Intimacies in a Desert: The Videos of Dani Marti
Anthony Gardner
The scene is like something out of an Australian myth: in the middle of what seems to be nowhere, with nothing but sand, scrubby plants and cloudless skies for miles around, and amid the insistent buzz of a colony of flies, three men sit beneath a spindly tree, a solitary refuge in the desert. With their broad-rimmed hats, unshaven appearances and rich Australian accents, the men could easily be mistaken as protagonists from one of Australia’s nineteenth century histories. They could be thick-skinned rural workers, perhaps, taking a momentary respite as they migrate from one job to another to another in order to earn their wage, or rugged bushmen sitting together and gossiping like the anti-heroes in the poems and songs of Australia’s colonial era. Yet, when these men talk, all such expectations and prejudices are shattered. Their discussion is not about the finer details of breasts and beer or shearing rams, but about the pressures of making art or filming for American television, about how one perceives one’s abilities and limitations, and most of all about self-doubt. In the ostensibly limitless world of the Australian desert, where the sun corrodes the division between the parched brown of the earth and the monochrome blue of the sky, these three men share everyday intimacies with each other, with the video camera watching the scene, with its operator, Dani Marti, and of course with the video’s subsequent viewers.
In many ways, this video, called Under the Coolabah Tree (2008), stands as something of an anomaly in Dani Marti’s practice. During the early 2000s, Marti’s reputation developed from his series of wall mounted works – in reality, hybrids of sculpture and painting that Marti simply labeled “paintings” – made by looping ropes of varying thicknesses and colors over and under each other, and around the square wooden frames that encased these complex weavings. Some of the works were given the basic title of Landscape. Others bore the names of fictional characters, friends or historical figures: Andrea, Snow White, George, Teresa, Monika. Each “painting” shared a particular characteristic, however, for they were all portraits of one kind or another: a portrait of a person, a conversation or a mood; a portrait of a place or even, in some instances, of a time spent listening to particular tracks of music (most notably, Different Trains (After Steve Reich) of 2004). How one could create a portrait out of something as abstract as a “painting” woven from ropes, and whether abstraction and figuration could be as conjoined and hybridized as painting and sculpture, emerged as key questions within Marti’s practice at the time.
Such understandings of portraiture have continued to be central to Marti’s subsequent work, even as his medium has shifted from loops of rope to looping video since studying for his MFA at the Glasgow School of Art from 2004 to 2006. Some of these videos have been quiet, benign, even soothing depictions of the lives of others. The six minute work Orifices (2009), for instance, shows an Anglo-Caribbean woman named Betty sitting in a room with a handful of other people, sewing soft baubles together to form a spongy mat or cushion, all the while singing along to a Caribbean gospel song humming from a nearby radio. In those six minutes, we get a sense of part of this woman’s life – how she sews, how she sings, the kind of music she likes and what her frames of community are – but only those parts of her life that she is willing to reveal to Marti’s camera. As has long been argued of photography, the video camera may be a recording mechanism, but its capacities to focus on one particular time and space, cropping and expelling what is unwanted from what is desired, always complicates the “objective record” with the subjective and the abstract. The video portrait is only ever a part portrait, a part object, a glimpse of what may be rather than what is.
Other examples of Marti’s work have, by contrast, proven much less benign in effect. His camera has often trained on gay men and gay sex – or, to be more specific, on HIV positive men, on rent boys and bears, on foot fetishism, and on the pundits of webcam sex – to the extent that some of his work has been met with a censorial eye. In 2009, a suite of Marti’s videos were refused exhibition in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, despite having been commissioned by the Gallery and by one of Glasgow’s main gay and lesbian festivals, Glasgay, so as to showcase the many different and sometimes conflicting ways that “gayness” is practiced in Glasgow. In Lovers Way (2009), this presentation of the self was certainly explicit: two men masturbate one another, engage in oral sex, reach orgasm, with the camera focused intently on the men’s faces and gasping mouths rather than on their penises or the “money shot” itself. Here, Marti and his two subjects emphasize the lust and sheer corporality of sex, while still leaving much to the viewer’s imagination (contra the Glaswegian censors, not everything is in Marti’s videos lewd, crude and dangerous to know). Other videos have revealed much broader modalities of sexuality than simply fucking, though. In Time is the Fire in which We Burn (also 2009), the protagonist, John, lies in bed with Marti, rubbing his fingers across Marti’s own, resting his head against Marti’s chest, answering the questions posed by the artist during the course of their conversation. John shares his experiences of being a rent boy, discusses his participation in a crystal meth-fuelled threesome for six days, and struggles to hold back the tears as he talks about his pet dog. The intimacies between these two men are not only seductive or erotic; they are personal, emotional, quotidian, overcoming the presumption that some people may still have that gay men only fuck when they lie in bed together.
Indeed, the sharing of such intimacies, and such everyday gestures of intimacy, recurs throughout Marti’s practice. In the two-channel video Disclosure (2009), six men present their thoughts about sex, their concerns about coming out, their HIV status, their penises. Some men wear boxer shorts while discussing the difficulties they have in defining their identities; others recline nude, recounting tales of lust, uncertainty or deep family secrets. Some are Caucasian, some are slender, some are hirsute. Little would thus seem to be common amongst these men, except for a remarkable sense of comfort being in the company of Marti and his camera, controlling what they disclose of their sexual and emotional selves, their bodies and their histories. Yet, that expansive cross-section of bodies, cultural backgrounds, fantasies and fears is what grants Disclosure its great strength, for as it suggests, there is no one definition of “gay” capable of encapsulating all of these men and their complex lives. “Gay” is instead a wide spectrum, a society of identities (if we can coin a new collective noun), each of which is interwoven and entangled through encounters, histories and brief yet profound engagements.
What, then, are we to make of Under the Coolabah Tree, the video with which this text began? Given Marti’s general focus on men’s naked bodies and desires, his portrait of these three rugged men would seem a world away from his usual conceptual concerns. Whereas most of Marti’s subjects lie naked, exposed, discussing sex and sensuality, these three men are fully clothed, revealing as little of their bodies as they do of their sexualities or fantasies. The outdoor setting is also rare for Marti, who usually confines his explorations to domestic interiors, bedrooms and other private spaces made public through the camera. At the same time, however, the men’s revelation of their doubts, from the professional (how to be a good artist, how to be a generous film-maker) to the personal, suggest parallel kinds of intimacy to those seen in Marti’s other work. If these men open up to each other, it is emotionally rather than sexually (though to similar degrees, perhaps, of delicacy and roughness). Gestures that are usually kept concealed – the anxieties of self-deprecation, the almost childish running of one’s hands through the sand, the fluttering of eyelids in the midst of deep sleep – are once again subject to exposure. In the heart of this desert landscape, intimacy thrives in unexpected ways.
We might even go so far as to say that this is precisely the theme driving much of Marti’s practice. Through conversation and company, touch and affection, each of his subjects tries to articulate intimacy in the middle of a desert. This is not necessarily the literal desert of sun and sand, of course, but rather a parched landscape of social and sexual relations: the desert of ever-present homophobia within the heteronormative foundations of many contemporary societies; the desert spawned by the webcam spectacles and other online media through which innumerable social relations are mediated today; and ultimately the desert of individual loneliness. Marti’s work is thus a validation of the means by which exchange between people, and particularly libidinal exchange, can provide a way out of this desert and can, in the artist’s own words, help ‘overcome, surpass, “expected” moral conduct issues’. It is an attempt not only to shatter the social mores that exclude as much as they define the intimacies of the everyday; it also shows how these mores are shattered by the momentary gestures of lust and emotion shown by John, Betty, Dani and others (some named, some anonymous) on a daily basis. Each gesture, each video is a means to find points of connection between people – between Dani and his subjects, between the protagonists of the videos, between these individuals and their viewers – so as to hint at different worlds from those that dictate what can and cannot be shown, seen and understood. Each work is thereby an attempt to construct a ‘queer project’ in the manner favored by American theorists and activists, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner: ‘to support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity’.
As with any other attempt to make the erotic public, this can lead to accusations of voyeurism or even sexual exploitation (as perhaps the overbearing acts of censorship in Glasgow suggest). To reduce Marti’s works to this is, however, to miss their point. On one level, Marti does not try to hide the constructedness of these scenarios. The questions he poses to his interviewees are not edited out, as in many documentary video practices (whether narrowcast in the gallery or broadcast on television). In some instances, the catalysts for Marti’s face-to-face encounters – gaydar meetings, online sex sites and webcam videos – also open the videos themselves, introducing these people to the viewer in the same way as Marti first met them. At the same time, Marti does not seek to veil his own presence as constructor of these “documents”. He regularly appears front and centre in the works, in bed, snuggling with these men, naked with them: in Disclosure (Dani) (2009), he even treats himself as a subject undergoing the same degree of questioning and self-exposure, revealing his naked body, his anxieties about mortality, his sero-positivity. If voyeurism is arguably inseparable from any kind of documentary practice – including, and perhaps especially, the recent documentary turn in contemporary art and its focus on activism, war and the labor conditions of the poor – then Marti’s refusal to conceal his presence suggests both his inherent complicity with voyeurism as a maker of these (quasi-) documentaries, as well as the need to complicate the presumed “objectivity” of documentary within recent art practice.
Most importantly of all, though, if the goal of better inter-personal relations is a transgression of social mores, then that transgression is simply amplified by the content of much of Marti’s work. The conjunction of the transgressive and the intimate has long been a potent means to create spaces for gay sexuality (whatever personalities and proclivities “gay” might entail), to bring those intimacies to attention and into actuality. Yet that conjunction should not be mistaken as the potentiality of gay men alone. If sexual de-repression is one possible ground for drawing Eros and civilization together, as Herbert Marcuse once argued, one possibility for presenting new worlds within old, or even of social emancipation, then it is not the only way to do so. As Marti and his various subjects suggest, intimate gestures of all kinds may be just as important here. From admitting one’s fears to others (as occurs under the coolabah tree) to being stared at while dancing in public (from Betty’s experiences), portraying oneself in public can open out new avenues of inter-personal connection, a rethinking of what it is to be social, and thus the possibility of maintaining intimacy in a desert.
1Email to the author, 25 February 2010.
2 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24 no. 2, Winter 1998, p. 562.
3 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.