Daniel Joseph Martinez
1957–
Daniel Joseph Martinez has implemented nearly every available artistic medium— text, photography, painting, sculpture, video, performance, and even motorized animatronic self-portraits—in works that examine individual and collective identity and reveal tensions between political activism and personal culpability. Martinez developed Divine Violence from a research project aimed at cataloguing every twentieth- and twenty-first-century organization that sanctions the use of violence for political ends. Ninety-two hand-lettered names appear on two-by-three-foot wooden panels coated with gold automotive paint. Martinez selected the color for its associations, which range, as he has explained, from “the Renaissance and religion to precious mineral and economic considerations.” Presented floor to ceiling in an installation that fills a room, Divine Violence immerses the viewer in a gridded, gilded environment.
Martinez implements a “flattening out of political ideologies” in the project, whereby a globe-spanning range of resistance movements and state-run agencies appear side by side. Included are groups as seemingly disparate as the Vigorous Burmese Student Warriors and the Central Intelligence Agency. Yet, every organization on his ongoing list “claims the same thing: to be right, to be moral, to be ethical, and . . . to be fighting in the name of God.” The artist derived the installation’s title from Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay “Critique of Violence,” a text in which the philosopher considers circumstances under which violence is acceptable. While Martinez boldly advocates for “the end of useful politics, as we know it,” he remains optimistic. Divine Violence prompts viewers to consider embracing what he envisions as “an intertextual and intercultural society,” one that might move humanity forward toward an “unimagined future.”
Introduction
Daniel Joseph Martinez (born 1957) is a Los Angeles–based contemporary artist.
Wikidata identifier
Q5217724
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 6, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, conceptual artist, installation artist, photographer, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500116651
Names
Daniel Joseph Martinez, Daniel Joseph Martínez, Daniel J. Martinez
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 6, 2025.
