HUNTER, WARRIOR, SHAMAN
So it is with his newest work, Hunter, Warrior, Shaman. This piece actually consists of three pieces: two videos, Shaman and Hunter (which both employ the delightful monologuist Mark Roth), and a handmade book entitled Warrior. Taken as a whole, these three pieces seem to examine the dichotomy between nature and culture, suggesting that the standardizing norms of culture supplant nature’s spontaneity, creating the monomaniacal figures of the hunter and the warrior, who try to hunt down or suppress nature. The shaman, however, is a healing figure, making sense of human experience through the telling of stories, thereby revealing (human) nature through culture.
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Still, Martin’s main concern is not the visual image on the screen but rather the remembered image of the story, and the process by which memory retains that image. This idea is beautifully realized in the final section of the tape, in which both Martin and Roth recount stories of meeting a man in a New York coffee shop who constantly inserts an empty hypodermic needle into his arm in an attempt to circumvent his drug addiction. Each storyteller makes sense of the encounter in a different way. For Martin, the story is about trying to understand another person. His focus is always on the man with the needle. For Roth, the story is something of a footnote to a larger story he wants to tell about creating a map of New York based on the locations of coffeehouses. Each storyteller latches onto particular objects in the coffeehouse–the bagels, the waitress, the coffee–and uses them as points in the constellation that makes up his story, thereby creating meaning out of lived experience.
Warrior, like Shaman and Hunter, is ripe for further exploration and contemplation. Martin’s work draws no conclusions but points you in the direction of several possible conclusions, so that an evening of his work is thoroughly invigorating and refreshing.
