The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of
all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely
because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and
objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its
object has become a social, human object - an object made by man for man.
- Karl Marx ¹

Two points to consider (read: turn on) in the copperplate etchings of Jennifer Bornstein:
1) her works function as props for acts;
2) her works function as props for meaning.
A third point, if we can call it that, independent of the former hierarchy and which permits this systematisation of experience to flip into its obverse, involves the interface between meaning and actions - something we can describe as the parasitisation of the one by the other. For example, having been drawn into the orbit of a single etching titled Margaret Mead in Authentic Samoan Dress (2003), an interpretative horizon comes into focus. Questions of subject matter, choice of themes and the potential reveal of everyday relationships, presumably governed by Mead's anthropology, interpersonal relations and her notion of field research, open up a vista that is totalising in its logic and indifferent to the works' other ontology of action. At this moment the body of work becomes a humorous set of autobiographical documents, possible fictions, future and past projects in film and three dimensions, a compilation of favourite artists and writers, as well as an odd peer group. Numbering more than one-hundred discrete etchings, the meet-and-greet includes Teenage Roommate Reading National Geographic, Marvin with his Skateboard, Alex Doing His Homework and Joel Wachs Holding His Unlimited Ride Bus Pass (all from 2003). The work as prop for action is forgotten; a hermeneutic machine has kicked in.

At other moments the reverse happens. Actions or movements in the space of the gallery are spotlighted. For example, at Bornstein's 2006 MOCA Focus exhibition, I found myself gravitating to a permanent gallery wall where the bulk of the etchings hung, and not to a supplementary (low and worryingly unfinished) free-standing abutment where further etchings could be looked at.² If at one time in possession of various properties - 'senses and qualities ... and attributes' as Marx puts it - the status of the etchings as objects is here instrumentalised. They serve as subsidiary props, or focal points for acts in a subtly disguised theatre. The artist as picture-maker - what a gigantic fiction this is! - fades to black, and a far-more devilish incarnation steps to the foreground. The wall - of the family Tabanidae or 'gadfly' - functions as a transparent reveal of Bornstein's interest in the interactions between viewers, objects and the space of the institution, something that the interpersonal dynamics of the etchings secret away. Poetics apparently rule the moment, but just as in the former hermeneutic case, one should wonder if Marx's eye has literally 'become a human eye', its object 'a social, human object'. Alienation has certainly taken more curious forms... Of course, the remains of a modernism (here reduced to interpersonal relations) are hackneyed in the extreme, but so too is the neo-avant-garde reaction to it.

With forty years separating us from the high moment of the late 1960s, it is probably worth asking whether the subject identified through the protocols of the Minimalist enterprise still holds any promise, or if the Minimalist subject is merely positive proof of the smooth (read: dialectical) functioning of the present hegemonic system.³ That alongside the inheritance of modernism, Minimalism, Conceptual art, performance and institutional critique are now all acceptable avenues for criticism that need to be fundamentally rethought is a presupposition of Bornstein's practice. Indeed, given the well-worn critical pathways that underwrite both enterprises, it should be of little surprise that these two antithetical projects are in fact co-habiting the same work for a reason. In identifying two negative moments which are the inheritance of her generation, Bornstein's work pushes a limit.⁴ It rethinks the fugitive interface that Michael Fried described in 1967 and 1968 as 'Art and Objecthood', and does so by working hard to inscribe the difference as anything but clear-cut or a matter of partisanship. While there is no need to take sides in this debate as Fried once did, Bornstein's interest is in putting the system of binaries into motion, posing them as a set of equally usable, rotating entrances.⁵ What one sees and feels in confronting this practice and its various interpretative hotspots (I have singled out two extremes) is that what we have come to think of as a line drawn in the sand is actually a situationally dependent, variable and highly modulated spectrum of moments. To clear up this back and forth between paradigms of art practice, and to make the foggy third point a crisp one, we can say that Bornstein's notion of the critical is grounded in the refusal to choose between one or the other.

A fourth point, not entirely unrelated to this two-fold threshold, ably provides a historical entrance to Bornstein's works. In the years preceding her turn to the distinctly outmoded medium of copperplate etchings, one sees the artist finding ways to avoid the art market - whether intentionally or not. Her relation to the market is at times a prohibition against producing art as a commodity, at times merely an indifference towards it, and sometimes it just galvanises a low-level worry punctuated by sardonic interventions. Still, I believe it is always fired by an aesthetic which privileges art not intended for any market, but for the use-value that is animated between art and its maker - in sum, a mix of disinterest in what sells, of disgust with fashion, a good dose of irony and a belief that 'good' art often does not fit into the market until many years after. This position led to a variety of projects, for instance, a book titled Documentation of Events That May Not Have Taken Place, which may be seen most productively as a dialogue with Walter Benjamin's notion of 'mechanical reproduction'.⁶ Projector Stand #3 (1996), a work comprised of an integrated system of parts including sculpture, audience and necessary union projectionist - the latter presumably shown in the etchings Union Projectionist Reading a Book Between Reels and Fatty Arbuckle Showing My Film (both 2003) - is difficult, if not impossible, to break apart and sell as discrete objets d'art. (What collector really wants a union projectionist living in their dining room?) Public Libraries and Basketball Courts (1996-98), a series of photographs (again accompanied by sculpture and film) showing the petite artist standing and sitting beside various children, walks the thin line between cultural artifact and intentional object.

This ambiguity fuels the inquisitive mind. Potentially falling beneath the radar of fine art, what are seemingly run-of-the-mill snapshots from the library and courts take on a range of secondary associations. At worst, the artist hangs out with underage boys at the playground. Less threateningly, she plays for 'both teams', the boys serving as a means of comparison and hence a motor for 'outing' herself. More banal still, in Untitled Sculpture (1999), she stands innocently with families she has found walking in the park. Otherwise? A cry for help, likeness serving as an entrance to woman as 'dumpy kid' with body-image problem and face of 'blessed babe'. Voyage to Samoa (2003) - to mention only one of three films that exist solely as filmic occurrences - adds up to what the artist describes as 'the singular experience of a viewer watching light projected onto a wall'.⁷ As difficult to commodify as the thought bubble championed by conceptual artists in the late 1960s and 70s, projected light flips a delicate finger at economy! Finally, we should mention an early video piece entitled Collectors' Favorites (1994), which sets the generally anti-market tone, here a spoof of the market, and yet does so as if nothing of the sort was on the 'sweet girl's' mind.

To my eyes, Bornstein's experiments all come to a head around 2003. As if finding both reason and strength in something such as Emily Dickinson's 'covenant of grace' - a pledge the poet took to safeguard her poems by not publishing them - Bornstein made the astonishing decision to stop exhibiting work for a period of two full years and instead ride the bus.⁸ Without thought of making anything that might constitute a work as such, here art evaporates into the nameless transit zones of the city; the promise of Dickinson's poetry extending into the realm of 'Good Buses: M11 (Travels ... quickly), M23 (Slow, but accesses ... Kips Bay ... Chelsea), M15 (Comes every five minutes).'⁹ In Bornstein's strange and recalcitrant practice the critical is indeed redefined; it becomes yet another loose-leaf page in what Emerson called the 'Poetry of the Portfolio'.¹⁰ More specifically, file under Ma Bohème, the lyric form of wandering or dialectical vagabondage Rimbaud chose over less palatable identities - and which may or may not push the dialectic towards unmediated extremes.¹¹ In this, Bornstein gathers up and extends the redolent pedigree of art in Los Angeles, in addition to rethinking the way in which that diverse set of practices tackled hegemony during the moment of 1968. Her points of reference include many of the key figures in the long and radical history of Minimalism, Conceptual art, performance and institutional critique. The genealogy is unerring: the decision to make objects independent from market demands - to make something with its own logic intact, never mind the market's two established niches - while being all-encompassing and neatly contained within her ongoing body of etchings. It is a capsule history of the neo-avant-garde, a historiography of grace under pressure and a set of references that doubles as a loose analytics and cataloguing of historical ways and means to disrupt, delay or simply ignore the flow of goods, many of which crop up in the etchings themselves. In no particular order, and with Reconceptualizing the Object of Art: 1965-1975 as bedside breviary, the high points include:¹² Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968); Gordon Matta-Clark's films of condemned houses and the 16mm films of Joan Jonas;¹³ the instrumental uses of photography to convey ideas that were typical of a range of conceptual practices concerned with combating the fetishisation of the object by market; as well as more recent photo-based practices like that of Sophie Calle and, differently again, Christopher Williams; Chris Burden's and Paul McCarthy's edict on making 'actions' the ground of their practice; finding value in what is not understandable in terms of established systems of circulation à la Charles Ray and McCarthy again; Yvonne Rainer's translation of Minimalism into gesture (see especially the etching entitled Study for 16mm Film (Naked Modern Dancer), 2004); the self-animating sculptures or spaces of Bruce Nauman; Michael Asher's 'inversions of spatial hierarchies'; the purpose-built walls of Christopher D'Arcangelo; and the anachronistic image-making practice of John Baldessari.¹⁴

Allow me to extrapolate on only two of these influences: firstly, a dialogue with the work of Christopher Williams; secondly, a period of study under the tutelage of Paul McCarthy. From Williams, who was also her teacher, Bornstein comes away with a variable and expanded notion of the archive. Looking at the ongoing revisions of Williams's photographic archive in Dix-Huit Leçons sur la Société Industrielle, and more specifically at the successive accumulation of examples in any one version, the viewer notes that with each additional example an epistemological sore point breaks the surface. In the manner of what Louis Althusser calls 'contradiction and overdetermination', a subtle yet obfuscated depth to reading is animated as a tension between apprehension and comprehension, a saturation point that is repeatedly confronted and surreptitiously overcome.¹⁵ As in the case of Margaret Mead in Authentic Samoan Dress, a global resolution for meaning is simultaneously called up and put under acute pressure as an individual moment of contradiction. In Bornstein's ongoing series of etchings the string of overdetermined points - obviously intrinsic to the system, but also on first encounter worryingly extrinsic to the limits of an always-already established archival logic - is foundational. Though she will playfully personalise Williams's project far more than his archive of contemporary industrial capitalism permits, the former's inappropriately personal and at times capricious spin on things allows her project to move. And not only that, it provides an avenue that departs from the 'truth effects' of discursive knowledge and leads toward the infinity of the body. In Bornstein's case, a complex of notions linked to the privative experience of cinema include getting 'to sit next to, and sometimes touch, people you don't know' - what, in shorthand, we might call the Pee Wee Hermanisation of public space, and a point upon which a heuristic put into play by time spent with Paul McCarthy is acutely felt.¹⁶

McCarthy's centrality hinges on the dimension of the performative, a question that spins off as the importance of actions and an attachment to props - though Bornstein will angle this away from McCarthy's idea of subject matter as manifest symptom of the dirty secret contemporary fine art would rather deny. In her work, the legacy of le maître's lyric atavism and infantile regression stews most productively beneath the surface of her etchings - conceptualised as an obsolete, undervalued and perhaps irredeemable language - and under the veil of her loosely autobiographical notion of the archive. The place of the prop and of the action, particularly when the latter 'misfires' (as opposed to firing for sure, that Fried describes as 'a kind of heightened perceptual experience'), holds out a promise for the performative that is not guaranteed by the hypostatising of the body that takes place within the Minimalist genealogy.¹⁷ One way to frame this deferred promise that is packed away in Bornstein's etchings and which encapsulates McCarthy's troubled relationship to economy, especially to Hollywood and the entertainment industry, is through Freud's term 'anaclisis'. Thus, in The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973), Laplanche and Pontalis designate the anaclitic as 'the early relationship of the sexual instincts to the self-preservative ones: the sexual instincts which become autonomous only secondarily, depend at first on those vital functions which furnish them with an organic source, an orientation and an object.

By extension, "anaclisis" is also used to refer to the fact of the subject's basing himself on the object of the self-preservative instincts in his choice of a love-object.'¹⁸ Clarifying matters further, Cathy Caruth tells us that the relationship between Freud's Trieben (or drives) is a question of propping.¹⁹ To summarise all too briefly, the anaclitic object choice that draws the infant to the mother's breast (a prop) for nourishment, and which in the future grounds object-relations based in desire, is detachable from the system, and yet is 'attached' nevertheless.

Here is where the 'abolition of private property' really comes into focus, in spite of the reversed or inverted entrance Bornstein's practice allows for. In Bornstein's etchings the props by which McCarthy latches onto the nipple of Babylon - an attachment that turns sour by virtue of its allegorical nature - gesture instead to an emancipated body that is twice removed from the revolving system itself. Whither the body that is repeated on this stage can only remain a question, but it is the question raised by Bornstein's ongoing body of etchings, for there is no way to verify whether the performative came off - an essay in itself - unless it is singled out from the 'Poetry of the Portfolio' and framed as art. In other words, if we group the intentional politics that Bornstein emphasises as the avant-garde inheritance as one more fiction (be it that of origins), a narrow definition of picture-making is called up and extended to include another far-more uncertain and displaced order of action. This prosthetic attachment consubstantial with what Marx calls 'the human', but not recuperable by the dialectical system he proposes, is not sure fire, though the misfire posited is surely better equipped to face future prohibitions against the market. Feeling the prickly hairs on the arms of the teenage roommate is far too infelicitous an effect to confirm the presence of the body that shrinks from art and shuttles between destinations on the bus - most likely a 'Bad Bus': say, the M15 which 'takes forever'.²⁰

- Shepherd Steiner