Pier Marton

Biography

Addressing intensely private discourses through the public forum of video, Pier Marton investigates cultural blind spots and the representation of violence in mass media. His early work was based in performance, shaped by his participation in Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch’s 1978 Los Angeles presentation of his "Orgies Mysteries Theatre” and the writing of Antonin Artaud.

Marton’s image-processed works confront the passivity of media spectatorship using confessional, documentary strategies. SAY I'M A JEW (1985) features interviews with adult children of Holocaust survivors as they grapple with their family histories and internalized anti-semitism, culminating in an affirmation of their Jewish identity. The video premiered at the 1986 Berlin Film Festival, preceding Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary, Shoah. (are we and/or do we) LIKE MEN (1986) similarly exploits video’s subversive and transformative possibilities. Featuring a montage of interviews about male violence, power, and fear, his subjects increasingly become more vulnerable and unguarded, revealing through their own testimonies how “reasons for violent behavior begin to look like excuses.” In both of these works, Marton exposes contradictions between internalized identity and cultural conditioning.

Marton was born in Paris in 1950. He received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Illinois Arts Council. He has taught at UCLA; Occidental College, Los Angeles; the Minneapolis College of Art and Design; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other institutions. Marton's work is in the permanent collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the JVC Collection, Tokyo.

His work has been featured in exhibitions including Video and Language: Video and Language, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, which traveled to the University Art Museum, University of Iowa and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (1986–88). His work has also screened in exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including the Berlin Film Festival; Tokyo Video Biennale; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Venice Biennale; American Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; World Wide Video Festival, The Hague; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.