Video Practise – Dani Marti
Oscillating between hopefulness and failure, my work is hinged to a representational paradox. For on the one hand it presupposes belief in the act of portrayal, and on the other hand it tacitly admits portraiture’s inevitable failure to accurately capture.
Lois Rowe on Dani Marti, 2008
A moment of time, a gestural flick, a brief rupture in perception: these are the keys to the contemporary portrait, a genre that is neither figurative nor abstract, that seeks neither to capture nor contain its subject, and so is not really a portrait in any traditional sense. What these momentary ruptures reveal is not a public or a private self: that dualism has largely disappeared in our world of casual cruising, of the webcam, the blogspot and perpetually being on show. What they hint at is a more contemporary realm of the self that we may not even know exists, yet which is released and revealed through tics, gestures and uncontrollable responses.
These are portraits of the gestural unconscious, of one’s habits and movements that persist in our daily relations and in the memory of other bodies, other names, other entities. The gesture exists but cannot really be understood. It can be made apparent, yet resists quantification and rationalisation as something that can be known. It pricks the façades of the spectacle. It is a sense of the subject that lurks below the conscious, intimate and lingering.
Anthony Gardner on Dani Marti, 2008
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 scrunity of the camera-eye of a video camera – as if waiting on a moment of deconcealing. 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 ‘deconcealing’ 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 deconcealing.
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.
Aann Finnegan on Dani Marti, 2008
Barcelona-born artist, Dani Marti is obsessed with intimacy. Filled with human imagery that is simultaneously physical and abstract, his authored documentary videos are portraits that on the surface seem eerily voyeuristic. A perfect encapsulation can be starkly observed in Marti’s latest work, Bacon’s Dog (2010). Here is a sad and lonely man — the well-known Australian art collector, Peter Fray, who at this point is being examined under an orthopaedic microscope as he experiences sexual intimacy for the first time. Peter is sixty-five years old and overweight. One of his testicles never dropped. He quivers when touched by the rugged paws of the artist – the camera capturing his enraptured gaze through the corner of the lens. At first, Marti’s performative involvement seems exploitative, but as the image fades, it becomes apparent that the artist’s ocular statement is as much about fostering a personally subjective engagement, as it is about constructing a document.
Similar to Renzo Martens or Artur Żmijewski, Marti’s ultimate pursuit forces him to transgress from normative ethics. This isn’t a bad thing. Unlike cinematic documentary, Marti is hyper-conscious about the inherently meditative qualities of this form. He treads through murky waters, with the intent to subvert, or perhaps more appropriately, to corrupt conventional expectation – deliberately choosing to embed himself as a catalyst for his subjects. This lucid tendency is apparent in the controversial series of videos produced to coincide with The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow and Glasgay’s social justice Biennial in 2009, which at the time was thematically concerned with the issue of LGBTi rights.
Although lesser known in the UK, Marti gained some significant exposure after a series of features in the national broadsheets about Culture and Sport Glasgow’s frivolous meddling with his commissioned works for the 2009 exhibition. The reasoning behind his canonical status is perhaps simple. Dani Marti’s work is still raw and in the process of maturation. His ambition on the other hand, is irrevocably incisive. At a meeting in a Glasgow pub, the artist reveals how in the early 1990s, he gave up his previous life and turned to art, when he became HIV positive. And while this personal facet may not directly influence his subjects – his preoccupation with intimacy can undoubtedly be read as a response to his early insecurity and rejection.
As our encounter draws to a close, I notice something. A glimmer in the man’s eyes. He has drawn me in. He makes me feel safe. He wants to be close to me. But before long, I lunge forward, make my excuses, and hug him goodbye. Later, when I am alone, I will draw the curtains, and for the first time in a long time, I will find an excuse to weep.
Omar Kholeif- 2010, Curator Whitechapel Gallery, London
Hatje Cantz Publication- Kirsten Lloyd
The Caress: Intimate transactions in the video work of Dani Marti
“Skin and light and touch”
Dani Marti’s video Bacon’s Dog (2010) opens with a single shot of a naked man splayed face-up across a bed’s crumpled sheets. The narrow split screen fades in and out with close shots of pale, mottled skin and clasped hands. Inexplicably blackened fingers caress and tug at a nipple. The tick of a clock mingles with the sound of passing cars, of bodies touching, mouths sucking and gasping breaths. Snippets of speech interject to describe the intensity of somatic sensations, to offer the briefest of reflections or narrative insights. Bacon’s Dog is a visceral account of the first sexual experience of Peter Fay, a 65 year-old writer, curator and art collector from Sydney, Australia. Over a period of five months, Marti introduced him to physical intimacy in exchange for the opportunity to film their encounters. In the associated excerpts taken from email dialogues between the two men Peter is devastatingly honest about his situation, going into some detail about the harrowing impact of his childhood medical problems, his failed encounters with prostitutes and the revulsion in which he holds his own body. Such anecdotes are contrasted with poetic attempts to articulate the acute sense of anticipation, desire and fear he experiences in the build-up to their encounters yet these texts pale next to the intensity of the video document itself. Condensed into an oppressive eleven-minute vignette, the footage places Peter under an almost unbearable level of scrutiny, dwelling on moments of unbound desire, jealousy, post coital reflection and loneliness.
Since he began using a camera in 2004 Marti has compiled an extensive archive of such intimate encounters which are often described as ‘video portraits’. In tracing the development of his work, this essay will propose a shift of perspective that loosens the grip of the traditional art historical category of portraiture to instead locate his practice amongst alternative lineages including the documentary genre and socially-engaged art. Addressing how Marti works as an artist introduces complex yet pivotal questions around the reconfiguration of the artwork induced by the now pervasive compulsion to document as well as the significance of ethical discourse to contemporary art. By reflecting on his practice as a form of labour attention is refocused on the intricacies of the transactions he stages with both the subject and the viewer of the document: it is within these economies that the uniqueness and significance of his artworks can be discerned.
Marti’s first foray with a camera, David (2007), recorded a young homeless man on the rain-lashed streets of Glasgow slipping in and out of consciousness as Winter shoppers hurried by. Though this encounter played out in public, the context is rendered indistinct as shop and car lights refract and disperse across the soaked pavement. Instead, the camera closes in on David’s half-shut eyes and stained fingers, hovering to capture his repeated efforts to retain his grip on a paper cup. Conflating the genres of portraiture and social documentary, this short, looped video established many of the key characteristics of Marti’s subsequent video practice. The constrained scale, the focus on the body and the intense quality of concentration on an everyday scenario have since become defining features. In this early case, Marti paid his subject twenty pounds and closely recorded him for around ninety minutes. It was a sight that occasionally elicited indignation from passers-by troubled by the potential for exploitation. Though these reactions do not appear in the final edit, the presentation of this spectacle of poverty in slick white (or black) cube gallery spaces generates a similar sense of discomfort.
Based upon a reconnaissance into deprived urban territories, David is reminiscent of Thomas Annan’s early photographs of Glasgow’s slum dwellings in the late 1860s (though Annan’s interest lay primarily in the dilapidated buildings and claustrophobic closes rather than in the transitory bodies of their inhabitants). But if Marti effaced his own position as an observer to create an apparently neutral description of destitution, this approach was quickly inverted in later videos. Working instead from the inside-out he began to both mine his own relationship networks and forge new ones, training his camera upon homosexual men drawn from the artworld, gay scenes in his home cities and the more loose-knit communities generated by online sites like Gaydar. Rejecting the happenstance of the street, he now proposes and plans individual projects over drinks or via webcams. Carefully composed scenarios then play out within the confines of domestic interiors, each focused on an exchange with a single individual lasting anywhere between a few hours and many months. Working alone with rudimentary recording equipment Marti’s personal charm plays an important part in facilitating these encounters. Something of a master at engineering consent and eliciting confessional storytelling, he possesses an extraordinary ability to put his subjects at ease in front of the camera, suppressing anxieties and loosening tongues to document everything from explicitly sexual activities to confessional pillow talk.
Sometimes questioning his informants from behind a hand-held camera at others lying in bed beside them with stray leads plainly in view, Marti makes no attempt to disguise the play of construction and manipulation upon which each encounter is based. While many subjects relish the opportunity to perform before the lens, allowing Marti an extraordinary level of access into their personal histories and sexual proclivities, others are considerably more reticent. The surreal recording of an overweight male in a cartoon mask fervidly running his tongue between the artist’s toes is a case in point. Recorded from the recipient’s perspective – with all the connotations of pornography such an angle suggests – Oompa Loompa (2009/10) documents the foot-fetishist’s slow progression to climax while almost comically attempting to hide his identity behind joke shop props. Looped and devoid of further narrative it’s a difficult video to watch. As with Bacon’s Dog the sense of discomfort induced by our transgression as viewers into such a private moment is doubled by the acute awareness that such moments have been constructed for us: they have been staged precisely in order to produce a document for display.
Flesh, tongues, breath and fluids: the relentless focus on the corporeal in Marti’s practice and his work has often been highlighted by various curatorial investigations dealing with aging, desire, masculinity and disease. Yet his work moves beyond the obsession with the human body so prevalent in the art of the late twentieth century to incorporate not just the materiality of the body, but the materiality of the body’s movement: the protagonists see, touch, talk, become sexually aroused and engage in intimate sex acts. Rather than attempting to create portraits which incorporate those elements that elude the still photograph – an individual’s mannerisms say, his voice or even his carnal preferences – these documents record the ‘presentness’ of a specific exchange between the artist, the subject and the camera. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has rejected the reduction of the body to mere matter, proposing instead an alternative conception based on relationality where bodies are not physical but ‘distant-near, reachable-unreachable, desirable-fearful, erotic, powerful, weak, fleeting, confrontational’. Marti’s practice is positioned here, precisely within intersubjective gaps and touching points. As documents of emphatically corporeal encounters, his videos emphasise the materiality of social relations and social processes.
Sex Work
Each of these video projects revolves around a transactional framework. While David received twenty pounds cash, in later works Marti has instead traded intimacy and sex for an opportunity to create his filmic portraits. Time is the fire in which we burn (2009) documents an encounter with John, a former bus driver turned porn actor and male prostitute. Recorded by a single camera mounted on a tripod the 67-minute video is only lightly edited. With their shaven heads and closely clipped facial hair the two men face each other in bed, tattooed torsos emerging from the sheets as John recounts his recent experiences in the USA. Young, handsome and voluble, he talks frankly about his work as a rent boy, addiction to crystal meth and the disintegration of his three-way relationship. We learn that following a mental breakdown he had returned home to Glasgow only two weeks prior to filming. Just inside the frame, Marti gently questions his friend, touching him, reassuring him and getting up to adjust the camera angle. His pared back interview technique is carefully based around open-ended questions discretely posed to either maintain the momentum of John’s thought flow or to mine a little deeper. He regales us with anecdotes about fetish fisting and marathon orgies before attempting to describe the intense sexual euphoria experienced under the influence of ‘Tina’; a description that quickly digresses into a comically complex Star Trek analogy. But the incessant flow of stories doesn’t stop there. John’s laughter swings back and forth towards despair as he recounts drinking a full bottle of bleach in an attempt to commit suicide and struggles to control his emotions when talking about the pet dog he was forced to leave behind. The contradictions flow thick and fast when he discusses his experiences of being rented: pride in the glamorous lifestyle, the standard of his clientele and the amount of cash he was able to command on account of the size of his cock rubs counter to an overriding sense of degradation, of being used. In one of the most revealing passages in the video he admits that the attention of clients – at least at first – made him feel special but that his experiences may ultimately have taken away his ability to ‘feel love’.
Each confessional tale is rooted in somatic experience. As John narrates we watch his body shift from postures of confident exuberance to grief-laden vulnerability, shrinking back to cover his face or lay his head on Marti’s chest. According to the artist, the only way to make him comfortable enough to relate his experiences was to lie down beside him. In the event, John appears to actively enjoy the process of filming. In marked contrast to the fetishist’s introversion, he relishes the sustained attention of the camera, displaying a self-awareness and a desire to please that verges on the performative. Set against a narrative of rejection, indifference and exploitation, the combination of his garrulous stories and on-screen gestures exposes an intense longing for touch, attention and physical intimacy. He scrutinises Marti’s body, stroking his skin and picking at his blackheads as he talks. For all the explicit references to fucking, this is only part of his desire for human response and interaction: in this instance, when the two men do have opportunistic sex half way through the recording, Marti switched the camera off.
Time is the fire in which we burn can be slotted into a venerable lineage of portraits of prostitutes in the history of art from Caravaggio to Manet, a lineage which has recently been expanded by the prominent place that the figure of the female sex worker occupies in contemporary art. What marks Marti’s video apart is that his constructed scenario specifically foregrounds the transaction between artist and model, between prostitute and client, positing the economy of production as a central theme of the work. A strange doubling takes place here; identifying a need in his subject for comfort and understanding then using his own body to trade intimacy for art material, the artist mirrors the role of the prostitute. At the same time, the document that emerges is an intense yet ultimately unstable, record of an encounter which hovers ambiguously between homespun therapy and brutal exposure. Though no money changes hands, John’s exploitation is re-enacted and spectacularised for our consumption.
The Ethics of Encounter
As an increasing number of artists site their practice within the social fabric of everyday life, the encounter has been placed at the heart of a newly defined aesthetic experience. It’s now commonplace for artists to employ participatory, collaborative, and relational strategies to engage directly with – and produce – interpersonal relations. When they do so, their work often bears a close resemblance to ethnographic mapping, journalism or even community work. The ever-growing demand upon art to provide a framework for the documentation of social processes is closely linked with these broader developments. While many artists produce investigative video essays or use the lens to record durational artistic projects, scores of others adopt a similar approach to Marti, carefully constructing artificial situations in order to create a document of the episode. Yet, if many socially-engaged artists seek to use their practice to strengthen social bonds and create positive on-the-ground consequences, it seems that the introduction of the camera often transforms the ethical dynamic. Consider the Polish artist Artur Żmijewski’s disturbing short video 80064 (2004) during which he bullies a Holocaust survivor into having his identification tattoo ‘refreshed’ despite his clear protestations. Or Santiago Sierra’s photographic documents of the numerous disenfranchised and desperate individuals he has paid minimal sums to be tattooed, dyed, incarcerated and otherwise humiliated. In these works the lens has effectively become a licence to stage exploitative social experiments. The process of bringing interventions back inside the walls of the institution by means of the video or photographic document either introduces an additional ‘layer’ of audience or, more usually, fully displaces the participant with the viewer. Used and manipulated as so much raw material, individuals are once again reduced to the position of powerless subject, while the artist aggressively reclaims the authorial role. This despotic tendency tends to be highly gendered, falling almost exclusively within the purview of male artists. Adopting a directorial role they prefer to ‘manage’ situations, hiring others to perform the physical tasks of dyeing hair, inking skin or documenting the proceedings: though they may well be visible these artists rarely physically touch their participants.
The ethics of image production and the inherently imbalanced power relationship between artist and subject has been extensively explored in the documentary genre, though much of the debate has focused on how to protect the most vulnerable, the most deserving, and alleviate the worst excesses of this disparity. As Brian Winston and Allan Sekula (among many others) showed back in the 70s and 80s, the situation is further complicated by the documentary lens’ apparently insatiable appetite for the victim. While Sekula talked of filmmakers’ predilection for ‘aiming the camera downwards’, Brian Winston later lambasted what he called ‘the tradition of the victim’, a tendency he saw as the product of John Grierson’s early dedication to social amelioration combined with Robert Flaherty’s poetic romanticism which so powerfully placed the trials of individuals at the centrepiece of his narratives. Along with many of his peers, Marti reflexively engages with the power a-symmetries that are embedded in the very act of documentation. Yet while Żmijewski and Sierra apparently relish the shock induced when they substitute the ultra-ethical artist-as-social worker with the deliberately provocative artist-as-sociopath model, Marti’s case is not quite so clear-cut. In his video documents the implicit aggression of the camera lens, the manipulation and exposure of vulnerable individuals is countered by the addition of an altogether different sense of care and generosity. It’s this curious mix that begins to open out alternative considerations that encompass – yet go beyond – the obvious questions of ethical valence which narrowly focus upon categorising interventions into the social fabric as either productively ‘good’ or transgressive, ‘bad’ and yet, ultimately, revealing. Instead, this work proposes alternative relationships between ethics and aesthetics. It draws in ethics in its broadest, multivalent sense, as concerned with ways of dwelling, or forms of being in the world and, crucially, being with others. To be sure, Marti’s transgressive engagements seek to disrupt the status-quo, the de-politicising consensus brought about and maintained by what Jacques Ranciere has called the reign of ‘soft ethics’. But they also break away from concerns with such normalising social and legal imperatives to move into the more complex realms of ethical relations. Marti’s subjects are not presented as mere sacrificial victims, rather they are presented from a perspective of intimate proximity. Care, responsiveness, concrete dialogic interaction, and empathetic identification are all central concerns of his practice.
Hints of this approach can be detected in the excruciatingly tender way Marti films David, where the gaze of camera resembles a caress. By entering the frame in later works he seeks to further collapse any sense of objective distance, the sine qua non of social research, documentary and, of course, therapy. The bond created between the artist and the subject in these intimate recordings seems to speak to a midpoint between social documentary and the personal snapshot or home video. There are echoes here of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979-2004), Nan Goldin’s diaristic account of her “community of lovers”. Discussing this accumulation of images which so closely recorded her life Goldin stated: ‘These pictures come out of relationships, not observation’. Similarly fascinated by lived experience, Marti also makes full use of his privileged position, documenting himself alongside his subjects as an HIV-positive gay man. But though Goldin spoke openly about her strategy of ‘developing a community’ to photograph, the individuals who have become part of Marti’s video archive do not constitute a coherent friendship network or scene. Instead, he hunts out and engineers these singular encounters, determined not to arbitrarily represent but to actively intervene in social realities.
Boris Groys has identified the fundamental difference this type of practice presents, suggesting that it re-conceives the relationship between art and life in a completely new context ‘defined by the aspiration of today’s art to become life itself, not merely to depict life or to offer it art products.’ Leaping into the territories of biopolitical production, artists move away from the traditional tactics of mimesis and representation to instead stage experiments, shape situations and otherwise direct social realities. These developments challenge the very framework of the artwork: does art documentation constitute art itself or does it simply refer to it? As productive as these points are, Marti’s practice complicates Groys’ assertion that the document simply makes visible an art event which takes place elsewhere. In his case, the video document is used as a work surface, as a site through which the protagonists stage a dialogic encounter and, crucially, to forge emotional connections. This is not to suggest that these are collaborative projects, where each participant possesses an equal level of agency and authorship is shared. Rather, it is to contend that the camera is a mediator in the fullest sense of the term, that it is fundamentally imbricated in the production of social relations.
“How does that make you feel?”
These notes and comparisons are particularly illuminating when considering two of Marti’s most recent works: And that’s it (2011) and Jim Solo (2011). Marti met the subjects when making the video Disclosure (2009), a work commissioned by the Glasgay festival and Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art as part of their shOUT social justice exhibition programme. William and Jim were two of seven men who agreed to be interviewed to camera about their sex lives, their experience of coming out to family and friends and, in some cases, contracting and living with HIV. Each lying naked or semi-clothed in his own bed, the only connections between this spectrum of individuals were their sexuality and geographic location. Through his editing process, Marti stitched together this series of brief, quoditian engagements across a dual screen, overlaying stories to create an occasionally incomprehensible babble of voices. Articulate accounts from confident, muscular men sporting tattoos, nipple piercings and black plastic spectacles were threaded amongst those of more vulnerable men from the West of Scotland who possessed none of the easy eloquence of their metropolitan counterparts. Marti has often observed that the camera tends to catalyse this kind of confessional storytelling and, despite the obvious contrasts, these informants all appear to be familiar with the format and happy to deliver what is expected of them. The one exception is Jim, a middle-aged, overweight man from Gourock, who halts the filming after becoming upset when trying to talk about the AIDS related death of his brother. Two years later Marti worked with him again to realise Jim Solo a longer, more intimate project. Under the hash glare of stage lighting, the pressure to perform before the camera is amplified still further and Jim is once again utterly unable to articulate his feelings. His conspicuous frustration abates when Marti moves out from behind the equipment to hug him, a gesture that is met with an overwhelmed response of tears and desire. The footage that follows is some of Marti’s most graphic, picturing everyday sexual acts. These are cut alongside discussions between the two men during which Jim admits to having had very little sexual experience and struggles to express the self-loathing he feels when the artist can’t get an erection. Braided with failure, loneliness and an uncompromising focus on the subject’s bloated, aging body, this is not the type of coupling that’s often pictured. Despite his physical presence, Marti remains oddly peripheral, muted to the extent that that his own personality appears to have been hollowed out in order to arrive at a condition of pure responsiveness. Informants like Jim expand into the gap he leaves, further exposing their desires and vulnerabilities.
And that’s it also revolves around a raw, carnal encounter. This time the subject is William, a similarly inexperienced pensioner with a broad accent and a predilection for men in tight white shorts. His fear of HIV restricts his sexual repertoire to activities undertaken while in costume. Filmed from behind rubbing himself upon the incongruously tanned and muscular body of the artist, the episode that plays out on screen smacks of abasement: the economic differentiation between the two protagonists is inscribed through both their bodies and their sexual ken. While we often see Marti taking instruction regarding carnal requirements and displaying an extraordinary level of attentiveness, he makes directorial role overt, positioning his subjects for lingering static shots, prompting them to look at the camera and popping into and out of shot. These are works which openly dwell on the challenges raised by the process of documentation, Marti makes it impossible for us to forget the process of production and our position as viewing consumers. Ratcheting up the tension still further William openly asks Marti if he’ll come back after the video is finished, if they’ll be friends. This artwork, after all, conforms to the ubiquitous logic of the project that pervades not only labour practices within the art world but contemporary society as a whole: the duration of a relationship is determined by its potential to be productive.
Art Gold
Skepticism of official accounts coupled with the attendant demand for first-hand personal testimony has seen the power of storytelling and biography emerge as defining features of much contemporary art practice. Marti’s own leap into the private emphatically illustrates that the document is ideally suited to this purpose: its ability to traverse both far-flung geographies and interior territories enables him to pursue an almost vampiric desire draw closed encounters into the public sphere. Initially, the visibility of the ageing, queer body in his work seems to reflect the feminist insight that the personal is political and a time when the consciousness-raising and transgressive tactics of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Mary Kelly and Nan Golden identified the private world as a key battleground for politics. Such positions were of course brought into sharp relief through the AIDS crisis which saw illness become a pervasive theme in much lens-based art production. Understanding the divide between public and private social life as oppressive – even murderous – strategies which rendered visible and articulated counter, hitherto closed, realities were considered to be emancipatory. That such articulations continue to be perceived as threatening was well illustrated when Marti’s contribution to the shOUT exhibition was censored by Glasgow City Council in 2009. In a shameful instance that attested to the virulence of ‘soft ethics’ which deny visibility to those who fall outwith the normalising consensus, Time is the fire in which we burn was one of the works removed from display on the basis that it could be seen to promote prostitution and drug abuse. Yet, at the same time, it must be seen against a contemporary backdrop where a prurient mediatised culture demands subjective narratives and sexual stories just as the art world continues to reward transgression by explicitly linking it with originality and therefore success. Under these circumstances the experiences of others are elicited, appropriated and transformed into ‘art gold’ with astonishing regularity under the catch-all banner of knowledge production. The particular challenge of Marti’s video works is that they speak directly to the complexity of this relationship between public and private spheres at the outset of the twenty-first century.
Ethical Economies
Traversing continents to produce projects, Dani Marti is the epitome of the nomadic global artist. In her influential study One Place After Another, Miwon Kwon connected shifts in artistic labour to the demands of capital and broader societal trends that had seen productive labour usurped by service-based economies in the West. A few years later John Roberts took this logic further, arguing that waged labour had converged with communication practices, placing an emphasis on the immaterial labour of knowledge production and giving rise to the prevalence of research-based art projects. Bacon’s Dog, the video document with which this short essay began, offers a particularly illuminating example when considering how these developments relate to Marti’s practice. Placed squarely within the network-driven economies of the art world, this work can be read as an attempt to engage with, and ultimately manipulate, the a-symmetrical power relationship between the curator and the artist. Though it surely can’t come as much of a surprise that sex is used as a cynical career advancement tactic in such an incestuous and egocentric field, realising art works within these specific dynamics is a strategy that has also been employed by other artists. To take I’ll be Your Angel (2001) as just one example, Tanja Ostojic exhibited herself as the curator Harald Szeemann’s elegant escort during the opening days of his 49th Venice Biennial, accompanying him to press calls, dinners and openings. Yet Marti’s manipulating caress cannot simply be reduced to entrepreneurial opportunism or a reflexive commentary on art world power relations. The labour that he so carefully frames as part of each work is twofold, combining the performative encounter itself and the production of the video. While his dependency on the document as a mode of circulation provides the spectacularising ethnographic twist so common in art practices dedicated to knowledge production and dissemination, the intimate transactions he stages are closer to an ethics of care than an economy of service. The complex constellations of social relations between the artist, subject and the viewing audience circulate around these contradictory impulses. At every turn Marti reaffirms that ethics lies at the beating heart of art’s re-emergence as a social practice.
Kirsten Lloyd, Edinburgh