UCI Artist’s Works Speak Louder Than Questions

“I’ve been waiting for the ‘90s my whole life!” Artist Daniel Martinez paced the floor excitedly as he voiced his passionate beliefs about art and society during an “Art Forum” lecture at Rancho Santiago College on Monday.

“The time to act is now! . . . I have a palette of media: painting, holograms, sculpture, film, video, installation, performance, collaborative work--all that was my training to be ready for the ‘90s.”

Martinez, who also teaches art at UC Irvine, has devised unusual works tailored to specific sites in cities from Venice, Calif.,to Rotterdam, the Netherlands. (In Orange County, he is one of several artists working on the $300,000 public-art project for the Koll-Anaheim retail and business development in downtown Anaheim.)

Martinez said he believes in questioning “existing structures” by making art that is “conceptually sophisticated but bound by experiences of human beings.” Each piece is designed to produce “particular types of responses, depending on the community,” he said.

In practice, this thinking has translated into works including “Nine Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Life” for “In Public: Seattle 1991,” an ambitious project of the Seattle Arts Commission that involved 34 artists from Seattle and other parts of the United States and abroad.

When Martinez visited the city, he said, people told him there were no poor people, no homeless, no ghettos. So he photographed nine upscale blocks of the city and designed a set of 79 banners posing nine pairs of questions--one pair per block--about the city’s haves and have-nots.

Near a store called British American Tailors, he hung a banner that inquired, sans question mark, “Are you a connoisseur with a refined palate.” On the reverse, the banner said, “Are you hungry.” Near a McDonald’s, the banner read, “Do you know anyone who can’t read or write.” And on the reverse, “Do you earn the minimum wage.”

Some local artists paid him the “highest compliment,” he said, by hanging their own imitative banners on other blocks (“Has Saddam invaded your wallet?”

But the banners aroused a storm of controversy. An editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer growled that they were “really nothing more than political billboards” paid for by a public body. The Downtown Seattle Assn., a merchant’s group, was not amused, either.

“To our dismay,” group members protested in a letter to the Arts Commission, “we discovered the work is not the bright, cheerful display we expected but is instead a series of socio-political messages intended to cause antagonistic response.”

Controversy also greeted Martinez’s designs for a permanent, $750,000 project for Yerba Buena Gardens, a combined hotel-office-retail-arts complex near the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco.

The proposed piece (a collaboration with fellow artist Rene Petropolous and architect Roger White) consists of four “word bridges”: 40-foot-high steel letters spelling out THIS / IS A / NICE / NEIGHBORHOOD--which were designed to form a series of street-spanning arches. On the flat surfaces of each word, neon letters spell out its equivalent in Chinese and Spanish, the languages of the majority of the city’s bilingual residents.

“That ‘D’ (in the 180-foot-long bridge spelling out “neighborhood”) is so sensuous,” Martinez exclaimed. He visualizes the piece as a beloved and useful landmark, with people instructing friends or lovers, “I’ll meet you by the D” or “I’ll sit by the N.”

But critics are troubled by Martinez’s ironic reference to the Redevelopment Agency’s gentrification of a once-seedy area, formerly a no-man’s land of skid-row hotels, run-down apartment buildings and warehouses. Martinez said more than 85 articles have been published condemning the project, the future of which is still, he said, “in debate.”

In Southern California, Martinez’s works have included a billboard, erected last winter in San Diego, that combined images of a U.S. dollar with a 100-peso note under the title, “Guerra de Culturas” (War of Cultures). For the El Segundo station of the Metro Rail, he made a sculpture of a 45-foot-tall hand poised to hurl a paper airplane into the air. That line runs through a district dominated by aerospace companies that have supplied the United States with its “major war machinery,” he said.

Last year, asked by Los Angeles art philanthropist Peter Norton to design his annual artist-conceived Christmas card, Martinez demurred--it just wasn’t his thing to be a lackey for even the most generous of wealthy patrons.

But he had another idea, something that would tie in with “A Day Without Art,” the annual December tribute to people who have died from AIDS-related causes. Underwritten by Norton, Martinez’s project involved sending 3,500 pizza-sized boxes--containing packages of multicolored condoms and the message “Intimacy + truth / Obscene is no choice”--to addresses throughout Southern California.

A third-generation American, Martinez said he is “classically Chicano,” but doesn’t speak “a word” of Spanish. The ‘50s were “the age of assimilation,” he explained. “To be American meant you only spoke one language . . . I was robbed of my culture.”

But he lived “on the street” in Lennox, “the smallest barrio in Los Angeles,” next to Watts and Inglewood. “You basically had poor whites, blacks and Mexicans. I grew up in a multicultural world 30-some years ago. The world is just catching up to this as an idea.”

As a child, Martinez made drawings and paintings on paper bags and had his first “show” at age 10. “It was outside the alley of my house. I was hanging things on the fence and giving talks to kids of the neighborhood: ‘You might not like it, but it’s art.’ ”

He graduated from high school with a low D average, and was told to consider a future in ditch digging or collecting garbage. That wasn’t what he had in mind, but it seemed par for the course.

He had become used to a “level of manipulation,” he said, that kept people in his community from access to things others took for granted. “The trash was rarely picked up, the street lights were not replaced, the ambulance didn’t come when you called, and the police (were visible) only when they were beating someone’s brains in.”

Luckily, he had a college counselor friend who suggested he go to art school. (“I had never heard of art school. I had never heard Picasso or Michelangelo.”) So he applied to “every art school across the country.” They all rejected him.

He finally managed to get a full scholarship to California School of the Arts (CalArts), the celebrated institution in Valencia, where the dominant “Anglo” aesthetic was dauntingly cerebral, cool and minimal, and he was one of only three Latinos.

After one semester as a freshman frustrated by lack of access to prominent artist-teachers who were “on the pulse of the avant-garde,” he petitioned to graduate after only one semester. His canny, self-described “performance piece” vaulted him into the second semester of his junior year.

Still, art school was frustrating. “They wanted to cookie-cutter you out: Do as your instructors do and don’t have independent thoughts,” he said. “I thought art was about expression and experimentation and being wild and crazy.”

After he graduated in 1978, it took him a while to understand “how much I was considered an undesirable, an outsider” in the art world, he said. “I’ve collected all my rejection letters for about 15 years. There are hundreds of them. . . . I’m a thorn in many people’s sides. (But) I’m unwilling to stop doing what I do because someone says no.”