Daniel Joseph Martinez

Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to present States of Being, a solo exhibition of Daniel Joseph Martinez, on view from 25 June – 7 August.   

On view in the First Floor galleries will be a monumental wall installation titled The Post-Human Manifesto for the Future: On the Origin of Species or E=hν (+) We are here to hold humans accountable for crimes against humanity Or In the twilight of the empire, in the spider hole where the masters of the earth have gone to ground with their simulacral weapons, reality gives way to a violent Technological Phantasmagoria Celestial Event or Homo Sapiens are the Ultimate Invasive Species on the Earth or Modernism has failed us, the Empire is collapsing, humans are Morally indefensible or A world between what we know and what we fear or Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one, Or Homines corruptissimi Condememant quod non intellegunt, 2022. This work will be shown in conjunction with a new 3 panel blackboard work titled Momento Mori, 2026.

Daniel Joseph Martinez’s practice spans five decades from the early eighties to the present, and has incorporated text, sculpture, photography, painting, robotics, performance, and installation. His work addresses issues of collective identity, history, surveillance, power, resistance, war, AI, machine intelligence, and systems of exchange.  Through various media and forms, Martinez engages in conceptual operations, utilizing history to understand philosophical ideas through exploration and experimentation, in aesthetic and theoretical critiques of the present and future. 

Comprised of five large scale photographic panels, The Post-Human Manifesto for the Future (Performance for the Camera) transforms Martinez’s self-portraiture into a series of supernatural post-human identities which float on the wall in a new dimension.  Exploring the liminal threshold between the historical, scientific, medical, and the fantastical, Martinez’s variety of cinematic references, post-human guises are mutations derived from mythological sources that posit the human race as the ultimate invasive species and prophesize its simultaneous materialization and destruction of technological society.  Using his own body as a site of transmutation to interrogate and bear witness to this moment in human history, an impending path towards the end of human evolution or our own self destruction, the images document what the artist calls a ‘radical performative experiment of becoming post human and the evolution of a new species.’  

Inhabiting a range of identities using augmentation and analog prosthetics, Martinez utilizes formalism and technical precision to stage each photograph, shooting it on large format film and then digitally printing the final image.  His images range from Frankenstein’s monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Count Dracula from Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), the Engineer from Prometheus (2012), to an Alien bounty hunter from the X Files (1993-2002), and the Drone Host from the tv series Westworld (2016-2022).    This work first premiered in Quiet as Its Kept, the eightieth Whitney Biennial in 2022, curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards. This is the third and final movement in his Trilogy Three Critiques. Beginning with Museum Tags, 1993, Divine Violence, 2008, and Post Human Manifesto, 2026, which took 30 years to complete, and is presented in its first solo presentation here.  An attempt to define contemporaneity and the magnitude of what we face as a species, it addresses the critique of the human itself, following on earlier themes that both provoke and implicate the viewer, through a critique of violence and power. 

In the adjacent gallery a second work, Memento Mori (Blackboards, definitions and translations), 2026, is shown in proximity to the above, and represents the beginning of a new series by Martinez. Premised partly on a hybridity of art historical and philosophical antecedents that incorporate writing and text from Beuys to Twombly, Arendt to Virillo, words appear as chalk on blackboards, based on a synthesis of found texts which utilize terminology in complex ways.  A willful proposition for new pedagogies, this work proposes Beuys’ concept of writing as the new sculpture and text as the new image.  Within a world of repetitive images that compete for a space to survive, Martinez's Memento Mori  is a quest for clarity and for new definitions within the Post Human, an intimate attempt to interrogate the operation and function of language within an abstract space. The definitions and translations are presented as value neutral, derived from an amalgamation of open sources, with words and terms taken from history and juxtaposed, suggesting a precise reflection of who we are now.  Thoughtful, energetic, yet full of chaos and unstable beauty, they show how meanings have shifted and emptied over time, reflecting and interrogating the state of political, economic, and global structures. 

Daniel Joseph Martinez was born in 1957 and raised in Los Angeles and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. He studied with Michael Asher, John Baldassari and Douglas Hubler. From 1979-1981 he did post graduate studies with German artist Klaus Rinke. Throughout his career spanning five decades, Martinez has engaged in an interrogation of social, political, and cultural mores through artworks that have been described as nonlinear, asymmetrical, multidimensional propositions. Operating with fluidity and as open-source manifestations not bound by any singular category, his works exist in an expanded field from the ephemeral to the solid. Martinez’s practice takes the form of text, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, robotics, performance, and public interventions to unapologetically question issues of collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference. Ongoing themes include philosophy, contamination, history, surveillance, violence, nomadic power, cultural resistance, war, dissentience, and systems of symbolic exchange, directed toward the precondition of politics coexisting as radical beauty. Their commonality is that they all address topics of race, class and sociopolitical boundaries present within American society.

Martinez is a Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of California at Irvine; he teaches in the Graduate Studies Program, New Genres and Critical & Curatorial Studies. He lives and works in Los Angeles.