Black Box

Decoding the Art Work of Martin Gantman

In her foreword to the book, Black Box: Decoding the Art Work of Martin Gantman, the noted art historian and artist, Dr. Lise Patt, writes the following:

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 conceptualism, a short-lived art movement with long-ranging 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 long-standing 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.

This book describes the theoretical bases, process, and development of the artist, Martin Gantman, through an almost 40-year span of art production. It details the evolution of his practice through 10 individual books, each based on a theoretical or practical interest that compelled him during his years of production.