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To tell a story about Modern Art in Arizona, there’s no need to mention Frank Lloyd Wright.
Phoenix-born painter Mario Martinez has been working in a crowd that he surely has the credentials to belong to, but being part of this group has made him an outsider in a way that few would ask for.
Martinez is Yaqui, a member of the tribe that entered Arizona from Mexico over a hundred years ago, and whose numbers in the US grew during the decades of revolution in the first part of the 20th Century, when the new conviction of Mexican nationalism penalized those who insisted on maintaining their indigenous language and life-ways. Arizona was haven to many early Yaqui immigrants, who became fervent Americans, yet remained always Yaqui. The crowd I refer to are not the Yaqui, but the Native American artists Martinez has shown with and given support to his entire professional life.
When he came of age in the 1970’s, Martinez became fascinated with painting, especially with the works of the Abstract Expressionists that claimed New York as the new center of the art world after World War II. Making art that was often non-objective, these artists were not so much part of a story, but involved in a project--the attempt to discover pure painting--to make art that was not the marginalia of the world, but something outside of tradition and, therefore, really part of the natural order of things. Think rock stars with paint and you might get a glimpse of how huge the whole thing seemed to these guys at the time.
Of course, time passed, and the Ab-Ex crowd became big names in the big money story--a sort of royalty that everyone else aspired to join. But the only way to join royalty is through marriage or murder; murder is best. Pop Art did a whack-job on the megalomanic aspirations of Abstract Expressionism, and restored art’s traditional function as commentary about other royals. Thanks, Andy Warhol.
These days, most abstract painting has gone the way of the jazz music made during those years. It’s become easy-listening painting, the visual counterpart to smooth jazz, the Thorazine for your ears. Many a painter today, who might know better, turns a quick buck making rectangles of color that might as well be sample boards left over from the decorative painted finishes that covered ostentatious walls during the 1990’s.
Though he has always (though not exclusively) painted abstractly, Martinez found a different group of revolutionaries to hang with, rather than the Ab-Exer’s, (who were mostly dead). Native American artist-curators like Juane Quick-to-See Smith put his paintings in shows that increasingly brought international attention to the Indian artists who were not content to make art for the tourists. Martinez has been in many of the most prestigious exhibits of contemporary Native American art, and is collected by institutions like the Heard Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he had a retrospective two years ago.
There is, however, the proverbial rub: The majority of artists in the crowd he has been loyal to depend to a great degree on humor in their work, albeit with a judging and often bitter laugh. Their favored styles are pictorial, forms of realism and increasingly montage and symbolism, that,ironically --though no doubt not always intentionally--might remind one of the traditional Indian Art that is supposedly being left behind.
And then, there’s Mario. As far away as possible from the Native artist at Indian Market in Santa Fe who wears the shirt that declares, “real artists don’t starve,” Martinez has lived in Brooklyn for the last half dozen years. Before that, he remained in San Francisco after graduating from the Art Institute. He visits his family in Scottsdale frequently and has participated in the Yaqui Easter ceremonies at Guadalupe, but his painting has always been New York.
Seen as an Indian artist, Martinez is an anomaly, a rogue wave in the swimming pool.
His work is informed, as might be that of any attentive MFA grad, by European art history and by the work that fills exhibition halls in biennials worldwide. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Martinez doesn’t make overt political commentary in his paintings, nor can his work be easily seen as part of the struggle to redefine Indian identity. For lack of a better term, the old phrase “a painter’s painter” comes to mind, and has been spoken of Martinez more than once. Yet through it all, his paintings maintain their own respect, and could obviously only be made by Mario. Using a language that he has been teaching himself for 30 years, these works are as much about the Arizona desert as any cityscape, east or west. Look carefully at his painting, and you will see that Modern was not just a time, but is a way of being, as alive now as any sweet horn chorus or guitar lick that will ever be played.
A version of this article appeared in JAVA magazine. |
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