Crafting pathos with Dani Marti
Touch: the portraiture of Dani Marti, a survey of eleven years’ work, opened at Newcastle Art Gallery (NAG) on 17 September 2011 and remained closed from 11 October for the remainder of its eight-week installation. Censorship had nothing to do with the shut-down, although Marti’s filmic oeuvre is arguably more controversial than photographer Bill Henson’s captivations. Newcastle’s infamous Laman Street fig trees were deemed by the city council to be a risk to public safety1, leaving the artist’s first public survey brooding in the dark, largely unseen and metaphorically untouched. For Marti, at least, his debut solo exhibition at Adelaide’s Greenaway Art Gallery served as a welcome distraction, and was closely followed by time in Glasgow, Scotland, and a residency in New York, culminating with two solo exhibitions recently shown in Sydney. 
Originally conceived by Marti and then NAG curator Lisa Slade, Touch embodied a paradox. As Marti stresses, the act of portraiture is always bound to fail, and it is a mission he constantly questions. His works are characterised through a struggle to mimic and document human intimacy. Knowing Marti’s work, and his portraits in particular, means to recognise two distinct practices. Intimate video vignettes of sexual and emotional encounters between Marti and men that he meets via virtual or actual social networks are realised alongside his highly crafted wall and floor weavings, which transcend minimalism’s ‘cool’. It is futile to resist Ann Finnegan’s ‘Baroque Minimalism’2 to describe the sensually redolent, industrial fibre works that manipulate a place so effectively within the field of contemporary art. Marti arrived in Sydney from Spain in 1988, a big year in Australia’s search for cultural identity and a period of deepening interest in the possibilities of ‘the other’. Multiculturalism was one of the spices whetting appetites for artistic variety, as Chris McAuliffe observed in 1990: Spain is frequently characterised as radically different from the rest of European culture. A variety of geographical, historical and psychological clichés are used to prove that Spain is exotic, oriental, mysterious. This kind of rhetoric defines the audiences as well as the object of their attention. Thus if Spain is anti-rational, we are rational; if Spain is sensual, we are restrained.3 In the context of Marti’s work, restraint offers a literal interpretation, with themes of bondage and restriction infusing the materials. Studying tapestry as a youth in his hometown Barcelona in the late 1970s was an instinctive response to Marti’s pubescent fascination with industrial macramé, and a kind of aesthetic awakening. Marti describes his wall-mounted works as ‘paintings’. These draw comparison with the late Mike Kelley’s More Love Hours than Can Ever be Repaid (1987), a work that trades on the 1970s feminist activation of textile-based practice as a high art form. It too is confidently presented on the wall as a painting. The surface of More Love Hours is a grotesque, swarming mass of hand-made soft toys and blankets. Kelley invites the viewer to consider both the contact barrier, which is the abject surface skin of the work made untouchable through the conventions of the gallery space, and the craft practice itself, which Kelley claims ‘loads the object with all this intense ritual energy’.4 Whether freestanding or wall-mounted, Marti’s densely woven surfaces present a mechanical precision which understates the artist’s ultimate absorption in the process of crafting. These are the ‘love hours’ that Kelley refers to in addressing the currency of making and giving– ‘the commodity is the emotion’, he states. Marti’s monumental triptych, George (2001), buzzes with ‘ritual energy’. Part of the Newcastle Art Gallery’s permanent collection, George portrays an architect friend of Marti’s from Sydney. Bound tight in golden yellow, the work emits a radiance that extends beyond its physical borders, giving the dark-walled space a chapel-like ambience. The challenging notion of emotional currency is most evident in Marti’s filmic portraits. Ritual also confers to the video work, which can span months and even years of editing, the channelled window eventually metamorphosed into the large-scale gallery screen. Marti transgresses the boundaries of the disembodied ‘virtual relationship’, meeting his subjects in the real world and recording the ensuing intimate contact, which is later replayed in the gallery space to an implicitly voyeuristic audience. Often these works appear to traverse barriers of physical isolation to provide a fleeting cure, which is then perpetuated through the filmic version of the event. Others appear to be potentially exploitative, such as David (2008), where Marti invasively hovers around a beggar on the street in Glasgow. Here, the subject maintains a solemn distance through his refusal to engage. At first glance, these exchanges raise ethical questions. How does the subject respond to this invasive penetration of private space? Is sexual intimacy simply being traded to create an artwork? Is Marti simply mining the personal experiences of others for a cavalier romp through sex, power and money? Are such considerations redundant in the 21st century online environment? In discussion Marti reveals the cathartic nature of the work, for both subject and artist. In his film Bacon’s Dog (2010), Marti collaborates with prominent art collector and curator Peter Fay, apparently leading Fay through his first homosexual encounter.5 What emerges is a confronting and mesmerising narrative of sexual intimacy. This work is a refined composition, built on the firm friendship between Marti and Fay, which is recorded in the frank, poetic email correspondence displayed within My Sad Captain (2010). In the Newcastle installation, Bacon’s Dog was accompanied by a large wall-piece, It’s all about Peter (2010). Here, a multitude of colourful plastic vessels, collected by Fay and gifted to Marti, are corrupted into a singular surface ofmsensuous melting, neutralising and transforming their emptiness. This ‘painting’ becomes a witty critique of the connoisseur, as well as the artist, in playfully referencing the collector’s collection, Julian Schnabel’s plate paintings, and Jackson Pollock’s aggressive abstractions. Marti’s scarlet beaded curtain, Looking for Felix (2000), acknowledges and closely resembles Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Golden) (1995). However, rather than crossing a metaphorical boundary between life and death, the viewer is here potentially lost, or snagged in the labyrinth. Both works refer to the heavy weight of AIDS-related illnesses and deaths, but also to the ephemeral ‘gift’ of life. Marti’s personal experience gives resonance to Vial Queen (2010), composed of the precious glass bottles that once contained his HIV medication. Their collection suggests a passage of time, each tiny vial becoming part of a twinkling chandelier. In breaking with the conventional grid Marti’s works take on a more evanescent quality, an approach also beautifully realised in Portrait of Joni Waka as a Fallen Angel Crying behind the Wall (2006-2011), a work set free from its earlier form on a rigid stretcher. If Touch in Newcastle was a look back, Marti’s 2011 exhibition at Greenaway Art Gallery, And that’s it, provided variations on similar themes. The exhibition title comes from dialogue in a video work made during a residency at Stills Gallery, Scotland’s Centre for Photography. Taking part in the Ethics of Encounter exhibition and associated public programs,3 Marti met his subject through Gay Men’s Health in Glasgow. Typical of many of the men in Marti’s films, the ravages of HIV, age and loneliness present faces and bodies that defy accepted notions of beauty and wellness. Across Greenaway Gallery’s three co-joined spaces, the exhibition faltered in a number of places, but made up for lost ground in the gravity of key works. Both video works suffered on a technical level. David St Vincent (2011) was shown on a small monitor with headsets adjacent to the gallery’s office, making it somewhat encumbered. And that’s it (2011) was compromised by too much ambient light and 
poor audio, exacerbated by William’s broad Glaswegian accent – not that there’s much of a plot, but dialogue is central in sequences where nothing much happens. The overt subjectivity of the works requires a quiet, dark enclosure to augment the empathy, longing, despair, or boredom which such works provoke. Oh William oh William (2011), the painting complement to And that’s it, lacked the formal, instinctive grace that characterises Marti’s best works. The white gloss, hard- edged aluminium made no concessions to the woven panel, bulging in an obese, distended form that felt altogether too literal. This response was in direct contrast to My Sad Captain (take 2) (2011), a floor piece that ambushed the (female) viewer with an overwhelming sensation of maternal instinct. Not much larger than a sleeping cat, the work was disarming in its simplicity: a pearl-encrusted, white, woven rope, both matrilineal and naval, the thickness of a man’s forearm, curls upon itself like a snake– or a scat. My Sad Captain begs to be plucked up and nursed yet is equally erotic – an engorged, double-headed libidinous phallus waiting to be aroused-. The work’s magnetism and vulnerability makes it perhaps a talisman of Marti’s guileless charm as much as a receptacle for longing The success of the gigantic codpiece Looking for Pablo (2006-11), beyond its obvious reference to Picasso’s virility, is in the penetrating depth of its woven surface which effects a fantastical, gothic form reminiscent of a bird’s nest. The work is as much an esoteric guardian as a physical shield, emblematic of Marti’s methodology where the process becomes its own sensual reward; the beautifully crafted objects acting as counterweights to the pathos and insularity of the video portraits. 1. Planted in the 1930s by returned soldiers, the Laman St fig trees created a colonnade between the gallery and the War Memorial. Despite widespread local community protest, including from the city’s Mayor, the trees were removed by early February 2012. 2. See Craig Judd, ‘Bacon’s Dog: Dani Marti’s portrait of Peter Fay’, Art & Australia, 2011, pp. 426-429. 3. The Ethics of Encounter comprised a series of exhibitions, residencies and exhibitions, hosted by Stills, Scotland’s Centre for Photography, November 2010 to March 2011. www.stills.org 4. Ann Finnegan, Variations in a Serious Black Dress, exhibition catalogue, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, ACT, February to March 2004. 5. Chris McAuliffe, Art & Text, No. 36, May 1990, p. 97; cited in Artlink, Vol. 11, no 1 & 2, Autumn/Winter 1991, p. 15. 6. Mike Kelley and John Miller, ‘Mike Kelley’, BOMB, No. 38 (Winter 1992), p. 28. Touch: the portraiture of Dani Marti was shown at Newcastle Art Gallery 17 September to 13 November 2011; And that’s it was shown at Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 16 November to 11 December 2011; Dani Marti’s Against Day was shown at Peloton Gallery, Sydney, 16 August to 9 September 2012; his most recent solo exhibition, Mariposa, showed at Breenspace, Sydney, 21 September to 20 October 2012; see review following. Dani Marti, the title of a 2012 monograph published by Hantje Cantz, Berlin, will be launched at the Australian Centre for Photography, November 2012. Download review by Una Rey & Faye Neilson Exhibition Links