Art Metropole

#15299

Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: Project for a New American Century

Artists

Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins

Price

$24.00

Date

2023

Publisher

Art Gallery of York University

Format

Catalogues

ISBN

9780921972556

Size

17 × 22 cm

Length

64 pp

Genre

Architecture, Art History

Project for a New American Century is a “what if” scenario that in part has its source in a little-known historical event. During the Spanish Civil War, anti-Franco anarchists operated prisons using “psychotechnic” torture in the form of “coloured cells” based on the principles of abstract and surrealist painting. In reference to this history, the Toronto collaborative team of Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins created an installation at the Art Gallery of York University combining architecture, painting, and sculpture, building a monolithic prison-like enclosure but updating it with reference to utopian brutalist architecture from the 1950s and 1960s and op art painting. In conjunction with their exhibition, the AGYU has published a catalogue documenting this work of Marman and Borins. Elegantly designed by Lisa Kiss, this hardcover book includes “The Prisoner,” an essay by Philip Monk written as if it were a French philosophical treatise on modernist aesthetics from the 1950s. Taking context into context, the text deftly weaves a story of both the prisoner and the viewer as we move through the implications of the exhibition’s pre-history. Essay by Philip Monk, designed by Lisa Kiss.