The ambiguities of Daniel Joseph Martinez’s blunt statements.

Daniel Joseph Martinez
"Not so much the imagery but the title of Daniel Joseph Martinez’s recent exhibition at the Roberts & Tilton gallery (newly renamed Roberts Projects) in Culver City, California, led me to wonder about that sense of identification between a male artist and his female subject that Flaubert and Williams are supposed to exemplify—although in the case of Martinez, the subject is not fictional but a historical personage. The exhibition was called “I am Ulrike Meinhof or (someone once told me time is a flat circle).” Leaving aside for a moment the show’s more obviously riddling subtitle, what could Martinez mean by his “Ulrike Meinhof, c’est moi”? It would be wise not to answer too quickly: Martinez has a history of hanging his work on blunt first-person statements that get more ambiguous the closer you look at them. One of them has kept me pondering for almost 25 years."