Dani Marti

By Carrie Miller

 

Over the past two decades, Dani Marti’s practice has been distinguished by an obsessive, unflinchingly honest preoccupation with the messy business of being human. Whether in the quasi-ethnographic representations of people on the margins of society that characterize his video pieces, or the gestural traces tightly woven into his sculptural ‘paintings’ – questions of sexuality, the body and subjectivity are the lifeblood of Marti’s art.

The artist’s new work continues to be a meditation on human embodiment. Rather than the conceptual focal point, however, the nature of corporeality is reckoned with in and through the artmaking process itself. The daily grind of creating such labor-intensive work deeply implicates Marti’s own body, own sense of self in it. Committing to this daily practice has required Marti to fundamentally let go of trying to control the work and faithfully surrender to the process. As the artist puts it: “After 20 years of trying to justify what I’m doing, so that my work is not considered just a ‘nice’ object, I feel more relaxed. The meaning’s there – I don’t have to state it all the time – I’m just allowing myself to make it”. Paradoxically, loosening his grip on the need to make sense of the human condition at a conceptual level has allowed Marti to get closer to the essence of his (and our) own nature.

The reflective surfaces of Dust flirt with the viewer’s perception, suggesting the little particles of dust percolating in space, catching colour and light, that we see if we immerse ourselves in the immediacy of our experience. The work reveals itself in its constant play with the viewer’s movement – flickering moments of reflected light in time and space. The reflectors simultaneously function as mirrors: the man-made material we rely on to literally see who we are. Of course, dust is also what we are. In this sense, these works are both portraits of us as individuals and reminders that this is a perceptual illusion, permitting us to see that the separation between us and the world is ultimately a false one. The viewer is given a window into the infinite landscape of undivided material existence of which they an infinitesimal part. The reductive minimalism of the DOT series also renders visible the way our existence can be broken down into basic, generic units of matter that elide any concept of a unique, individual being.

The customised rope that constitutes Songs of Surrender creates endless variation of pattern, subtle differences that undermine our capacity to ‘read’ the work’s surface so that we submit to its sheer physical presence. As a cultural signifier of bondage, the knotted rope also evokes the notion of submission. The erotic materiality of this work conjures the experience of surrendering to what’s there in front of you – to accept and even find gratification in the fact that control is an illusion. Sexual pleasure has been a continuous theme in Marti’s work and the obvious reading of

is a sexual one: the title denotes both a chain of sex shops and the life source of our repressed erotic desires. The work is made up of vintage necklaces the artist collected from charity shops over the course of two years. The time-consuming and laborious process of weaving and tying these individual necklaces together stitches Marti’s own life history into the lost narratives of the former wearers – a reminder that our attachments to things (whether we are producing or consuming them) is ultimately a futile attempt at avoiding the brutal truth our own mortality.

This conceptual reading of Marti’s work is, of course, an equally futile attempt to fix it in time and space – to impose a human will on a world that only ever be possessed for a fleeting, historical moment. To fully appreciate Marti’s latest works, we instead need to follow his lead: let go of expectations; stop projecting; go with the flow; revel in the poetic flux of perception and the wonderful, terrifying impermanence of existence.