Chus Martinez

Essays on the question on how art--and contemporary art practices in particular--embodies an intelligence capable of serving the erasure of the culture/nature distinction. The Complex Answer: On Art as a Non-Binary Intelligence presents a series of entangled essays on the question on how art--and contemporary art practices in particular--embodies an intelligence capable of serving the erasure of the culture/nature distinction. The book is conceived in four parts and each not only introduces a slightly different writing on the subject matter, but also refers to concrete questions that affect the practice of art, the exercise of exhibiting, the duty of reflecting, and the institutional forms that define our present but may radically change in a near future. The book imagines art and contemporary art as an organ. An organ that produces an experience of inexpressible realities that are fundamental to understanding life and its processes. Stem cells exist, first, without a purpose and it is for the whole organism to decide if they will become part of an auditive nerve or the brain or the cornea of an eye. This adding to an organ is how Chus Mart nez understands the intelligence of art. Poets and artists have claimed to understand the language of birds and flowers. We speak now of multi-species communication without a trace of metaphoric language. The experience of nature has evolved inside artistic practice. One could claim that the very fact that we talk about artificial intelligence is a merit of the arts. To transfer traits of organic life to inorganic entities such as information systems is a bold move that took centuries to prepare. Art has been essential in getting our senses and our arguments ready to accept this reality. The same with animal language, the synchronized reactions of a rainforest, and the transformative way fish have been discovered as able to recognize their own image in a mirror. These are just jests on the part of the sciences, developments of technical knowledges.

The head of the Copyright and Intellectual Property Enforcement Squad wants his top agent sacked, or put behind a desk. Instead the body count keeps rising because The Bastardizer is 100% obsessed with dishing out street justice on behalf of the music industry. Rules, like bones, were made to be broken. The Bastardizer did not care who got in his way. If they pissed him off he wiped them out The Bastardizer had a feeling for violence. That was what compelled him to cripple, maim and murder all those who didn't worship at the altar of the Berne Convention of 1886 and the Paris Act of 1971. The thud of his fist on a copyright infringer's face did something for his soul. The thud of a boot in their groin did more Pumping copyright violators full of lead was even better... guilty or not he wanted them dead What no one could have foreseen was The Bastardizer's chance encounter (on an operating table of all places) with a geriatric pornographer. This caused the story to morph messily into forms of literary experimentation that put the music industry and the book world into a tailspin...This is the book that disappeared up its own arse and came back to tell the tale

A study of Emilia Azcárate's recent art work focused on her vital relationship with geometric abstractionism and her spiritual practices. These series of work adds on to the aesthetic and conceptual themes recurrent in the artist's work, and are linked to abstraction as a way to manifest her spirituality. The catalogue includes three bodies of work: the Practicables, Postcards and the Gohonzon series which incorporate processes, ideas and aesthetics related to her life and spiritual practice, Nichiren Buddhism. Text in English and Spanish.