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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
