Remembering Tony Martin (1937-2021)
Erin Stout and Tony Martin during the exhibition Tony Martin: Choice and Chance, Emily Harvey Foundation, November 10th, 2019. Photograph by Scott Walden. Image description: Erin Stout holds a microphone to Tony Martin, addressing an audience.
In November 2019, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented a weekend-long exhibition on the work of artist Tony Martin (1937-2021) at the Emily Harvey Foundation, featuring video and photo documentation, posters, scores, sketches, and other ephemera. Martin, who passed away last month, was a pioneer of installation art, creating sound and light environments that directly implicated the viewer in their design. A painter and classical guitarist by training, Martin cultivated his unique multimedia practice while in San Francisco. During this time, he collaborated with artists such as Anna Halprin, Michael McClure, Ken Dewey, and the composers of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which he helped co-found, serving as its first visual director. Meanwhile, Martin was also developing techniques for light and liquid light projection to accompany such diverse musicians as Terry Riley, Jefferson Airplane, and the Muddy Waters.
Martin relocated to New York in the late ‘60s, joining New York University’s Intermedia Program and sharing studio space with Morton Subotnick and Len Lye. He was offered the opportunity to mount a solo show at the Howard Wise Gallery, providing Martin with the resources to produce a number of immersive, participatory installations works between 1968 and 1970. The Game Room (1968) divided the gallery into four colored quadrants and encouraged onlookers to choose where to stand, tripping photoelectric cells with particular visual and sonic consequences, its playful engagement of technology countering the ominous advances of the Cold War. Other “involvements,” utilizing viewer-active sensors (The Well) and inventive use of two-way mirrors (You, Me, We; Column; Door), soon followed.
On the second day of the exhibition, Martin sat down with art historian Erin Stout for a wide-ranging discussion on his life and work. EAI is proud to feature an excerpted transcript of their conversation alongside a BBC feature on his 1968 installation The Game Room and an excerpt of Circuitry, a collaboration between Pauline Oliveros and Tony Martin for 5 percussionists and lights. We are immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Martin, whose decades-long engagement with participatory electronics continues to be an inspiration. Throughout his career, Martin pursued a humanizing of technology, inviting visitors to participate and influence the activities of his installations and seeking to call "attention to the inner life of the individual within the complex dynamics of our interwoven lives”—an approach that has sustained resonance in an increasingly mediated world.
Tony Martin’s Game Room on BBC’s Tomorrow World
1968, 1:01 min, black and white, sound
Tony Martin and Pauline Oliveros, Circuitry for 5 percussionists and lights
From Wow & Flutter: The San Francisco Tape Music Center at EMPAC
Originally composed 1967 and performed in 2004, 5 min, color, sound
Erin Stout: You grew up on the East Coast in New Jersey, and you also took music classes on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.
Tony Martin: I started with a wonderful Russian classical guitarist named Alexander Bellow who used to brush up Segovia. I was only 12 years old—on the subway alone with my guitar. And he was just a wonderful guy, a catalyst for me—not only for classical music, but for just the whole region of the guitar as a very total instrument. Many years later, I was upstate in Delhi, New York playing on a guitar in a music shop and the guy at the shop said, “Who did you study with?” I said, “Alexander Bellow.” And he said, “I knew it.” And that was, you know, 50 years later. Because of the techniques he taught me. He was terrific. So that fed my sound thing for the next 10 years.
Erin Stout: You also studied music theory at the time with Barbara Britton.
Tony Martin: Barbara Britton was a pianist and related to some important progressive people in New Jersey. For some reason at that time a lot of the population around central New Jersey was very liberal and civil-rights-oriented. My parents would help out workers that would come through, and they both did murals for the WPA. So I grew up in an environment of art and cultural open-mindedness—a politically humanistic environment. I think that helped me later on to get interested in the kinds of things that could happen for viewers if they directly activated art.
The Game Room (1968) really was based on that idea of people sharing themselves and not their ego, not really their “selves,” but their whole person. I wanted to somehow make a piece where people could activate imagery together and associate with each other and learn about each other, connect with each other in meaningful ways.
Erin Stout: You made quite a journey from starting out creatively as a classical guitarist and then deciding that you were going to switch to painting.
Tony Martin: I wasn't entirely sure how my life was going to pan out. Those years from about 1957 to ’67—that decade was a formulating time where I became more and more visually oriented.
I started painting very rigorously going to the Art Institute in Chicago. And then I didn't want to stay there in Chicago and wanted to move on. For some reason, I just had a feeling that there would be a kind of expansion for me and also a personal centering, you might say, if I went to a new place. If I didn't go back to New York City where I grew up basically, but to a totally new place.
So I basically started painting in a huge loft in San Francisco and it was terrific. It was 10,000 square feet with redwood planks, and it was a great place to really get involved with my painting. I had a show at the Batman Gallery there. Bruce Conner showed there and Bob Brandman, and other people. Joan Brown and Manuel Neri also showed there. The environment was very rich. Jim Weeks and the Parks School—they were figural. It's interesting to think about that now because the six to ten people that were the most important painters were very figural.
Tony Martin at his studio on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Image description: a double-exposed photograph of Martin at his loft, showing both the artist from the front, and his back.
I was painting abstract paintings. The first one was called Shostakovich's Room and it looks somewhat like an abstract expressionist painting. But I moved in the sixties more and more toward figural painting and my work with light became more abstract. So it was almost like a cross-fertilization, I would say, because the Shostakovitch paintings led to the first images I made for Ramon Sender's Desert Ambulance, which is a wonderful piece of music for acoustic instrumentation and an organ that was made with tapes.
Erin Stout: The Chamberlin Music Master!
Tony Martin: The Chamberlin was the biggest instrument in the thing, except for Pauline Oliveros, who wore her accordion. So I projected on Pauline and the accordion as a shape, and I made it an aperture for the film projector in the shape of Pauline with the accordion. I put that in the gate of the film projector and then I could slowly expand imagery that started out with that film on her. Over the 16 minutes of the piece, it expands from Pauline and her accordion outwardly, and then finally fills the entire wall with a very kind of ecstatic abstract configuration. That was a combination of three projectors and two slide projectors cross-faded very slowly. I loved cross-fading slide projectors using a Variax with a big dial, so I could dial the light levels very slowly.
Laurie Spiegel was a composer from that time who worked at Bell Labs and knew electronic instrumentation as it was developing from tape to oscillators and such. And she said, “Well, I want to automate some of my music so that leaves me free to explore what cannot be automated.” And that was a very interesting statement to me because it wasn't about how Bell Labs was giving her devices to combine sound. It was about her strong interest in the more analog human, intuitive, heartfelt stuff. I liked that statement because it really sums up what has been so important for me for the last 50 years—being able to express feelings that are deep and have a broad reference to art, including any kind of primitive art from 20,000 years ago. I like to say that the heyday of multimedia was 20,000 years ago, making sound and painting bodies and dancing and painting walls. And you know there’s sound clothing that you can play that comes from 10,000 years ago—so there's real multimedia right there.
Erin Stout: Your work has been discussed primarily in texts on music. David Bernstein's 2008 anthology The San Francisco Tape Music Center probably presents the most cohesive analysis of your work to date. But what’s interesting is it seems like the San Francisco Tape Music Center was really an audio-visual or multi-media project. Why do you think at this point in history an electronic music center was compelled to have a visual director?
Tony Martin: Ramon and Pauline and Morton were all fairly exposed to visual art and we got along together very well because we were really interested in some new art forms that you would not call either painting or virtuosic use of instruments. They were into any instrument that they could use, including concrète ideas and mixing tapes and things like that. And they always had a sense of theater.
Erin Stout: How did you determine that the sound needed the visual?
Tony Martin: Well, that was in a way determined by our personalities. Morton was so into his Buchla electronics and Ramon was so into acoustical instruments of exotic kinds, including very simple ones, like a kazoo or a concertina. I was the only one who was full-time, visually-oriented in my studio in the Embarcadero. I had all the visual facilities and they had all the sound facilities and then we would come together.
Erin Stout: The first time, if I’m not mistaken, that you all came together was at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for the Sonics series, which lasted from ’60 through ’62.
Tony Martin: We put together performances—I wouldn't call them concerts. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music would invite us in for an evening and we would just go over there with whatever we had and perform about an hour and a half of whatever we felt like doing.
Some of the stuff I brought to that was a combination of projectors that I built or modified. I always wanted to take a commercially-available piece of equipment and modify it for certain purposes that were more directly involved with my art and with other people's art. Right away, I would disconnect the wires and I would connect them in my way. I’d disconnect the fan and plug that in and then I would put the lamp on a rheostat, so I could make it darker and lighter. Or I would turn a carousel projector upside down and put different lenses on it. I also used an old Bell and Howell 16mm projector that I loved because it had a rheostat on it. You could dial it all the way down to one frame, every two seconds or something like that. So click, click, click. I would find film in garbage cans in San Francisco and try it out on this projector. And each frame was like a photograph, but intentionally, in the beginning, it was also a running motion film.
This was time-based visual thinking. It was all hands-on improvisatory—so you could say I was an improviser using visual instruments. I was a one-man visual band and it wasn’t easy because I had six projectors in front of me on a bench, and trying in real time to invent a piece, while the musicians were inventing their piece. Ramon would bring something as silly as a washing machine with rocks in it, but it was a sound event. He turned it on and off the way he wanted it to. So this was true concrète, as they say, and the kind of performances we did there were pretty wacky, but pretty interesting as well.
Erin Stout: And eventually you would get kicked out of the conservatory for the theatrics.
Tony Martin: That lead directly to being on Jones Street, and to another piece called City Scale. It was scoring up the North Beach section of San Francisco as a six-hour piece involving maybe a hundred people. I was the main visual input in the beginning, Ken Dewey was the main theater input, and Ramon Sender was the main sound and word input. And Anna Halprin and some of her dancers was also involved. Stu Dempster, the trombone player, was on one side of the Broadway tunnel and another musician was on the other side of the Broadway tunnel. And there we go! Here was a piece to hear these great spaces. I love spaces—short spaces, longs spaces, big open visual spaces, tight visual spaces. All of these compositional elements, I always feel are totally transferable to the visual and to sound, and to the sense of touch and smell. We did a smell opera!
Erin: Smell Opera with Found Tape, I believe it was called. Can you describe that piece?
Tony Martin: Well, Ramon put together tapes that he had found in a random way. But random, what is random? I like to say that that chaos is created from very organized stuff. In the natural world, there’s all of these amazingly beautiful structures—like how things grow and make cells and make patterns and replicate themselves and make fractals; the way each leaf on a tree is actually different from every other leaf, and yet they have the same spine and the same lengths that go off to the edge of the leaf. All of that sense of an organic distribution of all the senses was something I was involved with. That orientation towards natural phenomena really led to a sense of being an artist who was dealing with all of the senses at one time.
That was primary in my whole evolution to deal with sound, light, touch, and hearing in exploratory ways, like the difference between running and walking, or the difference in feeling sandpaper or glass. That’s interesting to me. I made a piece that relates to the time we’re talking about called the Theater for Walkers Talkers Touchers. That piece was a springboard that has lasted until now for me, in some ways, but especially a springboard for the shows at the Howard Wise Gallery. It was not electric. It was all physically made. It was flats in a spiral maze like the Spiral Jetty. In the center was a swing, and you could get on the swing, and it was strung with harp strings. So if you were heavy, it sounded high. And if you were light, it sounded low. So some child would get on the swing and it would go [low drone] and somebody heavy would sit down and go [reeee].
I connected that with a pantograph that moved things in the front of the maze. So the center people were connected with the outer ring of viewers. And for me, that was an interesting idea, to connect people just coming into the installation. We didn't use that word yet, but there, I was making an installation art piece in 1961. For me, this was connecting any amount of people who were in this piece as active ingredients of the art object. You weren't just a viewer. It’s a little difficult to say this, but you're a part of the art object, and that takes you out of your personal ego realm in a way, and makes you a piece of wood or a piece of glass or something that's painted red or blue. You’re just part of this thing. I was interested in that people gathered together getting less and less self-oriented, more and more interconnected as they experienced the piece.
Sketch for Theater for Walkers Talkers Touchers. Image description: a drawing of the architecture of Theater for Walkers Talkers Touchers, depicting the spiral and placement of the piece’s elements.
Erin Stout: It was essentially people touching it and interacting with it and destroying it in the process. This piece was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1962 alongside photographs of Anna Halprin's dance troupe when they performed The Five-Legged Stool. Can you say something about how Halprin inspired you or the work that you did with her in Marin County?
Tony Martin: That was an important input to my whole creative life. I was 30 years old and meeting people, and I met Anna Halprin through Jo Landor, who was part of the art community in San Francisco. She was a painter and said, “Oh, you have to meet Anna!” So she actually drove me out there the first time, I think, to Kent Woodlands in Marin County. And I started talking with Anna and with some of her dancers and realized they really needed to have a visual, physical person. Also, just like the Tape Center people, it’s almost like I felt they were missing a missing link. So I started to go over to the dance workshop in Marin County and helped make environments that the dancers could make use of.
I would hang ropes from trees, make a tree house, or make textural changing environments for them to cross. The dancers were very in tune with that because Anna’s sensibilities were just like mine in wanting to have a poly-sensory stage to explore.
And these were pieces of exploration. Partly The Five-Legged Stool was a little more structured, but another piece of called Esposizione was more like an adventure. One day, I brought to the Dancer’s Workshop a cargo net in my old GMC van. It was big—maybe 30 feet by 30 feet. I rigged it up over a branch of a tree and Anna had her dancers climb up one side of it and down the other. Finally, they added rags and clothing and such to carry over this cargo net. Then they took their clothes off, so they were all nude going over this cargo net dragging cloth. And that became this piece called Esposizione and it created havoc in Europe. There was a riot in Rome and they had to stop. People couldn't take it—that these people were nude, pulling their bodies? over this cargo net. Confused the hell out of the Romans. Really challenging the whole history of European art. But a lot of other people loved it.
Erin Stout: It seems like in a lot of these pieces, they were meant to be provocative, to stir up the audience in some way. Would you say that's also the case in the San Francisco Tape Music Center works that you were doing?
Tony Martin: Our intention was not to provoke people or alarm them or challenge them. Our artistic intention was to involve people and bring them in to a new form of sound and enlightened experience that they would resonate with and love and enjoy. We were always a little bit surprised when people did respond negatively or worried about what it was. A good example of that spectrum is a piece of mine called You, Me, We, which joins two people on either side of a two-way mirror, but very accurately and with colored light playing on both faces. So it’s not like Dan Graham's more informal slabs of glass with people’s images combined. Mine was very specific. I wanted people’s heads to become merged with another person’s head and for that to change by their own actions—pressing buttons that illuminated them differently so you would have a changing, new human being that you could relate to. Now your half disappears, more and more, which is also part of the intention that you are joining up with humanity here, and I’m inviting you to do that. I'm not trying to provoke you in any way.
That was the case also with the pieces that we were making that may have been seen as provocative, like Anna’s piece was provocative to some people and an open door for other people. And I think that for me, a lot of the people who came to the Howard Wise Gallery, it was terrific because it was an open door for them and they could explore their own personalities and other people's personalities in a way that made them part of an art object—because I really feel it was an art object that did this. Part of the medium wasn’t paint, it was people. Not to be denigrating of what the human being is, but just to say that the human being can be a whole individual and really connect with another whole individual.
Now, the interesting thing to me right now is that we’ve come almost full-circle with technology that enabled us to begin these experiments and work with them and develop them and have them be what they wanted to be. And now when commerce has taken over, we have technology that is joining people in a totally different way. It’s joining the egos of people in the main. There was a sculptor from the late sixties, Chris Wilmarth, who said, “If it isn’t magic, it’s merchandise.” It’s a wonderful statement. And it relates to now, and then, because back then we were trying to make magic for people. As a matter of fact, when I did the first light shows at the Fillmore West with the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and Muddy Waters and the Blues Project, they used to call me Mr. Magic. “Here comes Mr. Magic," and the Hell's Angels would usher me in—some of the Hell's Angels were very nice people and some of them weren’t—but anyway they would make a little ring around me, Mr. Magic, to help me get upstairs. I’ve always loved that phrase because it relates to now where it’s almost all merchandise and it’s commerce and people become commerce, or at least they pay for it. It really bothers me when two people who might be very well-connected and maybe even loving each other in some amazing ways are sitting at a table and they don't talk at all to each other, but just look at their iPhone. That is very symbolic of a decline in humanity, in a big way.
Now it’s not always used that way. Some good artists have used the iPhone to good purposes, like Pauline Oliveros. She was probably the most humanistic composer from that time. In some way, she wasn’t so interested in building huge technological devices. She was more interested in people holding hands in a big circle and making a drone that varied because of each person. She used an iPhone in a piece and it didn’t have any of that negative commercial aspect. She was just using it as a device that did certain things that she wanted to do. That's fun. That's great. And you can do that. You can do that with almost anything that comes up in the technological world, I think.
Erin Stout, PhD, is the Curatorial and Research Associate at the Institute and Museum of California Art at the University of California, Irvine. Her research considers visual art and experimental music with a special focus on media technologies. Her dissertation, “You, Me, We: The Technosocial Work of Tony Martin and the Audiovisual Avant-Garde,” is the first comprehensive examination of Martin’s intermedia practice.
Further reading:
Tony Martin (1937-2021) at Artforum
The Variable Place of Tony Martin by Camilla Padgitt-Cole and Nicky Mao at BOMB
Tony Martin: The Variable Place, edited by Camilla Padgitt-Cole and Nicky Mao, Ab-Sens Press
The San Francisco Tape Music Center Was an Early Home to the Avant-Garde by Jordan Reyes at Bandcamp
The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, ed. by David Bernstein, University of California Press
Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and Other Art by Gregory Zinman, University of California Press
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.