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Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts Fall/Winter 2002, Volume 29, No.2 Daniel J. Martinez: Without Anesthesia OR This Isn’t a Nice Neighborhood Editor: Marisa S. Olson Table of Contents • In This Issue $8 each (no discount) [Add to Cart]  table of contents 1. In This Issue by Marisa S. Olson 6. The Highest Degree of Illusion By David Levi-Strauss 8. Death and Photography’s Open Doors By Reena Jana 12. Portrait of Daniel Joseph Martínez #1 Neutron Imaging, or An Experimental Program Against the Approaching Era of Zero Optical Bias—After The Matrix, 1999, and the d.r.e., 2002 By David Goldberg 18. A Dialogue on the Sublime and the Fury: A Conversation with Daniel Joseph Martínez By Cuauhtémoc Medina 24. Portofolio: Daniel Joseph Martinez By Sharon Bliss 34. Exhibition Reviews: Yes Yoko Ono San Francisco Museum of Modern Art By Dore Bowen Reed Estabrook By David Buuck 38. In the Gallery Safe Haven: Picturing Domestic Space By Diana Gaston Same/Difference By Marisa S. Olson 40. Book Reviews Deborah Willis and Carla Williams/ The Black Female Body By Marisa S. Olson Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students/ James Elkins Florida Photogenesis: The Work of Creative and Experimental Photographers in Florida By Chuck Mobley Photographers, Writers and the American Scene: Visions of Passage Robotics/ Alan Rath Projects/ Nikki S. Lee By Jean Chu 44. Books Received and Noted Chuck Mobley in this issue Daniel J. Martinez: Without Anesthesia OR This Isn’t a Nice Neighborhood Daniel Martinez is for real. His work, on the other hand, questions reality and the rhetoric of the mass-market questioning of reality, in photographic contexts. Martinez has worked in a variety of media over the years. Calling himself less an activist and more "strategically engaged," readers may remember the attention Martinez garnered when his contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial came in the form of museum admission tags emblazoned with single words that added up to the revelation, "I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white." In accepting and putting on these tags, audience members became participants in the artist’s engagement in the ongoing "culture wars" that have so deeply affected artists of Martinez’s generation. This issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts coincides with a rare SF Camerawork solo show. Without Anasthesia OR This Isn’t A Nice Neighborhood: Recent Work by Daniel J. Martinez, curated by Camerawork board member Sharon Bliss, is the first major Bay Area show by the artist in over ten years. Martinez continues to carry out his creative and intellectual strategems through the production of visual art, as well as the execution of performative and political practices, in the domain of the culture industry: writing, curating, organizing, intervening… Though it seems that his recent work leans more in the direction of photography, if you ask him, he’d likely say that the Camerawork show features no photographs. Instead, he gives us a photo-realistic animatronic sculpture and images he calls "resemblences of photographs," documents of performances imitating paintings… In this issue of the Journal, a cadre of writers attempt to dissect Martinez’s images, at times ironically imitating the artist whose own visual imitations provide the context for his most recent work. David Levi-Strauss has given us a copy of the essay he wrote to accompany Martinez’s contribution to this year’s Lima Biennial, and its translation into English. Never uttering the artist’s name, Levi-Strauss focuses his attention on contemporary modes of reading and interpreting the visual, and our apparent preference for the photographic over the "real." If Levi-Strauss looks at how we experience a visage, Reena Jana looks at the experience of the thing itself—then asks what the difference is… This is all part of her wider investigation of the relationship between death and representation, and the evolution of a shock aesthetic, in which Martinez’s work may be situated. David Goldberg unravels the delicate artifice of Martinez’s tableaux, the specific violence of his mise-en-scene, and the location of his specific narratives, along the graphic continuum of art historical representation. Filling in the blanks, in first person, is Cuauhtemoc Medina’s interview with Martinez, carried out in tandem with the artist’s exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporarneo Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City, and appearing here in its first American iteration. In all cases, we are reminded that, in his reiteration of the forms and tropes of Western art history, Daniel Martinez is "making real" that which existed previously only as visual hypotheses. Marisa S. Olson, editor This issue of Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts and the exhibition "Without Anesthesia OR This Isn’t A Nice Neighborhood, Recent Work by Daniel Joseph Martinez" are generously funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.; Grants for the Arts of the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund; and The Bernard Osher Foundation. home | about | exhibitions | bookstore | events | membership | journal | mentoring | links Copyright 2002. SF Camerawork. All Rights Reserved.