Colleagues’ Endorsements

[Why gather these? Ego, no. At some point, I was still trying to find a teaching position… At this point, I am still trying to find some place that would be interested in my speaking about: “hmm… what is it that really bothers you?” I LET’S BE BOTHERED TOGETHER! That has to be the topic, but not in the context of therapy though, nor confrontation.]

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Deceased Colleagues include  JEAN BAUDRILLARD, JUDITH DONESON and HERVÉ NICANOR.

• • • EXCERPTS
• • • ELIE WIESEL – Nobel Peace Prize recipient
I am moved by what you are doing, I hope your video will reach many viewers. I hope it will bring them closer to a world they could never enter.
• • • SUSAN SONTAG – Leading Writer, Critic, Filmmaker and Political Activist
I will always remember our conversation. – in 2004
• • • Dr. SANDER GILMAN – Leading American Cultural and Literary Historian, Psychoanalyst and the Author and Editor of over eighty books
In the tradition of Abraham, the iconoclast… Pier Marton remains one of the most versatile and innovative visual artists dealing with things Jewish… an original, an artist for our age…
• • • ARIBERT MUNZNER – Artist, Professor Emeritus/Former Dean, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Pier Marton rakes the virtual screens and the tablets of our hypocrisies with the sharp claws of the avenging angel, piercing the complacent facade of the status quo to reveal the underlying agonies of our conflicting moralities.
• • • PETER FREDLAKE – Photographer, Former Director of Teacher Education and Special Programs at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (2005 – 2016)
Many of Pier Marton’s insights about how we must think critically about representations of the Holocaust, Jews, and antisemitism have made their way into the programming I have developed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. We need new voices to help us navigate…
••• RAPHIE ETGAR– Artistic Director & Curator of the Museum on the Seam (Socio-Political Contemporary Art Museum)
As always catching my eyes and touching my heart.
• • • GENE YOUNGBLOOD – Leading Media Theorist (author of the classic Expanded Cinema)
Pier is an accomplished and honored video artist who always pushes the boundaries of form and content in humanistic directions. Documentary and poetry are combined in his unique body of work. For him, art is not separate from the politics of life.
• • • Dr. JAMES E. YOUNG – Leading Scholar on the Memory of the Shoah
What of the Holocaust is being remembered in this literature and how? What kind of knowledge is being passed down? And how do we grasp the world today in light of such knowledge? These are the questions we find embedded in the works of a current generation of writers and artists born after, but indelibly shaped by, the Holocaust, artists like Art Spiegelman, Shimon Attie, Ellen Rothenberg, Vera Frenkel, and Pier Marton.
• • • Dr. MARGARET OLIN – Senior Research Scholar, Yale Divinity School, Yale University, also Department of the History of Art, Author of Forms of Representation, The Nation Without Art, Touching Photographs, co-editor of Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, Co-editor of the journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture.
Pier Marton is a highly articulate speaker whose poetic imagination embroiders lines of emotion into historical phenomena.  His artistic sensibility opens an original viewpoint on the Holocaust, its use and misuse in contemporary representations.  He is a tireless and creative wellspring of ideas.
• • • Dr. STEPHEN FEINSTEIN – Late Founder/Director of the U. of Minnesota/Minneapolis Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
If any of you need a different speaker on film, I’d recommend Pier Marton, Professor of Film. He gave a great lecture here showing issues connected with how films are made (from the director’s and producer’s perspective), manipulation of narrative and visual text, when Holocaust imagery becomes kitsch and pornographic, when Holocaust images work, when silence is better than what can be said. He shows short clips from many films (not longer than 3 minutes each) in his presentations and uses a lot of European films that many of us are unfamiliar with. One is the APPEL scene from the new film based on Imre Kertesz’s novel “Fateless/Fatelessness” opening soon in the US.
Marton has also made a significant second generation film called “Say I’m a Jew” that received strong reviews and played at the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum.
• • • Dr. MARITA STURKEN – NYU, Department Chair/Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
What sets Professor Marton apart from many contemporary practitioner/teachers of new media is the depth of his knowledge of technology and the range of his intellectual apparatus. He is both old and new school in ways that are compelling and unique.
Professor Marton has intellectual, moral and critical weight as an individual, and this sense of a thoughtfulness and profound engagement with the issues of our times is a key factor in his engagement as an artist, teacher, and intellectual force.
.• • • BILL VIOLA – Leading and Pioneer Video Artist
Even (thirty years ago) Pier stood out as a reflective, thoughtful presence in the field, someone who balanced intellectual rigor with unbridled creativity and curiosity. In both his professional pursuits and personal relationships he has always striven for an integrity and authenticity characterized by an inner strength, giving his work a unique sensibility that was rare in our field of media art.
He is wise about technological histories yet also very cutting edge in his technological expertise and his capacity to deploy new media as a pedagogical and methodological approach.
The broad view of art that Pier teaches emphasizes not only the use of technology but also the use of the mind, heart and soul as a foundation for art, and he firmly situates these within the human experience.
After a lifetime of artistic practice he has accumulated a significant body of work that brings his sensitive vision to an institution as a fine example for students. Pier Marton would be a valuable asset to any art or media faculty, and a gift to its students.
• • • Dr. DAVID E. JAMES – Professor Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Pier Marton uses video — never the opposite… consistently of the highest quality. He has persistently explored micro-political subjectivities with such a consummate command of his medium that, while being most sophisticated in terms of rhythm, structure, and sound-image relations, he is able to contain its effects within his own objectives.
Pier’s work is distinguished by his exploring very unusual– I would say symptomatically repressed– areas. His tapes manifest a probity that leads rather than follows fashion.
• • • JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER Two-time Academy Award nominee
Pier Marton, an American filmmaker who has written some of the most insightful and supportive pieces about “The Act of Killing.” He has worked extensively on the Holocaust, and is connected to the Holocaust Museum in St Louis. His cinematic universe includes Alvarez, Vertov, Rouch, Nurith Aviv, Marker, Varda, Solanas, Riggs, and Brakhage.  (Ed.: And Dusan Makaveyev!) – and in another private letter: “you are so erudite and wise!”
• • • SUZANNE LACY –  Leading artist, educator, social activist, and writer
True originality and creativity... a “hands-on” artist who constructs his own work from beginning to end.
From M.o.M.A. and the New Museum in New York to the Pompidou in Paris, he has exhibited nationally and internationally, taught as a visiting artist and lectured around the world. His professional record is lengthy and distinguished, featuring several awards and grants. He is a highly recognized and respected professional in his field.
His art has pioneered a revelatory and confessional art in the service of a unifying political goal. For all of its strength as a social statement, his work is non-doctrinaire. Instead, Marton focuses on complex reflections on the dilemmas of human existence, representations that are moving and personal. His goal is instruction through a one on one interaction in the service of defining human “good.”
• • • ROBERT CAHEN – Leading French and Pioneer Video-Artist
His “visceral” pedagogy makes him an essential and exceptional being. His teaching is a living art, permeated by generosity and tolerance. Most striking is his mixture of humanity and intelligence.
• • • DORIT CYPIS – Artist and mediator, Director, Foreign Exchanges, Los Angeles
Pier Marton, a masterful video-artist.
• • • SHALOM GOREWITZ – Pioneer Video Artist, Professor of Visual Arts and former Dean of the School of Contemporary Arts, Ramapo College
A brilliant thinker and passionate proponent of radical idealism. From his early work which I curated at The Kitchen to his most recent experiments in blending documentary and literature, he has been a provocative and inspiring voice of his generation.
• • • NIEL SIELING – Director of Big Screen Project, NY, previously with LinkTV, Alive From Off-Center...
An emotional and intellectual honesty that stands out from the current crop of video artists… an empowering, low-tech feel that is a vivid contrast to the recent spate of high-tech and comparatively lifeless works given high visibility via broadcast television outlets… genuinely innovative… (his) experimenting with the form of works with a strong content is a genuine public service.

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 FULLER STATEMENTS • • •

• • • I have known Pier since the early 1980s, and I have followed his career for a long period of time. He has moved from work in video aesthetics, to examinations of identity, ethnicity, gender, and history, to new media explorations and social media networks. He is deeply embedded in new media practices and digital media, in both his artwork, his construction of an intellectual practice, and his teaching.
What sets Professor Marton apart from many contemporary practitioner/teachers of new media is the depth of his knowledge of technology and the range of his intellectual apparatus. He is both old and new school in ways that are compelling and unique. He is wise about technological histories yet also very cutting edge in his technological expertise and his capacity to deploy new media as a pedagogical and methodological approach. He is thus able to convey to today’s students, who are very much in their contemporary moment, how media arrived at this point, and the particular media histories of artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century. Professor depth production courses across a range of media to theory-practices courses to film and media theory courses.
Professor Marton is very impressive in his interactions with students – prodding, challenging, articulate, all at once. I have met a number of his former students who have been deeply inspired by his influence. I believe that he is a remarkable teacher, whose artistic production and pedagogical philosophy is aligned in unique ways.
Dr. MARITA STURKEN – NYU, Department Chair/Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication. Her work focuses on the relationship of cultural memory to national identity and issues of visual culture. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (California, 1997), Thelma & Louise (British Film Institute, 2000), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, Oxford, 2001, Second Edition, 2009), and co-editor, with Douglas Thomas and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, of Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technology (Temple, 2004). Her most recent book is Tourists of History: Memory, Consumerism, and Kitsch in American Culture, Duke University Press, 2007

• • • I have known Pier Marton as a friend and colleague for over 30 years when we both found ourselves swept up in the burgeoning artistic practice of electronic sound and image making. Even at that early time Pier stood out as a reflective, thoughtful presence in the field, someone who balanced intellectual rigor with unbridled creativity and curiosity. In both his professional pursuits and personal relationships he has always striven for an integrity and authenticity characterized by an inner strength, giving his work a unique sensibility that was rare in our field of media art. He is widely read and has studied and traveled extensively presenting his work in many countries and benefiting from cultural exchanges.
The broad view of art that Pier teaches emphasizes not only the use of technology but also the use of the mind, heart and soul as a foundation for art, and he firmly situates these within the human experience. He states in his teaching guidelines that “To be alive is to move from the known to the unknown, and education is the process of facilitating that transition.”
This speaks to his clear understanding of the needs of young artists today, and how they require guidance in finding not only their medium and their voice, but must look for this within themselves.
It is clear from the long list of recommendations by his peers and grateful students that Pier has been a sensitive, dedicated and inspirational teacher. After a lifetime of artistic practice he has accumulated a significant body of work that brings his sensitive vision to an institution as a fine example for students. Pier Marton would be a valuable asset to any art or media faculty, and a gift to its students.
BILL VIOLA – Leading and Pioneer Video Artist, the recipient of many awards and of a great number of honorary doctorates (Otis College of Art and Design, Columbia College, Royal College of Art, University of Sunderland, California Institute of the Arts, Massachusetts College of Art, California College of Arts and Crafts, The Art Institute of Chicago, Syracuse University)

• • • In every age, the prophetic tradition is reborn by the forces of human events. In our time, Pier Marton rakes the virtual screens and the tablets of our hypocrisies with the sharp claws of the avenging angel, piercing the complacent facade of the status quo to reveal the underlying agonies of our conflicting moralities.
ARIBERT MUNZNER – Artist, Professor Emeritus/Former Dean, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design

• • • For almost forty years now, I have known Pier Marton as an artist, a teacher, and a human being whom I respect without qualification.
I have always been impressed by his wide cultural knowledge, the power and integrity of his commitment to his chosen medium, his creativity in the classroom, and the brilliance of his own art.
His work reflects his years’ experience in the medium: he uses video– never the opposite. At times, some of his work seems to simultaneously accommodate the conflicting demands of a resolute formal minimalism and a sense of his own body as it is mobilized in performance. I found it to be consistently of the highest quality. He has persistently explored micro-political subjectivities with such a consummate command of his medium that, while being most sophisticated in terms of rhythm, structure, and sound-image relations, he is able to contain its effects within his own objectives.
Pier’s work is distinguished by his exploring very unusual– I would say symptomatically repressed– areas. His tapes manifest a probity that leads rather than follows fashion. In addition he is warm, considerate, temperate, patient and supportive.
Dr. DAVID E. JAMES – Professor Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Author of Written Within and Without: A Study of Blake’s Milton (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977), Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1989), Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (London: Verso Books, 1996), and The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2006). Edited: To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton University Press, 1992), The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class (Minnesota University Press, 1996), Im Kwon-Taek: The Making Of a Korean National Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2002), The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in LA (Temple University Press, 2003), and Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (Temple University Press, 2006)

• • • I was a colleague of Marton’s at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and co-taught with him at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Later, in the 1990s, I hired him for a video workshop at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, when I was dean of that school. I have stayed in touch with him over the years and have a good sense of his teaching capacity.
Pier Marton is an inspired teacher. His approach is fresh, continually evolving, he reads extensively, and his inquisitive nature makes him well suited to curriculum development. I have been continuously impressed with the breadth of his readings and his attempt to integrate apparently disparate and wide-ranging concepts. This is the mark of true originality and creativity and an important aspect of teaching. He is well versed in media and art theory and its application to video and new media. But rather than adopt a singular line of reasoning he integrates broad concepts and works with students to develop critical thinking skills. For example, he teaches contemporary video theory, both as it relates to European and American contemporary history and inquiry, but adds to this orientation a political perspective in mass media research and critique. These might be common to fine arts and media technology educational environments. Yet he also reads extensively in the personal, revelatory, and autobiographical uses of the medium and brings this knowledge to his students, facilitating their inquiry into their own artistic intentions.
Within the medium itself he expresses continual curiosity. Through his knowledge of world music, the vast array of national cinemas and his solid grounding in the twentieth century avant-garde (art/film/theater/music) and its political movements, he brings to his teaching a spirited comprehensive view of what constitutes a living (world) culture.
While this might sound like Marton is a theorist, he is also a practical producer with the ability to impart in-the-field techniques necessary to produce, from beginning to end, a media work. Marton is a “hands-on” artist who constructs his own work from beginning to end. Inspired by neo-realist cinema and Third (World) Cinema, he has developed inexpensive strategies for producing quality works, although he understands and can teach sophisticated and expensive technology.
Pier Marton’s exhibition record speaks for itself. From M.o.M.A. and the New Museum in New York to the Pompidou in Paris, he has exhibited nationally and internationally, taught as a visiting artist and lectured around the world. His professional record is lengthy and distinguished, featuring several awards and grants. He is a highly recognized and respected professional in his field.
Pier Marton has had experience as chair at School of the Art Institute at Chicago, and earlier in his career he developed programs at UCLA and Occidental College. His classroom experience is supported by an administrative capacity that makes him desirable for the developing phase of new programs. As a faculty member, he is a collegial participant, committed to the good of the program.
SUZANNE LACY – Leading Artist, Educator, Social activist and Writer. Chair of MFA in Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design – 2010 CAA Recipient of Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement

• • •  Pier is an accomplished and honored video artist who always pushes the boundaries of form and content in humanistic directions. Documentary and poetry are combined in his unique body of work concerned with such critical issues as race, sexual identity and consciousness. For him, art is not separate from the politics of life.
GENE YOUNGBLOOD – Leading Media Theorist (author of the classic Expanded Cinema)

• • • Internationally renowned in the visual arts, Pier Marton excels in the art and daily practice of teaching. His “visceral” pedagogy makes him an essential and exceptional being. His teaching is a living art, permeated by generosity and tolerance. Most striking is his mixture of humanity and intelligence. We met more than thirty years ago and pursue a constant exchange of ideas and reflections.
ROBERT CAHEN – Leading French and Pioneer Video Artist (with a recent retrospective at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris)
Associate Professor, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Le Fresnoy, France, Vice-President of l’Association Vidéo Les Beaux Jours

• • •Pier Marton, a masterful video artist, is equally dedicated to his young students, recognizing that it is they who will take his teachings on ethics, aesthetics and personal responsibility into daily life and apply them to our collective longing for equity, accountability and open expression.
DORIT CYPIS – Artist and mediator, Director, Foreign Exchanges, Los Angeles

• • • I have carefully followed the career of Pier Marton, a brilliant thinker and passionate proponent of radical idealism. From his early work which I curated at The Kitchen to his most recent experiments in blending documentary and literature, he has been a provocative and inspiring voice of his generation.
SHALOM GOREWITZ – Pioneer Video Artist, Professor of Visual Arts and former Dean of the School of Contemporary Arts, Ramapo College. Guggenheim Fellow, N.E.A, Fulbright Foundation, and Arts America Grants Recipient

• • • (Pier Marton is) not content to churn out formulaic permutations of successful early pieces… unique approaches to the connection of form and content, Marton’s works  have an emotional and intellectual honesty that stands out from the current crop of video artists… an empowering, low-tech feel that is a vivid contrast to the recent spate of high-tech and comparatively lifeless works given high visibility via broadcast television outlets… genuinely innovative… (his) experimenting with the form of works with a strong content is a genuine public service.
NIEL SIELING –Director of Big Screen Project, NY, previously with LinkTV, Alive From Off-Center…

• • • In the tradition of Abraham, the iconoclast… Pier Marton remains one of the most versatile and innovative visual artists dealing with things Jewish.  If one of the great debates in the West ever since the 19th century (or even since the exile to Egypt!) is whether the Jews can produce art, Pier Marton is living proof that they can, not only produce art, but also that reflecting on being Jewish can be a fundamental aspect of the art they produce. Marton is innovative and self-reflexive: an original and an artist for our age in which being Jewish confronts the past and deals with the present age that is as much rooted in the debates about representation and the Shoah as in Zeek/Jewcy culture.
Dr. SANDER GILMAN – Leading American cultural and literary historian, psychoanalyst and the author and editor of over eighty books.