Artist Gabriel Martinez finds shimmering poetry in Houston’s debris
Gabriel Martinez can’t stop seeing shattered glass.
The debris left from car break-ins is a constant in Houston. “When I see this color out of the corner of my eye, I know. It’s kind of inescapable now; I can’t stop doing it,” he said.
For some time, he has been sweeping these finds into neat squares and leaving them where he finds them when he’s walking, riding or driving by — usually around Montrose and the Third Ward, where he lives. Not because he’s obsessivecompulsive but to disrupt the “rational use” of the cityscape with his subtle gestures.
Martinez practices what
academics call post-studio art, producing work that can be so stealthy it’s virtually invisible, even though it’s out there in plain sight, on the streets of Houston. He rarely has more to show for his interventions than photographs that he shares when he’s giving lectures.
It isn’t just about glass. He has also picked up trash and replaced it with blank white objects of the same shape and size; and placed official-looking signage in parks, renaming spaces for political radicals.
But this kind of work also poses problems. It’s like the proverbial tree falling in the woods: If no one sees it, what’s the point?
“My work is difficult in that sense,” Martinez acknowledged.
A bit against his instincts, the artist has corralled some of his ideas into his first solo museum show at the Blaffer Art Museum. The exhibition’s title — “Everything Turns Away Quite Leisurely” — is as deeply considered as all else in the deceptively spare display, echoing a line of W.H. Auden’s 1940 poem “The Fall of Icarus.” Auden’s poem was a riff on Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s 16th-century painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” depicting farmers on a cliff who are oblivious to the tragedy of the young man falling into the sea nearby.
Fittingly, Martinez’s show has poetic, even elegiac sensibilities.
To create the show’s big seduction — the shattered-glass installation called “The Long Poem of Walking” — he brought a lot of found glass home.
“This is barely a year’s worth,” Martinez said. “I was gone a bunch, then (Hurricane) Harvey happened, and there was a curfew. So this is maybe six months total. I could double this in no time at all.”
He designed a landscape of shimmering blocks that are laid out on the floor like an aerial view of a subdivision grid, implying things about the city as a place of disintegration, integration and sprawl.
Martinez composed each section of glass from a single incident that he strained and cleaned in jars of soapy water. The sections are lined up from smallest to largest (about the size of a windshield) because he wanted to use — and satirize — the aesthetic language of hard-edged, Latin American abstraction that’s so popular with collectors and museums.
Indeed, “The Long Poem of Walking” could easily hold its own alongside works by Latin American artists in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s current show “Home: So Different, So Appealing.”
“A lot of those artists are big influences on me. Most of them,” Martinez said. “These choices were not coincidental, and having a dialogue with that collector base.”
An amiable, down-toearth guy who grew up in Alamagordo, N.M, Martinez has been a prominent member of Houston’s art scene since 2011, when he arrived as a fellow in the Glassell School of Art’s Core Program. He teaches interdisciplinary art seminars at the University of Houston, plays bass and percussion with the experimental music group Nameless Sound and directs Alabama Song, a collective that often hosts talks and performances.
But the works of the Blaffer show represent his own conceptual projects, which have been ongoing for years. Post-studio art was having a moment when Martinez was earning his undergraduate degree in Washington, D.C., in the early 2000s. The Patriot Act, which heightened urban surveillance in 2001, also influenced his direction.
“My take on the city was transformed by that,” Martinez said. “I started looking for inspiration that wasn’t lofty, that was starting from my eye level or down. I knew if I spent the time, anything I landed on would satisfy all this art-historical, sociopolitical things.”
Non-object-based work still appeals to him because it’s cheap and quick to make.
One of his “Ghost Trash” installations sits at the top of the stairs at the Blaffer, looking like something the housekeeping staff missed.
Not so quickly, Martinez has also sewn a quiltlike, hanging textile from dozens of oil-stained mechanic’s rags; reduced highway signage into mirrorlike shields; painted a huge canvas with the pulverized powder of a single Pullman brick; and composed a grid of cartoon prints that retain only pertinent parts of their imagery.
None of these are random objects, and the more time a viewer spends with them, the more apparent their connections become. This all started with Martinez’s own movement through cities.
“The city is a good way to speak about globalism or borders,” he said. “It has these extensions. It’s something everyone relates to.”
The quilted piece is, somewhat literally, an “oil painting” — and a bit more intimately personal. Martinez worked ages ago at his stepfather’s gas station — almost all of the rags are from there — and his mother is a quilter.
“I’m just thinking about that history,” he said. “For me, one of the values of this piece is anyone can come in here, assume it’s abstract art and also engage with it as straightforward rags, with no abstraction. Also, I love these colors. Same with the glass.”
Martinez’s work often involves hard labor — he brutalized his hands pulverizing the brick and arranging the glass, for instance — but he prefers to leave the objects he finds in a somewhat raw state, so they’re open to interpretation.
“I’m not spelling something or making a portrait,” he said. “The viewer can see the material. The trauma of the car damage — it’s not like me painting a picture of someone breaking in, which would fail immediately. Instead, the reality of our city is just presented to us in a clean space. This is just chaotic street debris, but it has design applied to it.”
The shattered-glass arrangement hints at planned housing, but anyone could walk into the gallery and not see it that way.
“They look like jade or diamonds. There’s this allure that pulls you in, then you realize it’s not what you thought it was,” Martinez said. “The dark ones are from tinted gangster cars. There’s little bits of information in each one .... There’s something beautiful and poetic about having this screen that we experience Houston through, that we don’t see when it’s whole and we’re using it. It’s not even part of our lives. When it’s broken, we don’t look through it anymore. It’s now this thing to look at. That trauma — it repositions us and our bodies.”
His work is partly influenced by the “psycho-geographic” work of artists in the ’60s and ’70s, who would intentionally get lost in cities to evoke reactions to the changing sense of danger and security.
One wall of the show contains a list of the streets where Martinez found the broken glass — but the list is nearly invisible, made of shiny white vinyl on the white wall. Martinez loves seeing people dance around it.
“I want your body to very subtly be made aware to you when you’re in here,” he said.
If viewers leave the museum more aware of the poetry of the city around them, even better.
“Each time you go on the same, exact path, you experience the city differently,” he said.
Martinez has another show opening Tuesday at Houston Community College, featuring a film of Ham, the chimpanzee launched into space in 1961 by NASA, overlaid with a score by Damon Smith and Henry Kaizer.
He wouldn’t mind more indoor opportunities, but he expects he’ll continue his street work as well.
“When I’m showing or working in the street, it’s because I’m not going to wait for a commission to make work,” he said. “I have hundreds and hundreds of pieces.”