ART : Listening to the Militant Muse : The streets are Daniel Martinez’s gallery. He loves to make waves about problems that are making waves for other people

“I am an extreme person,” asserts Daniel J. Martinez. Not missing a beat, he adds, “If I hadn’t been an artist, I would have been a terrorist.”

And maybe he would. Certainly the Los Angeles-based artist takes himself and his artwork seriously enough for the role. Like an uncompromising guerrilla bent on justice at any cost, Martinez is mad and wants everybody to know it. Without apology, he manipulates aesthetics and mixes mediums to make a social or political point. He typically opts for colossal scale and inevitably vents his wrath against the inequities of this postmodern, high-tech, paranoid culture.

If nonstop exposure is any measure of talent, then Martinez is very good at what he does. Within the last few years, his art of rage has been seen in venues no less impressive than Seattle’s 1991 “In Public” series, last year’s prestigious and controversial Whitney Biennial in New York, the 1993 Venice Biennale and last summer’s watershed public art exhibition “Culture in Action” in Chicago. Each time he has managed to command both public attention and critical debate.

In fact, Martinez stirs up trouble just about everywhere he goes. His installation at Cornell University last year was vandalized by white supremacists. That attack led, in turn, to an impassioned demonstration by Latino students. His banners in Seattle sparked a rancorous debate on the very nature of art that went all the way to the front page of the city’s major newspaper. Even the museum tags he created for the 1993 Whitney Biennial reading “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White,” were ultimately taken to be mean-spirited symbols of multicultural dogmatism.

Martinez has created a high volume of disquieting work in a relatively short time, and it has earned him dual-edged critical recognition. Newsweek magazine recently named him American art’s hot “new face” for 1994, calling his Whitney tags “the sharpest thorn” at the show. Meanwhile, when asked for this article what he thought of the tags, Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes called them a “cute one-liner of zero aesthetic value.”

Whatever the critics think, Martinez has managed to gain a foothold in the art world. He is a quintessential hybrid artist who crosses disciplines, mixes technologies, applies theories and appropriates disparate elements from the tangled web of postmodern society. Simultaneously, he is a construct, an angry decolonized individual who has made himself over from the fragments of his original culture and the debris of postindustrial society. In many ways, he embodies a migrant nomadism, an exilic and oppositional sensibility moving subversively through our cool, digitized culture.

Although he now identifies himself as a Chicano, the 36-year-old Martinez is a classic study of the colonized Mexican American. Growing up in the working-class city of Lennox (near Los Angeles International Airport), he never learned to speak Spanish. Although both his parents were fluent, they spoke only English with him and, he says, “Spanish was strictly forbidden by my teachers.” By his account, he never learned anything positive about his ethnic background. So, like many of his generation, he just drifted into an unthinking identification with “whiteness.”

Reflecting on that period, he says: “The orientation of my world was toward whiteness. Mexican music was not played in my household. Spanish was never spoken. For me, white meant better. It meant privilege.”

By the time he graduated from high school, Martinez knew he wanted to be an artist: “I wanted to learn about the art world and what it meant to actually be part of it. So I applied to every art school in the country, and I was rejected by every art school in the country. Finally, the only place left to try was CalArts,” which was where he ended up.

But art school wasn’t what he expected. In his mind, it would be a place of creative exchange. Instead, he found it to be a continuation of the prejudiced education he felt he had received all his life. “Even there, I was looked down on by others. On the surface the place seems open, but it’s as alienating and racist as anywhere else,” he claims.

Perhaps that’s where Martinez’s irrepressible urge to expose the ugliest truths took root. Even before graduating in 1979, Martinez began a long, intense series of what he calls “aesthetic investigations.”

“I worked through several art forms,” he explains, “searching for that form that would carry the content. I found myself dissatisfied with the object in the gallery. So I started to combine forms, to collaborate with other artists, with whole communities. This finally led to where I’m at now: large-scale interventions into public landscapes.”

During that molting period in the the early ‘80s, he fell in with Harry Gamboa Jr. and ASCO (Spanish for nausea), a Chicano art group based in East Los Angeles. ASCO’s work was infused with social commentary and a cutting sardonic edge. A master of appropriation, Martinez recognized the power in this specialized ethnic aesthetic and began reinventing it.

He also worked with local performance artists and often stayed up until dawn discussing political theory with radical academics. He earned money working as a free-lance photographer and stole whatever free time he could to read: existentialist Albert Camus, Italian Futurist manifestoes, Michel Foucault and even ‘60s Situationist tracts.

As his universe of conceptual reference points expanded, his anger continued to brew. He was in training, “arming myself with a philosophical position, a base of thought. Once that foundation was grounded, I could move anywhere I wanted to go.”

By the early ‘90s, it all began to come together. His 1992 show, “I Pissed on the Man Who Called Me a Dog,” opened at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. It exemplified all the basic elements of Martinez’s world view. An especially angry, almost rabid installation, the work was a claustrophobic labyrinth strewn with old clothes and cardboard boxes that reeked of mildew. A shrieking soundtrack of deranged gospel music played in the background while strategically placed video monitors ran endless loops of violence excerpted from film, cartoons and other sources.

The installation also presented several photographs superimposed with quotes from famous thinkers. One piece depicted a grisly atrocity from the Bosnian war. Over it was Aristotle’s dictum: “Anyone can become angry--that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way--that is not easy.” Aristotle’s words could well be Martinez’s motto.

Indeed, insult is a through line in his work. Every installation becomes another opportunity to agitate, another chance to deliver a well-deserved punch into the gut of mainstream America. In the process, Martinez joins with other artists whose work only succeeds to the extent that it offends

“I want to get to people,” Martinez says. “So, to be successful by the standard I’ve set for myself, the work must go straight to the core of the issue and deliver a deathblow. Anything less would be just empty posturing.”

In his installation for the 1993 Venice Biennale, “Big Bad Wolf,” Martinez offended his Italian hosts by including grisaille paintings on black velvet, each one depicting members of Italy’s most notorious terrorist group. One writer in the journal Art in America said that Martinez’s work represented the “strongest current of honest anger” in the show. The whole installation was imbued with a “sense of suppressed aggression.”

That’s Martinez’s forte: He apprehends the anger of a place--political, social or personal. Then, he turns the intangible emotions into palpable artworks.

His long journey into ethnic self-awareness makes the lapel buttons he did for last year’s Whitney Biennial a lesson in high irony. As he says, “The buttons were open to multiple readings. White people thought it was reverse racism. People of color thought it was funny. For me, personally, the buttons were something else again. Even though I once tried to be white, I have now reached the point where I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” The tags incensed a great many patrons and reviewers. The buttons pushed a button, and they became emblems of the mainstream art world’s disdain for multiculturalism.

He struck a nerve once again when he built the outdoor installation “The Castle Is Burning” last fall at Cornell University. When a giant black asterisk of particle board started going up on campus, Ithaca’s pristine Ivy League community was told that the panels that composed the asterisk were a behavioral science experiment. In actuality, they were the building blocks of his installation, part of “Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence,” the first Latino site-specific exhibition in the United States.

Martinez selected the Arts Quad as his site, he says, precisely because “it is the most beautiful place on campus. It is the view, and that is directly related to privilege. It’s about the whole notion of beauty and who has the privilege of having the beautiful view.”

To further punctuate his point, Martinez placed red Styrofoam letters on top of the asterisk. Hovering high above ground they cut through the landscape with sayings such as this one from Diogenes: “In the rich man’s house, the only place to spit is in his face.”

These colossal billboards of contempt functioned as both sculpture and painting. The asterisk’s panels, with their luxuriant, almost velvety, black fields could have been abstract canvases from the ‘60s. The pitch-covered boards and the razor-thin slits that cut horizontally across them also suggested modernist sculpture.

But the work was never taken seriously on its own terms. Many on campus saw it as nothing more than a nasty jab at Cornell’s hallowed traditions. The student newspaper called it “non-art” and a “monstrosity.” By the time the show opened, vandals had spray-painted a swastika and vulgar racial epithets all over the piece. Although the university president eventually condemned the racist graffiti, Latino and other minority students occupied the administration building for four days to protest campus intolerance.

Looking back on the dispute, Chon Noriega, co-curator of the show and a professor at UCLA’s School of TV and Film, claims that “the piece made manifest all the conflicts hidden by the Ivy League facade. It exposed the hypocrisy of a place that hides behind the notion of beauty.

“That’s what Martinez does best,” Noriega maintains. “He peels back the outer skin and shows the worst of what lies just beneath the surface. And then he’s on to the next project.

“Daniel is a nomad,” Noriega continues with a tone of both respect and cultural pity. “I don’t think he has ties to any particular, localized community. He flies into a place and gets a sense of it. He dissects it and pinpoints its soft underbelly. He then presses down on its most sensitive pressure points. He’s a catalyst.”

In the fall of 1991, Martinez played a similar role in Seattle. Commissioned to create street banners to commemorate the opening of the Seattle Art Museum, he used the medium to question the city’s social reality. Calling it “The Quality of Life,” he fabricated two-sided banners based on the idea of society’s haves and have-nots.

The black-and-white banners were Spartan, almost grim. The “have” sides asked such questions as “Do you have a beach house or a mountain house?” The other side read: “Do you have a place to live?”

Even before the banners went up, the local retail business association was outraged. In a letter to the Arts Commission, they said they had been led to believe that the “banners would be colorful, cheerful and enjoyable . . . .” Instead, the letter complained, “they were sociopolitical messages.” The Seattle Times ran a front-page story and photo as well as an editorial condemning the flags as false art.

For Martinez, that was the point. “Art is an encounter,” he says. “My work stimulates people to ask questions and re-examine their role in society. The real question in the Seattle situation wasn’t whether or not my work was really art. The real question was control. Do business interests own all the avenues of discourse in a retail core, or can artists contribute?”

Besides drawing the whole city into a debate about art, his Seattle project caught the attention of one of America’s most innovative curators, Mary Jane Jacobs. “What I saw in his work,” she says, “was a real consideration for his audience. I was drawn to that. In the past, audience was a given--there were patrons, dealers, collectors, museums. But now, in a post-studio reality, work that matters is much more audience-specific. Artists now ask: ‘Who is it for?’ ”

In late 1991, Jacobs approached Martinez about being part of a new public arts project sponsored by Sculpture Chicago that would take an audience-specific, non-institutional approach. Their collaboration was so natural that she took the project’s title, “Culture in Action,” from a presentation he had made to a Mexican American group.

For his part, Martinez spent two years working on a twofold Chicago project. An assistant professor in the Department of Studio Art at UC Irvine, he would leave for Illinois every Thursday night to spend the next four days working with community organizations in Chicago.

One result was “100 Victories/10,000 Tears,” an installation that moved giant concrete blocks (from a building the University of Illinois was literally deconstructing) to a nearby university site that had been the locus of labor protests during the 19th Century. Using these discarded building blocks, Martinez created an “alternative university” space.

The second part of his project, “Consequences of a Gesture,” (in collaboration with Vinzula Kara) was, as Martinez describes it, an “absurdist parade, carnival and spectacle.” The procession, which took place last June, involved 800 marchers from Mexican American and African American communities. The artist explains that at least one of the goals of the project was to generate a community “intervention” that would allow the audience to displace art objects as the central element of work.

Over the next two years Martinez will show his work--in one form or another--in Dublin, Moscow, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Venezuela, Saskatchewan and Riverside. Through it all, Martinez says he’s ultimately driven by the fervent desire to make art part of life.

“Otherwise,” he says, “why make it during these times of crisis? Is it worth our effort and energy if it can’t be part of real life and affect us in some way? The answer is no.”