Tony Martin

Lived 1937-2021

Tony Martin has, since the 60's, created seminal new media works. As early as 1968, Howard Wise called his work "cybernetic" for the way he applied information processes. In his works "Well" and "Interaction Room," the electronic systems were the interface between the viewer and the event and process of the sculpture or installed environment. He created the electronic and optical configurations for these in his own studio, and when necessary, commissioned help from the new generation of engineers and scientists forging new ways and methods.
A painter from the outset, Martin has also devoted himself to using pure processes of light and simultaneous projected imagery in motion. The legendary visual compositions produced at the San Francisco Tape Music Center and Bill Graham's Fillmore West, stand as early testament to his love of "painting in time," and to his involvement with music from an early age. Exhibitions of his paintings at the Boreas and Batman Galleries coincided with the Fillmore light shows and Tape Music Center events. Martin has worked intensively with such composers as Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick and David Tudor. Prime works that championed viewer interaction began in 1962 with Martin's first multisensory environmental piece, "Theater For Walkers, Talkers, Touchers." This was a commission by the Anna Halprin Dance Company for the San Francisco Museum Of Art. In these and current works Martin distributes variable thematic content through switching systems and optics activated by the viewers, principles of resonance and feedback are applied through photo and proximity electronics. In Martin's collaboration with David Tudor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, all resonant information gathered from the dancers' movements, light events, and sound created a truly interdependent yet freely variable event. These concepts were dominant in his light system for the E.A.T. Pepsi Pavilion at Expo 70, Osaka, Japan, and also in his groundbreaking vector image work shown at P.S. 1. during 1980. In sculptural works such as The Well, a 40" copper cylinder, viewers experience and influence light imagery both inside and above the "light well." Such signature works point to Martin's career-long attention to the inner life of the individual within the complex dynamics of our interwoven lives. Their resonance can be found in paintings that steadily emphasize opportunities for viewers to "look into rather than at."
In 1993, Martin helped co-found The Painting Center, with the aim of providing exhibition space to both emerging and mature painters pursuing different formal directions. His exhibitions of painting and drawing reveal Martin's characteristic synthesis of emotionality and thoughtfulness: open, receptive space coherent with high tension. The forms, texture, and light and dark originate in seeing. Recent exhibitions of the past five years include shows at the New York Studio School, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and galleries in The Netherlands.