Everybody knows the old saw about imitation being the sincerest f0rm of flattery. ’Yet a host of earlier critics missed the mimetic boat during the appropriationist phase of p0stmodern art practice. In fact, borrowing became an official and original strategy. And nobody did it better than the Australians.
Of course, to cynical eyes a whole lot of antipodean appropriatonists looked like clever second hand shoppers. In their defense, a host of the “original” local smart set looked like nothing so much as piét-é-porter importers. All of which inspired a friend of mine to hazard in a magazine review that he suspected the winning artist of getting hold of the latest international magazines a little ahead of the rest of us.
Meanwhile, artist Dani Marti has spelled out his sincere intentions in the title of his latest exhibition, “Looking for Felix,” a show ostensibly about his relationship with the work of the late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez- Torres. Marti’s sincerity makes me think that the work is allegorically linked to Warhol’s celebrity screen prints (rather than a mete appropriation, that is). In these wow, Warhol was explicit about capturing the reflected glow of his subjects or making their star power somehow his own. And in 2001, 1he prime can be read as memento mori as the stars themselves have died (Andy, Elvis, Jackie, Marilyn, Natalie) or have horribly faded (Mick, David, Yves). Felix Gonzales-Torres, on the other hand, may be dead, but his star is definitely rising.
In ‘Looking for Felix,” Marti filled the gallery with streams of red beads hanging floor-to-ceiling, along with three speakers playing cante jondo songs from his native Spain. Gonzales- Torres did a series of autobiographically based bead works—Untitled (Golden Shower),Untitled (Chemo), Untitled (Water), to name just three. Marti’s work is most similar to the latter work which was rendered in blue beads symbolizing the water separating Gonzalez-Torres from his country of birth. But his red beads represent the sanguine fluid separating him from his natural home- he is the HIV+ son of a Catholic mother.
What ultimately distinguishes Marti’s w0rk from GonzaIez-Torres is the audaci0us volume. While the latter’s beaded arriers were rendered in the beaded single strands often found in the doorways of Latino households, Marti’s beads fill the entire atmosphere of the gallery, so dense as to tinge the gallery walls a womb- like pink. The viewer must walk through three streams of beads to enter the space, only to be then invited to walk through ten more showers of beads running at right angles in the rear chamber of the gallery.
The tactility of the installation easily over- takes the intellectualizing. Walking through the beads is pure sensation, the plastic spheres like silk or champagne cascading over one’s skin. With this, the allegorical impulse turns romantic and sexual, toward Sheherazade or Sacher-Masoch. And at that point the work becomes distinctly performative and interactive, Marti’s imitation taking on an element of the haute-est male flattery: drag.