A MEDITATION ON THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE OR WHERE YOU GOIN’ WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND, BOBBY SEALE AND HUEY NEWTON DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN EXPRESSIONISM AND SOCIAL REALITY PRESENT IN HITLER’S PAINTINGS

Daniel Joseph Martinez

Exhibition: Mar 23 – May 8, 2005


In A MEDITATION ON THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE OR WHERE YOU GOIN’ WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND, BOBBY SEALE AND HUEY NEWTON DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN EXPRESSIONISM AND SOCIAL REALITY PRESENT IN HITLER’S PAINTINGS, Daniel Joseph Martinez begins blending rival political and aesthetic ideologies just outside the gallery door. There hangs a photographed magazine image of John F. Kennedy being shot–a signifier of both the hope and demise of social democracy, as well as current discussions about the role of found material, photography, and sensationalism in art.

From a windowsill inside the gallery, twelve-inch tall white silhouette cut-outs of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, Black Panther revolutionaries, survey a series of white paintings. While the men eye the snowy mass, the paintings recall another political topic from the 1960s. In the same contentious decade, but in the realm of aesthetics, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, and others developed monochromatic painting partly in response to a perceived failure of Expressionism to cause a social change.

Martinez’s installation represents another mode of historic radicalism through text. Accompanying each painting is a panel that reads like the warmongering rhetoric of contemporary American politicians, yet is in fact edited passages from Mein Kampf, Hitler’s treatise on the necessity of his fight.

Through strategies of appropriation, conceptualism, painting, and photography, Martinez collides signifiers for social democracy, anarchist revolution, and fascism to draw out correspondences between systems that are fundamentally different yet founded on similar utopic goals. A MEDITATION… questions the cultural success of various political and aesthetic tropes and suggests that neither world is far removed from the other.

-Kate Green
Assistant Curator

Artist

Daniel Joseph Martinez

Los Angeles, California, USA

Through conceptual pieces ranging from digital to analogue, Daniel Joseph Martinez engages socio-political issues, infusing art with examinations of contemporary and historical moments. The artist’s cross-disciplinary works use the body, architecture, and language to expose cultural contradictions and test institutional power. His spare, dialectical installations oppose the idea of art as entertainment and belie expectations by combining opposing elements to expose unexpected similarities. The resulting projects critique philosophies and notions of aesthetics and refuse resolution in exploring society at large.
Daniel Joseph Martinez lives in Los Angeles, CA where he received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Solo shows include The Project Gallery, New York, NY (2004, 2002, 2001); the Museo de arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico (2001); and Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland (2000). Group exhibitions include San Juan Triennial, Puerto Rico (2004); Lima Biennial, Peru (2002); and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2000).

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Curator

Victor Zamudio-Taylor

Mexico City, Mexico

Victor Zamudio-Taylor is an international curator of Latin American and contemporary art whose work addresses historical and current issues. An advisor to institutions and foundations, Zamudio-Taylor lectures widely in the United States and abroad, and is a member of the editorial board of Art Nexus and a co-editor of Origina, the Mexican arts monthly. He has organized project spaces for ARCO 03, 04 and 05, and recently co-produced The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo for broadcast this spring on PBS. He is chief curator of O-Lamm, a new video and photography space in Mexico City. Zamudio-Taylor publishes widely and has received numerous academic awards, among them the Rockefeller Foundation Senior Research Fellowship. Curatorial endeavors include Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, co-curated with Pedro Alonzo with venues at Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City and MARCO, Monterrey, Mexico in 2003; with Liz Armstrong, Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA in 2000 and traveled widely; and with Virginia Fields, The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland, which debuted at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA in 2001.

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