Black Box Book

Martin Gantman is very pleased to announce the release of his new book, Black Box: Decoding the Art Work of Martin Gantman, published in association with the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) and ICI Press.

In 10 individual volumes, each focusing on a theoretical or practical interest that has compelled him, he describes the background, influences, history, and development of his almost 40 years of artistic output. The book includes a foreword by Dr Lise Patt, Director of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry.

The deluxe version shown above is a signed and numbered limited edition of 50 books. Each book has a slipcase containing the 10 separate volumes.

The book is also available in Print-on-Demand and Ebook versions, which are available through bookstores and online booksellers.

Information on future book signings to be announced.

For more information, contact Martin Gantman here or the Institute of Cultural Inquiry here.

Select Your Edition

Box Set Signed Limited Edition– Inquire availability here.
Paperback Edition – $79 (Click for sale price) Amazon or Barnes & Noble
Ebook Edition – $12.99 (Click for sale price) Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook

Paperback: 340 pages
Publisher: Martin Gantman Studio in association with the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) and ICI Press (January 16, 2018)
Language: English
Signed Limited Edition: ISBN 978-0-9759857-1-7
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-0-9759857-3-1
Ebook Edition: ISBN 978-0-9759857-4-8
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches

Sample Chapters

Preview:

INTRODUCTION
BLACK BOX
Decoding the Art Work
of Martin Gantman
Martin Gantman
with Foreword by Lise Patt

Foreword

Martin Gantman grew his artistic bones during the last throes of modernism, when art’s autonomy had already been undermined and all that remained of this enduring style were the simple, clean lines of formalism. He cut his intellectual teeth on con­ ceptualism, a short­lived art movement with long­ranging impact on art’s raison d’être; and developed his visual muscle in the warren of ‘posts­’ that were coined during the 1980s to lessen history’s stranglehold on art’s discourses, institutions, and practices. Yet, by the time Gantman hit his stride as a visual artist he had already sev­ered many of the ties that tethered him to these varied movements. If, in 1913, Duchamp drew a line in modernism’s sandbox, then by the 1990s Martin Gantman had crossed that line to become a contemporary artist, a practitioner who disavows history and any long­standing art historical style with work that analyses the status of art and the state of the world as they both exist in the here and now.

In the opening pages of this raisonné, Gantman likens his process to that of the bricoleur’s, someone who brings a number of visual and textual components togeth­ er to create layered objects that defy any traditional style or medium. Where once these parts might have issued from a tube of paint or a piece of charcoal, the mélange of materials, objects, and words he brings together for his projects are more quotidi­an, chosen not only for their potential as readymades but for their capacity to be re­made— artistically, as well as socially and politically. In this way, a project might fea­ ture a baseball cap, chosen not only because it is a readily available cultural icon, but because it can evoke, with equal ease, a sports fan eating a hot dog at a sport stadium or a millennial wearing expensive perfume at a gallery opening. The hat might be adorned not with diamonds or a sports team moniker, but with an idiosyncratic, hand­painted visual icon that relates more to current consumer branding trends than Barthesian semiotics. Then, just as a unique color palette once did, this symbol might be used to grow a project’s oeuvre, not on traditional grounds like canvas or paper but on more popular (and populist) “corporate give­aways” that quietly but precisely expose how certain cultural (corporate) traditions indiscriminately conflate aesthet­ics, consumerism, and human desire. In a similar way, the desktop computer has be­ come an increasingly indispensible research and production tool within the artist’s oft­times recombinant work, as it does not provide its user any clear distinction be­ tween the artist and his viewer, between high art and kitsch, nor between intellectual and low­brow culture. This is exactly the point: the bricoleur utilizes not only what is at hand but only what is at hand. And what’s at hand for today’s contemporary artist is that which is available to anyone with a computer– a world whose objects are less likely to be fabricated in a step­by­step factory assembly line, or stored in an easy to locate museum basement, or catalogued in the neat and ordered drawers of an ar­ chive, but one that is experienced in bits and pieces; a world powered by a plug and a plug­in.

As a contemporary artist, Gantman has given up modernism’s avant garde temporali­ty that positioned time and space in a future that was always looking over its shoul­ der. He operates, instead, in the passing present, which, paradoxically, means he cre­ates not “in time” but “out of time,” and beyond history where any possibility of ‘place’ is made vis­à­vis dislocation. The Internet has, of course, greatly contributed to the leveling of time and place in contemporary art. On the computer, art and soci­ety use the same means; they can be identical in formal terms; and they often travel similar distribution circuits. By understanding the computer’s ability to ‘flatten’ the cultural, social and political consequences of its own ‘visual currency’, artists like Gantman have been able to combat this type of reductive leveling through creative acts of complexity; to upset the numbness of internet trolling with sensation and ges­ture; and to resist a search engine’s trend towards standardization with instances of critical thought that depend on the internet’s periphery. Gantman uses the endless archive that is the internet not as a collection of antiquities to be discovered and dis­ played, but as a constantly growing cultural landfill whose content and materials can be continually tunneled through and mined for his many projects. In his hands, the computer is not just a passive dumping ground for data and information but an active place of experimentation and revolt for thoughts and ideas.

As strong as these contemporary art tendencies are in Gantman’s work, the artist has not been able to float totally free from his artistic roots. Vestiges of formative tradi­tions can be seen in many of the artist’s mature projects although they appear more as apparitions, ghosts that have been around so long we have forgotten why they ever came to haunt us. For instance, Gantman’s recurring use of strong framing devices harkens back to his formal roots. But whereas thick black lines were often used in modernism and in the artist’s earlier work to visually count off the (almost) identical parts or aspects of a stand­alone edition or as a way to announce the style’s rampant colonization of allied creative fields such as advertising and graphic design, in Gant­ man’s hands, especially in the last two decades, seeming frames are not meant to hold ‘one­offs’ that are to be guarded from (cultural) infection—as Clement Green­ berg might have wished it— but are in actuality tromp l’oeil hideaways for coded in­ vitations written by the artists’ fingers rather than by a fine ink brush. There, hidden in plain site/sight, in a language we all inadvertently write but often don’t read, the artist re­presents the most unrelenting of observing machines as an object that can be (and maybe always should be) unrelentingly observed. Gantman’s frame­like struc­tures are, in actuality, technological tire marks for iterations of an artist proposition that can be realized with a seemingly endless number of different sets of elements. As the digital equivalent of a door cracked open, each frame allows us a peek into the artist’s studio and his process. Taken as a whole, they immerse the viewer in the artist’s unique style of mediated interactivity.

Likewise, we are reminded of postmodernism’s love of historical pastiche and word­ play more than once in the artist’s work, but these links to earlier traditions appear more as shiny lures, invitations that are quickly rescinded. These are not style­ or medium­specific objects from a past historical period but a kind of material jamais vu the artist incorporates into so many of his objects. In a chronological history these traces might be read as proof of Gantman’s frequent prescience about social and po­litical events that have not yet but are about to occur, but they also act as guidelines to revelations proffered by his other works, past and future projects that are never ‘in order’ but are always shifting their position in time and in the artist’s oeuvre. Just as Gantman has chosen to do in this series of books, a person wishing to find moments of confluence in the artist’s body of work will quickly abandon chronology for a more rhizomatic ordering. This seemingly haphazard re­positioning is actually more faith­ ful to the way our own ideas spontaneously form: bits move forward and then slide back, providing strange conjectures about possible destinations before they settle into more productive pathways. This idea­forming activity undoubtedly contributes to the eerie sense of déjà vu that accompanies any quick look through these books’ images. Artists like Piero Manzoni (Nocturnale), Douglas Huebler (Tracking Identity), Matthew Barney (Four Marks), Bas Jan Ader (Male Call), the Lettriste Group (Words), and even Andy Warhol (4 of Twenty Jackies), slip in and out of our visual impressions, providing the not too wayward idea that this is a catalog of lesser­ known works by some of the 20th century’s most innovative artists; the art historical equivalent of a B­side, less heard by popular culture but more studied and cherished by fellow artists. Once you take in the catalogue’s words and they begin to spider through the images, you quickly surmise that this is not a Side B textbook, nor even a scholarly catalogue raissoné. The books before you will more often evoke the field­ workers’ notebook, whose utility is best measured by its ability to provide a new blank page onto which the artist can write down or gather the next urgent idea. Gantman’s creative process and his recounting of its varied history, is most akin to the investigatory traditions of the crime scene. The artist is both detective looking for almost imperceptible changes in the mundane and ordinary and the forensics specialist whose work is centered on the unseen and mysterious. Under these dual guises, scene and seen collapse as the artist builds meaning that accrues in subtle de­tail. Through this process, Gantman “explores all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and space,” as Nicolaus Bourriaud describes this activi­ty in his definition of, not the detective, but the contemporary artist.

It is Gantman’s unwavering and self­confident questioning, including a line of inquiry that is always self­reflexive, that most aligns him with the one formative tradition whose tie he has loosened and tightened over the years but has never severed. Per­ haps not surprisingly, conceptualism’s influence was able to survive Gantman’s turn to the contemporary since it was never an entrenched style but more a habit of inter­ rogation. His allegiance to many of its most basic tenets is found in almost all his works: the use of documentation, word play, everyday objects, and acts of appropria­ tion, all of which are used to transmit an idea instead of any aesthetic tradition. At the same time, Gantman reminds us that the dematerialization of the object did not lead to the dematerialization of the artist, especially in the west­coast, Baldessarian­ tinged interpretation of conceptualism he most favors: ‘artist as impresario’. Gantman embraces this stance in playful projects that utilize the artist as the art object’s main material, in projects driven by an endless number of solutions such as enumerating ‘all the things I want,’ or in seemingly impossible tasks like representing all the peo­ple in the world (or even a large metropolitan city). These latter projects are set up not only to flex the artist’s nominative muscle—to use the project to extend the field of what constitutes art—but to hint that the question that fuels contemporary art’s conceptual inheritance may no longer be the most relevant one. When Gantman at­ tempts to fulfill a mandate like capturing the visage of all the people on the planet, a task that has been attempted before in art (Huebler, “Variable Piece” 1970) and in sci­ ence (Galton and Bertillion), he does not obfuscate but spotlights how this account­ ing can be accomplished today with the touch of a finger on a NSA keyboard. In so doing, we can’t help but ponder if Duchamp’s dream has become our day­to­day nightmare. We might ask then, not ‘Is this art?’ but ‘Why art?’ – why is our ‘passing present’ the most important time for an artist to attempt a Herculean task where de­ sire is rooted in the very idea of its failure?

From ‘What is art?’ to ‘Why art?’ is not intended as a coy twist on conceptualism’s most enduring sound bite; the role of the artist has undoubtedly changed as we march into the 21st century, adding administrator, courier, translator, storyteller and computer programmer to any typical contemporary artist’s job description. Curating, especially, has come to dominate as the primary creative act of the contemporary artist, including Martin Gantman. Yet, just because artists are now expected to don a multitude of hats, many of which are also worn by practitioners in other fields, it does not mean their role in society has diminished. In fact, these varied jobs required of contemporary artists might best poise them to make us think of, for instance, not only how the computer has leveled the world to digital pixels but conversely, how the digital is modulated through different (non­computer) materialities, especially social and institutional formations that are opaque and incomprehensible to most of us. As Terry Smith, an art historian and theorist of contemporary art, has warned “a differ­ent politics, a different ethics, a different imagery is needed to deal with contempo­raneity.” These are not separate pleas to be realized in different traditions but a single clarion call for a new image that is political, ethical and aesthetic, all at the same time. Art and politics are no longer (if indeed they ever were) two separately consti­tuted fields between which a certain work of art might be able to act as bridge. As the political theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it so succinctly, “there is an aesthetic di­mension in the political and there is a political dimension in art. Because of this, art is well positioned to make visible what the dominant consensus obscures and oblit­ erates.” Contemporary art just might be the last refuge of political and intellectual radicalism. It still has the potential to function as a critical self­consciousness for is­ sues of power, domination, myth, and exploitation as they are constituted by the technological normative regime. Through projects that provoke and nudge, instead of lecturing and admonishing us, Gantman challenges us to become engaged viewers and at times, even active subjects in a kind of physical or symbolic participation that empowers us to determine our own social and political reality.

Why art? It may be that by now we have all drunk the Kool­Aid, but maybe that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Through a body of work that has ranged over four decades, through projects that challenge us to look outside the insular worlds of both art and ourselves, Gantman, forcibly and unrelentingly, reminds us: whether it’s poison­laced sugar water, a venomous tweet from an errant leader, or the endless number of assaults to body and mind that happen in between, just because we drink something, it doesn’t mean we have to swallow it.

Lise Patt

Los Angeles, 2017

Sources

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002.

Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1998.

Medina, Cuauhtémoc. “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses,” e­flux journal #12, Jan. 2010.

Mouffe, Chantal. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Vol. 1, no. 2, summer 2007.

Smith, Terry. “ The State of Art History, Contemporary Art,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 92, Issue 4, 2010.

Acknowledgements

When I began this project, even further back, when it first occurred to me, I had little comprehension about what would be required; and when I say “what” I mean any­ thing and everything that goes into the process of accomplishing a book. Thank goodness there are people one can count on during times like this who are willing to offer their time and expertise in helping to navigate such an unfamiliar course.

First, I do not have enough words to thank Lise Patt who wrote the foreword to this project; but also, during the course of many meetings and discussions, shared her knowledge, advice, and particularly her encouragement. Brian Lewis, who when I confessed that I didn’t know how to write, said, “You are a writer.” Suzanne Mantell did an amazing job of copy editing; maintaining, while at the same time enhancing, my awkward prose style, and Andrea Reider, book editor, who displayed immense pa­tience in responding to my never ending, and sometimes infinitesimal, design changes. I also want to thank my daughters, Debora and Jennifer, for continuing to be themselves; else how would I know who I am.

And most important my wife and partner, Abbe Land, who during the course of the last twenty­five years has unhesitatingly supported, encouraged, and embellished this bizarre, yet extraordinary, life direction that I have chosen.

INTRODUCTION

At heart I consider myself a bricolagist, an artist who gathers pictures and words from all kinds of sources and puts them together in some new way. Whether grabbing images or words from the Internet, or borrowing parts of texts, elements of an installation, or even someone else’s ideas, I arrange my selected sources and put them together as if pasting swatches of paper or cloth, one partially on top of the other, sometimes obscuring but never completely hiding the original elements, in order to come to a final unity that I always hope says something, or coalesces to make meaningful sense.

I try to work all over or around whatever represents the canvas in a particular project, and when I say canvas, I really mean the “notion” of the project. The notion is different from the “concept,” because the concept is simply the beginning, the conscious idea around which the “project” is formulated, or the “intention” (the desired effect or result) that I hope the project will achieve. Notion is the overall sense, a “trace,” related to but slightly different from Jacques Derrida’s use of the word. Derrida’s trace speaks, loosely, to an acknowledgement of the absence of a presence, but the notion I speak of refers to the necessity to acknowledge and fulfill an imperceptible presence before a work can be completely realized. It is the intangible possibility that is available to the project, or the potential that resides inherently within the concept. Whereas the concept is an initial idea, the notion becomes the project’s incipient – but continuing and malleable – opportunity. The notion is fulfilled by the artist’s desire as he or she develops the initial concept into meaningful information, and it emerges as the layers of art material, including the artist’s choices, are applied, just as layers of paint emerge from within a painting to fuse into a luminous and articulate expression. Yes, layers are what are most important to me in the production of art; layers of thinking, layers of choices, layers of meaning. The only other constant is that it is always about me, or you, the viewer, or both of us within the swirl of some unacknowledged, unperceived, SufI-like dance.

I try to work all over or around whatever represents the canvas in a particular project, and when I say canvas, I really mean the “notion” of the project. The notion is different from the “concept,” because the concept is simply the beginning, the con­scious idea around which the “project” is formulated, or the “intention” (the desired effect or result) that I hope the project will achieve. Notion is the overall sense, a “trace,” related to but slightly different from Jacques Derrida’s use of the word. Derri­ da’s trace speaks, loosely, to an acknowledgement of the absence of a presence, but the notion I speak of refers to the necessity to acknowledge and fulfill an impercepti­ble presence before a work can be completely realized. It is the intangible possibility that is available to the project, or the potential that resides inherently within the con­cept.

Whereas the concept is an initial idea, the notion becomes the project’s incipient – but continuing and malleable – opportunity. The notion is fulfilled by the artist’s de­sire as he or she develops the initial concept into meaningful information, and it emerges as the layers of art material, including the artist’s choices, are applied, just as layers of paint emerge from within a painting to fuse into a luminous and articulate expression.

Yes, layers are what are most important to me in the production of art; layers of thinking, layers of choices, layers of meaning. The only other constant is that it is al­ways about me, or you, the viewer, or both of us within the swirl of some unacknowl­edged, unperceived, Sufi­-like dance.

I have tried to create my own sense of what art is, rejecting the influence of those who I thought try to limit the boundaries of art within some artificially constructed preconception. And I have striven to be open to those whose work I have at first been reluctant to accept. In fact, I long ago devised a test for myself. If I ever felt an immediate dislike of, or negative reaction to, a work that I was viewing, I would stick with that feeling until I resolved it into a response that I thought was justified, or un­til I perceived the block that may have been preventing me from appreciating a new thing. With work that I respond to positively, it is always interesting to analyze why that is so. It might just be a case of it speaking to my choir, but more likely such work might show me how to better articulate ideas that I have had difficulty illustrating.

Select Your Edition

Box Set Signed Limited Edition– Inquire availability here.
Paperback Edition – $79 (Click for sale price) Amazon or Barnes & Noble
Ebook Edition – $12.99 (Click for sale price) Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook

Paperback: 340 pages
Publisher: Martin Gantman Studio in association with the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) and ICI Press (January 16, 2018)
Language: English
Signed Limited Edition: ISBN 978-0-9759857-1-7
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-0-9759857-3-1
Ebook Edition: ISBN 978-0-9759857-4-8
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches