If Only God Had Invented Coca Cola Sooner! Or, The Death of My Pet Monkey

2004 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Daniel Joseph Martinez

location: Los Angeles, California
year born: 1957
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Los Angeles, California

For more than three decades, the Los Angeles–based artist Daniel Joseph Martinez has used every art medium at his disposal to investigate raw aspects of American culture, dipping adeptly into derangements of body and brain, individual and society. In one well-known piece that he produced for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, he replaced the text on the museum’s admission ticket with the phrase “I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting to Be White.” Visitors held the sentiment in their hands and kept it in their pockets. In The House America Built (2004), he re-created in exacting detail the cabin in which the Unabomber penned his manifesto. While Martinez’s concepts are tight and concise, they leave ample space to implicate the viewer. His work prompts more than finger pointing; it catalyzes introspection, signaling the necessity of taking stock of one’s own role in perpetuating difficult yet ubiquitous images.


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Other related works, blended automatically

A meditation on the possibility…
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Daniel Joseph Martinez

2005

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Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...

The Left Hand Can't See That the Right Hand is Blind
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Douglas Gordon

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Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...

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