Raffaele Martini Pandozy – Sculptor / Philosopher Art about Art
About the Artist
Website: martinipandozy-artaboutart.com
Email: rmpandozy@aol.com “ rmpandozy@libero.it
Martini Pandozy artist, philosopher, Master in sculpture and art history,(Univ. of Dallas, TX), and a scholar of art (PhD. D. in the philosophy of art education from New York University), since the late 1960™s has worked incessantly to advance the perception of art and produce a comprehensive theory of phenomenology and ontology of art. His work as an artist and as a philosopher throughout his life was influenced by German philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger and has been motivated by the belief that art can change the world and contribute to a better humanity. To this end, the production of art should move from the present metaphysical and esoteric realms to a ontology of art that embodies the essential values of human existence. For this reason he thinks of himself as the founder and the initiator of the true ontology and phenomenology of art in the world.
Martini Pandozy was born in Rome Italy in 1937, where he received his basic education. He lived in Rome until 1967 where he learned marble cutting and bronze casting in the old Begotten of Via dei Coronari. Pari pass u, he developed an insatiable interest in existential philosophy, which moved him to the natural progression of encompassing phenomenological thought. With such cognition in the mind in 1967 he left Italy and went to live in San Francisco CA where he worked as a sculptor, executing marble and bronze portraits for established California families, while taking courses in phenomenology and American Art at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1969, he moved to New York where he joined the group of the conceptualizes art workers. There he interacted with Joseph Kossuth and shared with him some philosophical concerns about art and language. Leo Castelli of West Broadway took an interest in his work. His white on white works were metaphysical representations of the lost meaning of art. As his phenomenological ideas matured, he began designing museum installations, which were linear inscriptions about art on white plaster he called Writing with Light. At the time he also met Joseph Buys and Klaus Stack with whom he exchanged ideas about establishing a free International University in New York. Although such project did not materialize, Martini Pandozy continued to pursue the ambitious idea of universalizing the perception of art in New York and in the world. He exhibited works and produced performances in the alternative spaces and galleries of Wooster Street and Pier 21 in Queens New York, but was waiting his chance to mount a major exhibition with prominent galleries, such as Leo Castelli, Ronald Fieldsman and John Weber, which never materialized for lack of sponsorship. Later his phenomenology of art moved toward more thematic projects proposing The new ontology a series of sculptures devoted to the exploration of conceptual application of existential ideas in art.
In 1971, disappointed with the art world, which he thought was not ready for his advanced work, Martini Pandozy moved to Dallas, TX with his wife, where he had three children and continued his philosophic studies side by side the making of several art projects. Â There in 1975 he mounted a major one-man exhibition on the phenomenology and ontology of art, which comprised three installations and a performance.
Among his large body of work, is his series of monumental sculptures, which earned him first prize in the 1978 Dallas City Hall Competition. This series is all in model forms, except the execution of the revolving Solar Magnet executed for the East field College of Dallas Campus. Throughout the 1970™s and until 2005, he maintained two studios, in Grand Ave., Dallas and in Lafayette St., New York City. Â In 1978 he developed a strong interest and deep feelings for basic materials such as the soils of the world. It was then that he began travelling and gathering all sorts of samples of soil (humus) from all parts of the world. He then began making art pieces emphasizing the depths and the natural colors of earth establishing tonic and ontological relationships. During the middle 1980’s he produced some political works with American and Italian soil, a series of flags and maps with soil taken from states and regions.
He was the founder of Art for the 1990’s and of the Dallas Contemporary Art Museum of Dallas, where he produced several exhibition of his work and designed children educational programs. His work is part of numerous private and public collections throughout Texas, among which is the MC Dermot collection, the University of Texas Collection, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Forth Worth Museum of Modern Art, the East field and Mountain View Colleges, and many more.
In 2003 he participated in the International competition of the Ground Zero Memorial with a large work which has been credited by some critics to be a landmark in synthetic architecture for its arduous and daring structures defying gravity and stress. Another major work is his design for The Museum of Tomorrow, which he designed between 1972 and 2008. Some compared it favorably against the F. Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum of New York with its large and continuous exhibition halls. It is a museum of great geometry and functionality with an internal spiral walkway that connects in one single breath twelve large exhibition galleries.
His current sculpture project at the 54the Biennial of Venice is called The Lost Language of Art which re-proposes in sculpture employing steel, marble and glass the ontological language which makes the true being of art and the artist. It is a continuation of the Painting of Stone€ realized in New York in 1985, where on each stone he inscribed a word as part of the art vocabulary which has been lost – and we know what the loss of language signifies, i.e., loss of meaning, of values, of our perceptual capacity, of our consciousness and of our anthropology.
During the last 35 years, he has been working consistently on his major life work, which is a book of 2,600 pages (tree volumes) which marks the needed transition to a phenomenology of art. The book is titled Of Archaeology A phenomenological Approach to the Authenticity of art. It is Martini Pandozy historic achievement. This Opus Magnum was written with the precise intention to change the perception of art. In order to achieve such ambitious goal, he had to obtain the most advanced philosophical and scientific knowledge and interpret art from every angle. To this end, besides philosophy, he had to delve into  psychology, microbiology, neural science and even genetic engineering.
Martin Heidegger was his teacher. He believes that Western philosophy ends with Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of being. For nine years Martini Pandozy studied Heidegger single master work Being and Time. He arrived at this conclusion after studying the forefathers of phenomenology, such as Kant, Hegel and Husserl. In Heidegger’s book he found the reason and the motivation to start writing Of Archaeology, namely, the Authenticity of being“ an indispensable quality for the edification of the new concepts of art and the artists of the future. Thus, his entire book aims at precisely this end. His research material comprises more than 350 books, a cross section of philosophy starting from the Re-Socratic and ending with the Postmodern thinkers. In other words, it took that much to prove that there is no mystery in art and that art can be defined as ontology, i.e., the art of the authentic human being.
For this reason, Pandozy believes that the meaning expressed in the word Telos presented at the Venice Biennial is as infinite as our human potential, and that art can indeed change the world, if endowed with the proper intellectual tools. Thus what he advocates is art for the sake of humanity, rather than art for the sake of itself.
The world, as a result of economic globalization, greed and ethical lawlessness has turned humans into beasts again behaving in a sort of Darwinism. What we need in this historic time is for artists to understand their place and function in the world and provide examples of ethical behavior. The author has come to the conclusion to write the 10 Article of the Ethical Constitution of Art as a text for a museum art installation project and to change the way art is done and perceived, since he believes that ART CAN CHANGE THE WORLD AND MAKE THIS A BETTER PLACE FOR HUMANITY.
For Further Information about the artist, please visit the website
www.martinipandozy-artaboutart.com
Raffael M. Pandozy, PhD.
(Revised on July 29, 2011)