer who beholds Great Minds Think Alike is the contemporary phenomenon of virtual and mass spectacle (the event 911) and virtual memory of mass media (the movie 2001). A thematic synopsis of 2001 tells us that the dawn of man (symbolized by the monolith) is the point in which violence and destruction become part of the rationalizing, and therefore human, thought process.
This video collage is presented as an intervention into the fictions and spectacles surrounding mass media and mass media current events. To accentuate this metaphor, the installation is set atop an antique Persian rug as if by coincidence, or, as a heavy-handed critique of geopolitics and its indebtedness to commerce versus a culture of tradition. Presented as an inventory of symbols, Great Minds Think Alike represents the confusions, conspiracies and disorder that have resulted from the post 911 world. However, this piece also represents the confusion of the contemporary art world at the edge of post-post modernity. Borins and Marman search for meaning in a world where the semiotics of academia has been left behind by a new world that destroys symbols, forgets history and randomly finds narratives. Great Minds Think Alike is a small cosmology of symbols, historical events, and mass media references both fictitious and real.