#daniel borins

Hey Dude by Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins, as part of their exhibition, “Three Dimensions”

Contemporary Calgary, Mohkinstis, Canada

Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins

Ai Wei Wei is turning out to be one of those names that people are becoming more aware of without a full understanding of his backstory or why he's become notorious in the art world and to the Chinese government. His most recent exhibition According to What? - which is now on view at the AGO until October 27 - does an excellent job of explaining his upbringing, with a good spotlight on his time spent living in New York in the 80s, as a student at Parsons. The two main underlying themes I saw were somewhat interlinked - destroying the past to maintain the present, and the ever-encroaching surveillance state - which was also echoed in the Marmin / Borins exhibition The Collaborationists at the AGH that I saw the week prior. The idea of destroying the past to maintain the present confronts the viewer immediately, when they enter the exhibition through a corridor papered with photographs he took around China - mostly of new concrete buildings, viaducts and other constructions, incongruously placed in the middle of fields or former buildings, now reduced to debris. Especially in fast-growing China, this is the new reality - massive growth spurts in infrastructure, but without the movement of people to settle, leading to surreal real-world situations.

258 Fake

We also see Ai's own methods of destroying the past in his infamous Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, but also in his Study Of Perspective series, where he makes an obscene gesture at several sites that are either seen as historically significant or as being representative of endless progress / commercialism / big business.

Dropping A Han Dynasty Urn

Study Of Perspective

Some interesting (if unintentional) parallels could be made with Marmin/Borins' works Surveillance Camera and Black Box. With the former, Ai's version is made out of intricately formed white marble and placed on a pedestal, whereas Marmin/Borins use gray fabric and placed it on the ceiling, looking down the hallways. The connections with Black Box are more theoretical for Ai - with his endless list of the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (which he uses as a motif for his larger scale installations, with Straight created from rebar recovered from the earthquake rubble) - appearing a likely candidate for the data held with in the black boxes, held behind wire fencing in a hermetically sealed room, confusing visitors who may think it to not be part of the installation and ignore it - out of sight, out of mind.

Surveillance Camera - Marmin/Borins variation

Surveillance Camera - Ai Wei Wei variation

Black Box

List of victim names from 2008 Sichuan earthquake

In his text Surveillant Narration, Thomas Levin remarks that "surveillance has become an issue that is not only increasingly a part of everyone's daily life, but is even embraced as such" (Levin, 578), and that "democratic accountability [of the method of surveillance] is the only criterion which distinguishes a modern traffic control system from an advanced dissident capture technology" (579). Looking at how Ai, Borins, and Marmin have all used surveillance apparati as objets d'art - doing so at a scale that is obviously attention-seeking - it is easy to see how the embrace of surveillance as an art-focus also serves to subvert the surveillance state. A tool such as a camera, which we have been culturally and socially taught to accept as a positive (for our own safety) can so easily be used to be our undoing. Levin's remarks were more closely related to the use of surveillance in film, but he makes a salient point when referring to the reactions / ethics of people viewing surveillance footage:

"When one sees what one takes to be a surveillance image, one does not usually ask if it is 'real' (this is simply assumed) but instead attempts to establish whether 'the real' that is being captured by the camera is being recorded or is simply a closed-circuit real time feed." (584)

This notion of engaging with the real is crucial to Ai's work. The audience can tell that Ai's larger frame works are meant to be representative of overarching messages relating to government/surveillance, but Ai also confronts with being watched directly - his self-portrait in an elevator mirror, surrounded by police, shows how the lens can reflect what the real situation is, not merely some abstract concept or distant public fear of surveillance. The lens of his camera becomes the CCTV, and Twitter becomes the transmission method - exposing what was meant to be out of sight (out of mind).

On Ai's time in New York, a selection of photographs he took during his years there is on display along one wall - stark in opposition to the other larger-scale pieces. A selection of photos of his friends, Chinese immigrants in New York, street scenes in the burned out East Village, demonstrations, and self-portraits, they were artfully arranged and showed, I thought, the spirit of what was to come in later works relating to the Chinese government. A photograph of a Jewish family sightseeing by the waterfront was flanked with photographs of protestors and police at the Tompkins Square Park riots in 1988 - with their gazes flanked on both sides. Who is protecting who, and for what purpose?

At the end, there was a painfully ironic bit of appropriation in the gift shop, where 19th century tables were used as stands to sell trinkets, travel guides, Chinese cookbooks and kitchenwares. Still deciding whether that was ultimately brilliant or clueless on the part of the museum. Answers on a postcard, please.