Writing Samples

Martine Gutierrez by Martine Gutierrez for Martine Gutierrez: Reading Indigenous Woman as a Contemporary Surrealist Manifesto

An essay on the 2018 independent publication Indigenous Woman by Martine Gutierrez. In scale and design, Indigenous Woman emulates publications such as Interview and W magazines, and includes editorials, beauty features, advertisements, a letter from the editor, and an artist interview. It is oversized and glossy, with stunning photography and masterful graphic design. But under its allure as a high-end fashion publication, Indigenous Woman is a subversive work of art whose publisher, editor, designer, stylist, photographer and model are all Gutierrez herself. Over Indigenous Woman’s 124 pages, the artist constructs a searing critique of binary gender roles, cultural appropriation, and consumerism. In her choice of the magazine format, photography as metaphor, and text as an instrument for social commentary, Gutierrez draws upon a number of devices from the Surrealist vocabulary and, indeed, I propose a reading of this magazine as a contemporary manifesto.

Sand Into Stone: Untitled (Early Egyptian) and the Personal Myths of Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly

I wrote an interpretative essay on Robert Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Early Egyptian) (1974), and demonstrated how the work’s fabrication, iconography, and narrative properties illustrate a decades-long, yet critically overlooked, creative dialogue between Rauschenberg and the artist Cy Twombly.