Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Daniel Joseph Martinez
37
Floor 6
Born 1957 in Los Angeles, CA
Lives in Los Angeles, CA, and Paris, France
These five photographs document what Daniel Joseph Martinez has described as a “radical performative experiment of becoming post-human and the evolution of a new species.” Martinez uses his own body to interrogate and “to bear witness to the extraordinary moment in human history, our own self-destruction.” The artist inhabits the identities of Frankenstein’s monster from the film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Count Dracula from the film Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), the Engineer from the film Prometheus (2012), an Alien Bounty Hunter from the television series The X-Files (1993–2002), and the Drone Host from the television series Westworld. Martinez staged each photograph and then shot it on large-format film, printing the final image without digital alteration.
Three Critiques* #3 The Post-Human Manifesto for the Future; On the Origin of Species or E=hνÓ (+) We are here to hold humans accountable for crimes agains humanity OR In the twilight of the empire, in the spider hole where the masters of the earth have gone to ground with their simulacral weapons, reality gives way to a violent Technological Phantasmagoria Celestial Event or Homo Sapiens are the Ultimate Invasive Species on the Earth or MODERNISM has failed us, the EMPIRE is collapsing, humans are MORALLY indefensible or A world between what we know and what we fear or Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one Or Homines corruptissimi Condememant quod non intellegunt
Daniel Joseph Martinez, Three Critiques* #3 The Post-Human Manifesto for the Future; On the Origin of Species or E=hνÓ (+) We are here to hold humans accountable for crimes agains humanity OR In the twilight of the empire, in the spider hole where the masters of the earth have gone to ground with their simulacral weapons, reality gives way to a violent Technological Phantasmagoria Celestial Event or Homo Sapiens are the Ultimate Invasive Species on the Earth or MODERNISM has failed us, the EMPIRE is collapsing, humans are MORALLY indefensible or A world between what we know and what we fear or Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one Or Homines corruptissimi Condememant quod non intellegunt. Five photographs, 59 1/8 × 73 3/16 × 3 5/8 in. (150 × 185.9 × 9.1 cm) each. Collection of the artist
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Daniel Joseph Martinez, Three Critiques...
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Daniel Joseph Martinez: Science fiction has the ability to imagine things that other forms of creativity cannot do.