Video portraiture an extension of Marti’s woven works – already a series of portraits expressed through the medium of the woven screen.
If, in the face-to-face of everyday conversation, the screen of appearance mediates our relationships with each other, then video is a multiplication and extension of this screen.
Portraiture is always impossible: always in translation, a reading or interpretation, of what is given over from the other, in the various screens of appearing in the world.
Portraiture has always been provisional, never the impossible unattainable kernal or essence of the person. Appearance has always been its exterior limit, no matter what glimpse of an inner soul, or imagined essence of that person has glanced off the screen [philosophically this problem extends all the way back to the Greeks, and was most interestingly posited by Kant who pointed out the impossibility of accessing the interior ‘noumenon’ behind the ‘screen of appearance’ of the phenomenon].
In fact, we’re drawn to the screen – whether of the face in person or subject to the scrutiny of the camera-eye of a video camera – as if waiting on a moment of de-concealing. Further, we’re driven to portraiture as if through technology, or the various mediums of art, one could finally break through the screen to a knowledge of the other.
Portraits could be said to share a kinship with intimacy, with intimate knowing, because they offer the other to our scrutiny, permit us to stand close-up, and for much longer, in the anticipated yielding of the other to our gaze. The niceties of social distance never usually permit us such close inspection in everyday life. Certainly not all portraits are intimate (state portraits, official portraits, public portraits), perhaps not intimate in the personal sense of being able to see intimate flesh, but they suggest a kind of intimate knowing of somehow getting beyond the screen, or the canvas, to some ‘de-concealing’ or ‘revealing’ of the person [to borrow Heidegger’s terms]. A portrait doesn’t necessarily deal in revelation but rather the revealing of a trait or an aspect, a bringing to the surface of de-concealing.
Then with the camera, in particular, the kino-pravda or film-truth, of the Russians came the idea that the camera could see further, with its post-human technological eye. The camera sees differently to what is ‘shot’ by the human eye or mind.
Marti’s video-portraits are not staged, but shot in this kino-pravda tradition (in its 1960s incarnation, cinema verite), open to the happenstance of simply being there, and permitting the camera to do its own observing. Of course, Marti is still pointing the camera, but what happens to a certain extent ‘de-conceals’ by itself (a Barthesian punctum on the screen of appearance).
What shifts is that Marti is not shooting life, fly-on-the-wall as in cinema verite’s most general terms, but the impossibility of capturing intimacy itself. Marti is filming lovers making love, extroverts preening on webcam, masturbatory moments, sleeping, showering, and even pissing. Even stealing a cheeky moment of intimacy of tracking a stream of urine down a toilet bowl, as synedoche for penetration [Bolted]. Any action generally takes places between the crumpled sheets of the bed and the fixtures of the bathroom, the camera drinking in the intimate surfaces of things and spaces. There’s nothing pornographic, no pornographic action per se, even though at times sex or masturbation takes place – because any of the sex acts are extensions of the portrait condensing via the camera’s caress of so much of what occupies intimate personal space. “It’s hard to kiss someone when you’re filming.” Marti.
2008