Martinez joined the army in 1989 at the age of 22. Serving most of his time in Germany and Belgium, he was disappointingly never deployed in the first Gulf War, and ended his stint languishing at Fort Meade in Maryland. There he was discharged partly for selling slightly damaged machine gun parts that had been sent back to be scrapped at gun shows. Things really went sour when he started operating as a Milo Minderbinderesque loan shark.
“This was when they had just issued Kevlar helmets,” Martinez says, “They were really rare and expensive, so I collected them from the other soldiers as collateral. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs or cavort with whores, so I was the guy. I had all the helmets. Then I got found out and threatened with a radar post in the Aleutian Islands with the angry penguins.” Returning to New York he hung around the fading LES hardcore scene with Murphy’s Law, Cro-Mags, and the rest while trying to avoid falling back into the forgery trap. Eventually he met an artist named Jeff Gompertz who asked him to curate a show at 13th Street and Avenue A. There he made the acquaintance of Anthony Haden-Guest (who would write about Martinez’ prison hunger strike years later in New York magazine) and started to feel he’d become part of the art world and actually done something. Parlaying his success into an association with internet impresario Josh Harris, he organized the first exhibition at Harris’ much talked about and documented Pseudo space. One reason that show was noteworthy is it included work by then-young Connecticut transplant Tom Sachs, a friend and junk-jousting partner whose subsequent artwork has often borne more than a passing resemblance to earlier Martinez creations.
Sierra Leone never panned out, and Martinez stayed on in New York. “I wasn’t concerned with an art career because I could always make a fake.” Part of his ambivalence to the concept of a career might have been the difficulties of being a Hispanic artist who isn’t “Latin” or “political” enough, but there’s also the age-old problem with the art world and its attendant vagaries: “It’s like a female hamster on crack—it eats its own. Artists now can’t usurp the previous generation so they have get permission to go forward. By being assistants, by being part of the institutional system instead of rebelling against it. Plus, art is a losing proposition for 99.9 percent of people.”
Nevertheless, Martinez keeps at it and has now sworn off forgery to concentrate on his intricately detailed gun drawings done freehand from memory, and making guns by looking at them from the outside and coming up with a simplified version that works and shoots blanks. He shows at the Proposition gallery in New York and has been curating and making new sculptures with Canadian collaborator Byron Hawes, with whom he recently completed an incredibly realistic thirty-foot long Harrier drone called “Rat Bit” out of metal, steel, plastic, and wood. They are also fabricating work for an exhibition in November in Beijing entitled “Weapons-grade Apophenia.” Its main premise is the idea that the tide has shifted from design in popular culture aping military aesthetics to the other way around. The military uses video games to train soldiers and guns and other hardware have started to incorporate a modern, rounded iPod look. “It’s gone from Escape From New York to super slick. The weapons are more appealing, like new products you’d see in Stuff magazine.” Apophenia describes the experience of perceiving patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, and in “Weapons-grade Apophenia” that unmotivated seeing of connections will be physically displayed in the form of iPod-like guns, private jet fighters, and a satellite dish all built to scale. Reflecting the new paradigm of computer-generated, excessively polished, blob-like design, the works have the sleekness that has overtaken the coarseness evident in the Exocet missiles outside and so many of the guns inside the Military Museum.
With all the digressions and stories tales talking with Martinez can be an exhausting, but there’s a sincerity and straightforwardness to him that’s refreshing—a disarming quality that prompts a you-can’t-help-but-laugh and did-he-really-just-say-that reflex. Like his response to Beijing’s Time Out when asked for his thoughts on the local contemporary art scene: “Nothing in the galleries here has made me wanna fart lightning.” There’s also something intrinsically New York about Martinez that is highly unusual in Beijing and adds color to the cultural landscape. New York comes up often, as in his notion that “New York after September 11th reminds me of the parents of the kid who died and the mom starts cleaning everything obsessively. New York isn’t dealing, it didn’t mourn properly.”
He then launches into a story, another story, about living in Bushwick across from a church that set up speakers that blasted gospel music at ungodly hours. “You know what’s wrong with black people? Baptist churches. They’re really bad for the community.” There’s a seriousness to the remark and an underlying understanding of a complicated situation balanced out by provocative humor as he relates how he shot out the speakers from different rooftops, eight or nine times, and each time they got replaced until finally he won.
JOCKO WEYLAND
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