“Project for a New American Century”

In 2003, a disturbing anecdote to Modernist aesthetics appeared when noted art historian Jose Milicua alleged anti-Franco anarchists had created a form of “psychotechnic” torture cells during the Spanish Civil War. The cells were said to be conceived by Alphonse Laurencic and were constructed by Republican forces to house those captured from Franco’s fascist army. This experiment in brutal psychiatry was based on the idea that a pastiche of surrealism and rigid geometric abstraction would debilitate the prisoners both physically and psychologically. It was a disorientating mixture of cultural progress and social repression.

The story received attention in the popular press and provided fodder for slapstick: hasn’t modern art always been torture? You would think that considering their recent art practice, Daniel Borins and Jennifer Marman would delight in the simplicity of such a delivery. Yet, the artists take this footnote as the starting point for their recent exhibition, “Project for a New American Century,” and make it an intelligent and unfortunate addendum to what has been one of the main geopolitical events of the past decade: the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The exhibition itself consisted of two installations and a surveillance feed video. A large-scale “bunker” and prison cell is the centrepiece of the first room. The viewer doesn’t so much enter the gallery and encounter it as walk around its faux-concrete structure, arguably through its structure, to get into the space. It is a subtle manoeuvre, all the more successful when you look back upon the dominating presence and staged authority of the bunker.

The second piece in this room sits opposite and just to the side. Tall, narrow and wide, it is also made from faux concrete and looks like a decorative stacking of blocks not unlike a partition in many institutional settings of the Brutalist kind. Like the other works in the exhibition, it is untitled.

A glass door connects to the second room, which consists of four paintings and a sculptural ensemble in the centre of the gallery. This ensemble explicitly embraces an American post-war formalist vocabulary: blocks of wood, faux-concrete forms and mirrored surfaces. Carl Andre and Donald Judd immediately come to mind as well as the weight of their influence. The placement of each element is exact, including treating electrical outlets on the floor as compositional elements. They cleverly mine model planning: the entire arrangement comes to be seen as an architectural layout, something like a campus expansion.

The four paintings, each more design than abstraction, are permutations not only of this floor arrangement, but also of the architecture and works in the first gallery. One takes its form from an inversion of the concrete partition in the first room; another is derived from the bunker. There is a proliferation of browns, greys and beige. Even the frames for the paintings are made from the same wood used elsewhere in the display. Both the sculpture and paintings can be considered reproductions of themselves in alternating form.

This clean and colourful treatment of a fairly clichéd American post-war art feels far too familiar and leaves me suspicious. Despite aims to have the physicality of the works convincing, these are surrogates. They employ only the vocabulary of minimalism and formalist work; materially, they are unconvincing and hollow. What are the consequences of this gesture, of the elaborate play of a Modernist footnote against a post-war art, all subsumed under the peculiar title “Project for a New American Century?”

The title takes its name from a small American think tank that collapsed in on itself in 2006 due to its ambitions and misdirected motives. Founded in early 1997, the fundamental aim of Project for A New American Century was to “promote American global leadership.” Holding a strong influence on the presidency of George W Bush, the pnac advocated what it considered “Reaganite clarity” in both foreign policy and morality. It published its neo-conservative tracts in obscure policy journals: signatories held key positions in the Bush White House (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz), and it tried to persuade the US Government to radically shift the debates on post-Cold War foreign policy. Yet, for all their bold advocacy, those involved in the PNAC were completely unprepared for the realities of the wars initiated by the administration of which they were a part. Much of the PNAC rhetoric remains contradictory upon rereading, and its murky legacy has yet to be fully investigated; the debate about the think tank’s actual influence is of no concern to the artists who engage in a conspiratorial leap. Even the credibility of Jose Milicua’s story has been questioned. Writing in an anarchist journal in 2003, Don LaCoss states that the story’s sole source isn’t particularly reliable, considering the information came from a confession made before a Francoist military court.

What remains is a confluence of zealous doctrines with aesthetic pursuits. In Borins’s and Marman’s revisionist cut and paste, modern art is seduced by barbarism. The anarchists fighting General Franco reproduced for the Left a type of mental torture endorsed by the Right. What was an art of the oppressed for one side becomes a repressive mechanism for the other. Decades later, the neo-conservative need to design a social order—what they regarded as a benevolent hegemony—has become a misleading and disastrous project, one full of paradox, blame and mea culpa: a progressive cause and country rejects the most basic tenets of liberalism in its actions.

What Borins and Marman provide in “Project for a New American Century” is less a refutation of Pax Americana and a neo-conservative culture than a project that mirrors the historical revisionism needed for sweeping gestures. Leninists often admired classic art, while many Modernists were political conservatives. Neo-conservatism as a movement had roots in the intellectual response young radicals made to events such as the Spanish Civil War. At one time they were ardent Trotskyites nourished on magazines like the Partisan Review; years later they turned Cold War liberals. Yet for Borins and Marman, high Modernism and American post-war art are reduced to design, often nefarious and continually and cynically compounded. The forms the works take are never stable, folding in on themselves in a process of modest reproduction. This systematic reproduction is certainly disquieting, but at no point is it ever as insidious as announced. ❚

Daniel Borins’s and Jennifer Marman’s “Project for a New American Century” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto from January 28 to March 29, 2009.

Kevin Rodgers is a visual artist based in London, Ontario; he holds an mfa from the University of Guelph and is currently a phd candidate at the University of Western Ontario.