An attempt to steer off into his artistic career brings us right back to where we’re at: “In 1992 one of my gun pieces got accepted into a group show called ‘Agent Artist’ at PS1, and the next call was my friend asking if I wanted to go to Sierra Leone to fix weapons systems on helicopters.” That leads Martinez to the notoriously notorious arms dealer Victor Bout (“Nice guy—good tipper”) and how the Picasso defacer and art dealer Tony Shafrazi hooked Martinez up with a job working for an almost equally infamous Armenian arms dealer named Sarkis Soghanalian in Florida, who had pictures of himself with his arm around Presidents Nixon, Ford, and the first George Bush on the walls of his office. As Chinese tourists line up to pose for photographs in front of the MiGs, there’s this bit of military aracana: “The Pakistanis sold an F-16 we’d sold them to the Chinese, and we were like ‘What the fuck?’”
As we pass a SAM 18, a rocket launcher resembling a bazooka, a Katyusha unguided rocket, and a recoilless rifle, it’s time for another tale of military mishaps. This one is courtesy of a journalist friend who’d been in Somalia, and is about rebels who invaded an air base and stolen missiles off the planes, then welded them to their pickups. “The pylons only work if they’re upside down, like on the planes, so when they launched the missiles they actually shot the pickup into the front lines.” Up the grand staircase on the second floor above the planes and tanks are countless vitrines of guns and more guns. Contemplating them Martinez observes, somewhat self-evidently, “All these guns could be sculpture.” Then, “This label is wrong,” pointing at what is identified as a Chinese copy of a Japanese type 38 6.5 mm heavy machine gun. “It’s actually a Chinese copy of a Japanese copy of a French gun.” What’s your favorite magazine? I ask. The answer comes without a millisecond of hesitation: Small Arms Review.
Thanks to his magazine patron, the still-teenage Martinez worked as a stringer for fascistic anti-Semitic crackpot/libertarian savior Lyndon Larouche’s Executive Intelligence Review magazine in Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, where his extensive knowledge of guns came in handy, as did his Spanish. Though there had been evidence of prodigious artistic talent since childhood at that age Martinez thought that his own art didn’t have anything interesting or important to say. It was around the same time though, that he started doing his first serious forgeries of Keith Haring’s work.
“The Harings were easy,” Martinez tells me, “It was right before he died. He would give art to lovers and tricks and they would go straight to Tony Shafrazi [Haring’s dealer] to try and sell them. Sort of ‘Suck my cock, I’ll give you a drawing’ type of deal. The thing is you can’t get sex back, but you can get a drawing back.”
Hanging around the East Village art scene at Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery he met and then worked at Astor associate Bill Steeling’s 56 Bleecker Street Gallery, which happened to be conveniently located right around the corner from Haring’s studio. “These guys would come straight from there and try to sell us Harings. One day a guy came in with a Haring mask and when they wouldn’t buy it for $100 he broke it. After he left I went outside and gave him $50 for it. It was broken, but it was still a Haring.” Before that he’d been selling amethysts and crystals he got from Pennsylvania on the street at an “incredible markup,” so his entrepreneurial spirit was sufficiently developed that looking at the Harings he thought, “I can do this.” And he did. And what made them more interesting than mere copies or “fakes” is that he took varied elements from different Haring drawings to make composites. To get technical about it, only the signatures were forged, so in a sense they weren’t fakes but originals like the great forger Elmyr de Hory’s “original” Matisses, Modiglianis, and van Dongens of the 1940s and 1950s.
Shortly after he began forging in earnest, Martinez encountered the Grey Organization, a British “anarchic” art group consisting of three suit-and-tie-wearing members who took him under their wing. “They taught me everything I know about conceptual art, from Beuys to Chris Burden. They were mentors. If it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t have become an artist. I wanted their respect.” He helped them with their artwork, mostly gratis, and went overnight from being a committed punk rocker to wearing Yohji Yamamoto suits. Concurrently he was still doing forgeries, which on one level can be considered a type of conceptual art prank. He’d started by selling through intermediaries but in time took on a couple of trusted accomplices and with them and a fax machine, he was off to the races and making a lot of money. At one point he sold the London dealer Anthony d’Offay some Basquiats of his own devising for 250,000 pounds. When those were found out and d’Offay sent over “some IRA muscle,” Martinez’s response was to pay him off with a forged Calder.
The move from contemporaries to Alexander Calder had come about by chance. While playing with the idea of forging Picassos (but leery since there were already too many of them around) a propitious meeting occurred with an “Eastern European babe with the morals of a snake.” The babe had a stolen Calder from an older gentleman and hoodwinked Martinez into trying to sell it without mentioning its criminal provenance. There ended up being no sale and the Eastern European disappeared, but Martinez did get to meet Calder’s grandson and see a lot of real Calders up close. “Mine were really, really good,” he says, without any false modesty. There was something undoubtedly genius about forging Calder—it was the last thing anyone expected from a guy known for faking Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
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