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

Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...

100 Hand drawn maps of my country, India
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Shilpa Gupta

2014

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...

n°5 The International Sail
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Enrique Ramirez

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Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...

Los rastreadores
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Claudia Joskowicz

2014

Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...

Untitled (Ruby Downing sitting between two Unidentified Men in a Room), Damaged series
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Lisa Oppenheim

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The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...

The White Album
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Mungo Thomson

2008

The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...

Bread and Roses
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Hank Willis Thomas

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Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...

Bus Logos
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Yto Barrada

2004

In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...

Mapa Mundi BR (postal)
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Rivane Neuenschwander

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Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...

Untitled (Sword)
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Shilpa Gupta

2009

In Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...

Sunday (Domingo)
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Rivane Neuenschwander

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In this video, a parrot chews on seeds printed with punctuation marks...

Drawn and Quartered
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Claudia Joskowicz

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The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...

Retired pilar
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Jin Shan

2010

Retired Pillar represents the death and deterioration of legacy of colonial Shanghai...

I am the Greatest
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Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...

Karachi Series 1 (Chandra Acarya, 7:50pm, 30 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi)
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Bani Abidi

2008

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...

Untitled (Joseph T. Robinson Standing at a Podium in a Room), Damaged series
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Lisa Oppenheim

2003

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...

Untitled (San Francisco)
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Edward Kienholz

1984

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...