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In another place, at another time, Bonnie Marin would
be sipping coffee at a sidewalk cafe discussing montage with Hannah Hoch
and preparing new work for an exhibition of Berliner Dadaists. Marin would
likely have been a key member of the Berlin Dada Club, which changed the
face of art in the first decade of the 20th Century; a group united by
an ironic cynicism and a desire to provoke.
From a distance, Bonnie's wood and wax sculptures evoke
a warm, comforting ambiance - what could be more down to earth than wood
& wax? - but beneath the warm exterior lies a sinister nether world of
text and images that challenge everything you thought you knew about social
This is just one of the dichotomies
of Marin's complex and engaging art. Marin's work is anything but comforting.
The swatches of text buried beneath the wax serve to narrate the piece and
navigate your interpretation of the images, which are often repeated, stamping
the image into the recesses of our conscience. But what you think you see
and what you really see may surprise you...it may even shock you. Mixing
explicit humor with implicit irony, Marin's meticulous work demands your
attention. Just try passing over this work without exploring it with a fine-toothed
comb. Like a five-car pile-up, Marin's collages will simultaneously amuse
you and repulse you. You canšt look away, for you are compelled by the work
to look for every detail and read every word.
In Bonnie's world, all things are "Queer". Creating collages with everything
from children's books to 1950's home decor magazines, encyclopedias to porn
rags, she leaves no stone unturned as she deconstructs the typical (and
generally accepted) social constructs of femininity and masculinity. Like
Hoch before her, who relied heavily on images of women as mannequins, dolls
and puppets to comment ironically on the cultural construction of femininity,
Marin uses a myriad of 'hyper-feminine' images, created by the media in
the 1940s and 50s, depicting women as subservient tenders of home and family
on one hand and as pinup girls on the other. The social construction of
masculinity is challenged and deconstructed in Marin's work through both
biology and sociology. Through the magic of collage, Marin performs more
sex changes than RuPaul, but it is the inversion of gender by gay men that
lies at the heart of this work. Using images of 'hyper-masculinity', Marin
cleverly deconstructs what is seen by what is read, thereby challenging
the spectators' way of seeing. Many critical and theoretical treatments
of gender promote the androgynous ideal as a liberation from constricting
masculine and feminine roles - however, Marin indulges in hyper-images of
gender while bending that gender with the use of text. Her work addresses
and challenges homophobia, gay-bashing, homosexuality, femininity & masculinity
along with the complicity of religion, childbirth and AIDS. But Marin's
work not only courts the spectator, it satisfies the voyeur in us all. Her
art is almost too complex to name...is it farce? Propaganda? Pop art? Postmodern
Dada? A combination?
Prolific and articulate, Marin
has gone beyond making "fine art" sculpture and has created a set of encyclopedias.
Building a set of wooden boxes the size of a volume of encyclopedias, with
hinged, collaged covers and spines, she has created 'pages' with thick pieces
of handmade paper which are enclosed in each box. Each volume is based on
a theme, each page providing text and/or images, appropriated from popular
culture sources. The encyclopedia serves as the pillar of academia, a source
to which we go to find out the truth. Many homes have them, all libraries
& schools have them, salesmen go from door to door selling them... in the
late 1960s/ early 1970s, I went to the "H" volume of a set of encyclopedias
to find out the "truth" about homosexuality, only to read that it was a
"disorder" of some type, an "aberration". Not only does Marin continue to
deconstruct gender through the content of the "encyclopedias", but her sheer
audacity in transforming and transgressing this literary pillar of knowledge
deconstructs the social iconography of the encyclopedia in and of itself.
These art objects will engage you for hours.
"...one fundamental question is how women's reading of conventional media
representations and other visual images contributes to our experience
of feminine identity. Another is whether or not, by producing new or reconfigured
images of women (and men), it is possible to intervene and transform existing
cultural conventions.
(This work) offer(s) provocative answers to both of
these questions. (In these montages,) strategies of pleasure are coupled
with the representation of anger to generate ideas of liberating, transformative
utopias. The intriguing tension between anger and pleasure in her works,
often manifested through an ironic humor, also raises questions about
the interaction of critiques of present-day and utopian desires for the
future in representation... these disruptive views of the present and
involved viewers in utopian fantasies... have the potential to form an
allegorical link between individual aspiration and societal transformation."¹
I end with this quote by Maud Lavin on the work of Hanna
Hoch, as it is an equally appropriate description of the potential and
the complexity of the art of Bonnie Marin.
notes:
1. Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kichen Knife: The Weimar
Photomontages of Hanna Hoch, New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, 1993.
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