The Brooklyn Rail

I once joked with Henry Martin (1942–2022) that while I loved his 1985 book Why Duchamp, it didn’t answer the question. Now in his “Selected Writings, Conversations, and Correspondences” titled An Active Ear, the query feels re-addressed and his intimate writings about the first generation of Duchampians brings both question and its answer closer.

Martin, navigator of paradox, published widely in his lifetime but was less well-known than he might have been—by design. A sweet modesty kept the lid on widespread awareness of his genius. In his introduction, the book’s editor Emanuele Guidi tells us that when first reading Martin’s papers, then in Berlin, it became clear the critic, author, translator, curator, and occasional performer had been archiving and organizing his life’s work with a sense of urgency, presumably wanting it read and researched by future generations.

Martin wrote at a time when Duchampian ideas about the choices of artists and the meanings of objects and art process transformed norms internationally, pushing conversations between himself as a writer, and artists as subject and audience center stage. No one was in a better position to articulate the new normal than Martin, who had copyedited Marcel Duchamp’s catalogue raisonné for Arturo Schwarz in 1969. Of the Frenchman he said, “He was the herald of total expressive freedom, linking art not necessarily to everyday life, but to whatever an artist is willing to declare as the essence of a personal life of the mind and spirit.”

Many avant-gardists of this period became Martin’s life-long friends. Guidi describes Martin’s writings manifesting “private and public dialogues,” “collaborations,” and “co-authorship” of both articles and many books. In this first publication dedicated to Martin, Guidi compiles texts from Martin’s personal archives, permanently conserved by collector Egidio Marzona’s Dresden Archive of the Avant-Gardes. The five hundred-page book contains 102 short articles, many previously unpublished in the international art press, parsed into sixty sections, each named for one of Martin’s artist-friends revealing the breadth of Martin’s productivity from 1965–2020.

In his twenty-three-page preface, Guidi explains how a “curator-critic as listener, translator and interlocutor” could “trace an alternative trajectory in the history of art criticism and curatorial practice” through friends and contemporaries, the very generation of artists that grabbed Duchamp’s baton. Among the longest selections are a meandering and enlightening Ray Johnson interview, profiles of Fluxcollector Francesco Conz, and an exploration of Man Ray, including excerpts from their correspondence.

“The Beauty of Indifference,” the first of four takes on Duchamp, begins this tome in an homage to the mid-1950s when a thirteen-year-old Martin frequented the Duchamp rooms within the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum, long before he began writing about the artist in 1965.

Martin later studied Chaucer under William S. Wilson at Bowdoin College in Maine, who introduced him, at age nineteen, to Johnson, who became a nexus for all future artistic relations. Johnson introduced him to Fluxus artists George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Geoffrey Hendricks, and later, George Brecht.

All who knew Martin were deeply shocked by news that he had suffered a stroke at his home in Aicha di Fiè, the small mountain village in Italy where he lived for fifty plus years with his wife, artist Berty Skuber, on January 6, 2021, ironically a day on which he also watched the American Capitol assault. The sturdy but gentle expatriate, born to an intellectually active Black middle-class family in Philly, left the US in 1965, visiting occasionally but never looking back. According to his son John-Daniel’s touching foreword, Martin was thought of as a “man of the mind and a man of language.”

In 1969, Floyd B. Barbour invited Martin to contribute to The Black Seventies, “an attempt to open a space for us in a new decade.” Henry replied with personal letters from Greece, reprinted then and now here as “Letters from Abroad,” providing a rare glance into Martin’s thoughts on race. Riffing on a Stokely Carmichael quote, Martin wrote, “The greatest power of the power structure is the power to define. And what they have been defining most of all is what it feels like to be alive. They had fooled Hemingway surely, and what I hope is that I will have the strength and energy to keep them from fooling me.” A page later he added, “But I don’t think I could stand it if blackness turned out to be just another style: another appearance of ease or dignity with just the same old shit beneath.”

In 1965, age twenty-three, Martin arrived in Italy and met Gianfranco Baruchello, a farmer and artist, beginning decades of collaboration. Their three books, Fragments of a Possible Apocalypse (1978), How to Imagine: A Narrative on Art and Agriculture (1983) and Why Duchamp: An Essay on Aesthetic Impact (1985) created sublime “untranslatable dialogue,” according to essayist and fellow translator Lisa Andreani. The “active ear” of this volume’s title is translator-critic Martin’s, contrasting Baruchello’s “active voice,” decoded and recoded, to create “a double voice,” as Martin did with every subject here.

Martin finally met Duchamp in 1966 at a Milan party in his honor organized by Schwarz. In 1972, Martin curated an important exhibit for his friend Ray Johnson at Schwarz’s gallery, Famous People’s Mother’s Potato Mashers. In their interview ten years later, Martin said to Johnson, referring to his collages, “It’s hard to make it clear that the density of the whole system of references is itself more than the various specific things referred to, and that individual references can lie at any number of different levels of importance.”