Performance
photographs: records of specific acts of artifice and craft; visual
records of - and prompts towards - specific mental states. Daniel
J. Martinez's photographs share a wide number of compelling references,
amongst them the following: religious iconography, scientific photography,
medical records, criminal records; the literary, the historical,
the metaphysical. The works exhibited were: Self-portrait # 4
Second attempt to clone mental disorder or How one philosophises
with a hammer. After; Mary Shelley 1816, 1999: the artist's
head tilted towards the camera, his cranium shaved and marked by
the stitches of a lobotomy. Self-portrait # 7 George and Daniel.
In an insane world it was the sanest choice or How one philosophises
with a hammer. After; Harold Edgerton 1964, Eddie Adams 1969,
2000: the instant that a bullet passes through the head of a standing
executed victim, the hand holding the handgun visible in the image,
extreme left. Self portrait # 5 Third attempt to clone mental
disorder or How one philosophises with a hammer. After; Edgar Allen
Poe 1842, 1999: the artist's head tilted away from the lens,
revealing a neck slit wide across its centre, viscous blood bubbling
to the surface.
These are delirious
images, going beyond voyeurism. If voyeuristic in any sense, they
share the voyeurism of a hallucination, that extreme liminal point
of real/unreal, here/there, subject/object, seer/seen. They act
as simulacra of imagined events: Self-portrait # 4 making
tangible its gothic fantasy, as well as carrying an echo of the
original religious iconographic sense of the word 'simulacra', the
stitches acting as crown of thorns, emblem of saintly suffering.
These photographs know no boundaries, they are unlimited: historical,
literary, metaphysical, art-historical, political, factual, fictional.
They are manifestly political images - as a previous critique of
Martinez's earlier work concluded: "Is it not an ethical imperative
and challenge to create situations that mock, question, interrupt,
undermine and subvert the continuum of progress that keeps (catastrophic)
things going."1 As the author notes, we are living in
catastrophic and apocalyptic times: Self-portrait # 7 acts
as a reference to the similar image of execution from the Vietnam
war, and also to gangland killings, sectarian killings, and all
late-twentieth-century and contemporary acts of kidnap or political
assassination. Such allusion across such a spectrum! Such an extreme
image finds its frame across geographical, political and personal
boundaries. It is cinema, television, newspaper, art history, personal
nightmare and social trauma.
These photographs
come from a tradition of activism, of art-political intervention.
Deconstructing the production and reception of extreme images -
images of atrocities - the work accents the authority of mental
disorder behind the act of atrocity, its image and its reception.
Yet disorder is a complex state; was it Rimbaud or Artaud who argued
for a wild disordering of all the senses? Disorder is a political
and social, as well as cultural, position. In this sense, the Martinez
photographs remind me of the novel Eden Eden Eden by Pierre
Guyotat, a novel of atrocity and multiple obscenities, a nightmare
hallucination of relentless torture, physical and sexual violence
in the war-torn Algerian desert. Banned in France for eleven years
after publication in 1970, the novel was championed by Barthes,
Phillippe Sollers, Foucault and others as revolutionary in form,
technique and subject. It is a continuum of phrases, separated only
by hash, colon, semi-colon - in one sense a continuous nightmarish
sentence.
The control
implicit behind such a tour-de-force of extremity is startling;
similarly, Martinez's photographs, created free of computer effects,
using the skills of special make-up-effects artists, imply an extreme
control - the photographs as records of extreme performances. Barthes
wrote of Eden Eden Eden: "we are left simply with language
and lust, not the former expressing the latter, but the two bound
together in a reciprocal metonymy, indissoluble. The strength of
this metonymy, sovereign in Guyotat's text, might presage a strong
censure...condemned to being excessive if it claims to censure simply
the subject and not the form, or vice versa..."2 Martinez's
work presents violence bound together with the image, and with the
history of imagined images - Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe. The
collusion of violence and mental disorder has a heritage, its images
are works of extreme beauty and horror: they can - and must - be
equally read as instances of political, social and cultural exchange:
"Art that engenders a multilayered dialogue, provokes human interaction,
and takes an interventionist stance in confronting the status quo
is an art that connects to people and joins art to life in essential
and powerful ways."3
Daniel Joseph
Martinez: "god made me do it" [ I suppose you know what you're
doing, but I wonder if you know what it means]) Orchard Gallery,
August/September 2000
Declan
Sheehan is a screenwriter and critic.
