The Political Canvas
Daniel Martinez, God Bless Americana Part 2, the Barricades of the Federal District
That Martinez’s work is explicitly political should go without saying -- his “I Can‘t Imagine Ever Wanting To Be White” museum admission tags for the 1993 Whitney Biennial are still cited as the nadir of Western civilization -- but by specifically locating the struggle within the uncanny replica of his own human body, he redirects the gentlemanly discussion of strategic differences back to the bloody battlefield, albeit in a manner that clearly acknowledges the limitations of representation. Further, the deliberate sumptuousness of the work, and its grounding in cultural traditions ranging from Baroque painting to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, gives lie to the belief that art existed only for art‘s sake before 1970, and disrupts the mechanism of easy dismissal that wants to label Martinez a “shock artist,” inverting the question of “Why depict such horrors?” to “Why do so few artists engage with this important strain of art history?”
“Politics” aren’t some form of optional content for art, like “still life” or “pictures of my mom in a Japanese internment camp,” but the very rules of the social nexus in which art hopes to have an effect on the world. Art with the underlying philosophy of “If we don‘t look at it, maybe it will just go away” isn’t apolitical, any more than art that name-checks Chomsky is implicitly radical. But whether with the light and playful hand of Charles Phoenix, the po-faced institutional reserve of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, or the simultaneously cool and gut-wrenching theatricality of Daniel Martinez, art that is willing to engage the rules of its realization and reception as the site of creative action results in complex and vital experiences that brim with urgency and meaning, without losing any of the power art has to awaken us through our senses.
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