Today we’d like to introduce you to Martin Back.
Martin, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I am an artist working in video, performance, sound, object making and tool-making. My work has been exhibited, performed and auditioned in museums, galleries, traditional and non-traditional performance spaces and on radio internationally.
I received my Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of North Texas and received a Bachelor of Arts in Moving Image Arts from the College of Santa Fe. In Santa Fe, I had the blind and dumb luck to study with phenomenal artists, both in and out of academia. I was a student of Gene Youngblood, who is a pioneering voice in the history of media art, media studies and media and democracy. Gene is the author of ‘Expanded Cinema,’ which laid the groundwork for New Media Art and was the very first book to discuss Video Art as such. I was also very fortunate to serve as an assistant to Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were among the very first generation of pioneers in Video Art in the late 1960’s.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has not been a smooth road. Artists are not treated well by the current American socio-political climate. I think artists are viewed with suspicion as we operate in an activity where we are daily questioning our own assumptions about the world. I think this makes folks nervous.
In my younger life, I worked for many years in the service industry. I waited tables and tried to make art. This was almost impossible. Service industry jobs leave you exhausted and unable to summon the emotional bandwidth necessary for any kind of critical inquiry. I persisted and was able to show video, help organize art events, be a musician, both in experimental and more conventional contexts, and live a pretty creative life. The starving artist lifestyle is only for the young. I don’t know I did it. Despite being employed, there were many times, due to the high rent in the city I lived in prior to moving to the DFW area, where I was forced to choose between feeding myself or feeding my cat. I always chose to feed the cat.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
I teach in the College of Visual Arts and Design, but my artistic practice primarily (although not exclusively) deals with sound as its prima materia. I’m somewhat of an outlier in that regard. I did, however, study narrative, documentary and experimental/avant-garde film and video in college. It’s not a traditional education in visual art with regard to media such as painting or sculpture, but the grounding is there . I feel that the seemingly oppositional interests in visual and sonic media provide me with the requisite skills to be an effective educator. In my classes, I do my best to foster what the composer Kenneth Gaburo described as a ‘both/and’ situation rather than an ‘either/or’ paradigm. I’m not interested in narrow specialization defined by an arbitrary notion of canonical methods or materials.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I would have spent even more time in the rare books library at Louisiana State University, where I began my undergraduate studies in a haze of youthful confusion.
I have a glorious memory of reading a self-published chapbook (with white gloves on, of course!) by D.A. Levy, who is one of my favorite poets and who I believe to be criminally under-recognized.
Contact Info:
- Website: martinback.org
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