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Martinezí postmodern trompe díoeil is inscribed in a tradition of the simulacrum pioneered in his native Los Angeles by the entertainment and leisure industries. The sculpture, "Happiness is Over-Rated", a perfectly cloned animatronic figure of the artist, elicits differentiation from various expressions of the hyper-real. These tend to deploy an illusion that is not sufficiently estranged from the established reality, and thus are devoured by its mechanisms of recuperation. Do not Duane Hansonís fiberglass sculptures of losers and social outcasts from the depths of the United States remain within the one-dimensionality they supposedly indict? Most recently, Maurizio Cattelanís miniature clone of himself clad in Joseph Beuysí signature felt suit hanging from a garment rack, his sole work for his one person show at The Migros Museum, La rivloluzione siamo noi (We are the Revolution), Zurich (2000), comes to mind. For all his reverence to freedom of and in art, ironically, Cattelanís poking of the art world circumscribed the work within a narrow context of specialists and elites.
But as critics have underlined, for all the references Martinez conjures up-- he quotes none. From the Chapman's and Tony Matelli on to the wide gamut of performance linked to the body, its duplication and the cultural corpus as exemplified by the works of Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta, Gullermo Gómez-Peña, Coco Fusco, and James Luna, Martinez quotes no one in particular. A richer vein to explore is the artistís relation to the two other classics of conceptual interdisciplinary work, namely Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden. Both of who like Martinez were initial ‘bad boysí and whose work was informed by California youth and counter-cultures. Jason Rhoades and Miguel Calderon in this respect would configure the generation that follows.
IV
"He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof"
T.W. Adorno, from Minima Moralia
Made of silicon rubber stretched over a fiberglass frame, "Happiness is Over-Rated" portrays the artist in a quasi hara-kiri pose; instead of holding the ritual knife used to slit the bowels--this is the most painful manner and self-conscious gesture to end oneís life-each hand clutches a razor blade. Quiet and still, the work recalls Ovidís story of Pygmalion, one would like to breathe life into it. This illusion and retreat into Greco-Roman myth does not last long as the animatronic sculpture revives. Powered by computer programs the sculpture reenacts the slashing of its wrists, bringing to mind the layered politicized and disciplined subjectivities of Yukio Mishimaís narratives. An exasperated laughter is let out from the depth of the belly, a recording of the artistís own voice. This tour de force underlines Martinezí taste for the carnavalesque and social function of laughter as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, not to mention its apostrophe to the canned laughter of the television industry.
The formal and conceptual strategies deployed are labyrinth-like and bifurcate. Meandering to and from various cultural locations, from baroque representations of heroism and martyrdom to various genres of the film tradition, and on to the poetics of the body of Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith, the sculpture produces a complex and contradictory web of signification. The work blasts any sense of progressive continuum as per its references; it is disorienting yet phenomenologically anchored in its time-based presence. It tears the epistemological safety net, and reverts to itself and the cultural location that informed it as a source of reflection and simulation.
T.W. Adorno wrote that happiness is obsolete because it is not economically sound for the culture industry and the totally administered society. Theme parks and Hollywood movies blend fantasy with authority, euphoria with punishment, stability with social death. The culture industries and the status quo profit from anxiety, as do the service sectors that capitalize on fear. One cannot forget that Adornoís seminal oeuvre co-authored with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), was written during their exile from Fascism in Los Angeles. Adorno and Horkheimer, like Martinez were informed by the web of signification of the culture industry and the marketing of fetish commodities linked to domineering and normative ideas of behavior, no doubt making happiness if not obsolete, certainly over-rated.
This text first appeared in Atlantica, Number 34, Winter 2003, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Gran Palma de Canarias, Spain, we acknowledge our gratitude to its editor, Antonio Zaya.
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