Dani Marti’s Paintings
1. Materialist Portraits
Dani Marti’s paintings are physical distillations of human encounters. Each abstract image seeks to capture and portray the impact of a person that Marti has known, either directly or through the mediation of rumour or popular culture. Defining these works as portraits, however, rapidly leads to a quandary of interpretation, for they appear fundamentally unrelated to classical notions of representation whose end is the revelation of a sitter’s inner core by the clever visual description of outward appearance. Far from seeking to reproduce the physiognomy of a sitter or subject, these large surfaces of woven plastics and rubber, rendered in monochromatic black, white, or (more rarely) clashing hues, nevertheless hints at a form of expanded portraiture. Most obviously, their titles often bear the name of a person – normally a first name only, leaving the exact identity unknown to all but the artist. Even when the titles do not designate a subject, we may notice other parallels to an individual presence in the paintings’ uniqueness of design, materials, and singular presence within a gallery space, their dense interiority isolated within the white architectural void. Indeed, for the artist, the point of departure for each work is a person, their emotional life, and their material existence. Each work is meticulously constructed by Marti, who rarely uses assistants in the production process. His paintings have a deep personal connection to the subject based on the ritual of weaving, duration taken to produce the work, and the choice of materials and pattern made by the artist. Such a subjective, artistic response to a specific individual is surely best described as portraiture. But what is the specific nature of Marti’s form of portraiture, expanded as it is beyond the limits that we might ordinarily assign to such category?
This is only the first in a series of decidedly tricky issues posed by Marti’s art. We might encounter difficulties too in defining Marti’s relationship with painting itself as a medium and practice. One might, for example, imagine a traditionalist asserting that for a painting to be counted as such, it should consist of: (a) canvas, and (b) oil or acrylic paint. Marti’s paintings are unusual in that they are made entirely without paint or canvas. Fabricated from woven or stitched plastics, they nevertheless clearly relate to painting as a medium and lie within its historical trajectory – the artist cites influences including Kazimir Malevich, Lucio Fontana and Frank Stella, and his works evidently partake of their abstract grammar. This name-check is indicative too, for over the last century radically innovative painters have demolished the grounds of their own practice and virtually levelled the traditionalist standpoint, replacing the old model with a new convention of abstraction. In other words, when we look at Marti’s paintings, we are not witnessing a radical attack on the pieties of oil-on-canvas painting; rather, we are looking at a subtle intervention into a modernist lineage of art as anti-art. The question to ask of Marti’s paintings, then, is not how they challenge the history and norms of painting, but how they seek to allegorize the modernist impulse towards abstraction. The answer, in part, is the premise of this essay and entails questions not just of medium, but also of ethics and ontology. In what follows, I shall seek to unpick how Marti enacts a dramatisation of personal encounters via the history and forms of abstract modern and contemporary art.
Marti’s works might best be understood under the rubric of what I shall call materialist portraiture – images that seek to capture a human presence through material means. In doing so, I do not seek to slew off yet another new sub-genre from the ever-bifurcating nomenclature of conceptual image making. Rather, the term is a useful way in which to understand a means of creating an quasi-devotional art that is nevertheless critical and dialectic, invoking self awareness in the viewer and drawing attention to the artist’s role within the construction of the image. I use the word ‘devotional’ here carefully, and in order to clarify the point, a contrasting practice might be useful, since I do not mean to suggest that Marti’s work is in any way sentimental or spiritualist – plainly it is not. By contrast, we might look to another practice that combines weaving and suggestions of portraiture: the use of human hair in ‘mourning jewellery’ – a centuries-old English tradition that reached its zenith in the Victorian era (and which has since all but vanished), in which strands of a deceased loved-one’s hair are knitted into patterns and embedded in miniature portraits, pendants or broaches. The aim of such a practice was to preserve an aspect of a person’s essence beyond death. Mourning broaches are fetish items – in the anthropological sense of superstitious objects with quasi-magical powers – with a private audience of one or two mourners. By contradistinction, Marti’s paintings, with their public engagement in the gallery circuit, are closer in spirit to forms of contemporary monument – albeit with an elusive and enigmatic core that is never fully disclosed to that public.
A more fruitful parallel might be found in the work of the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96), one of Marti’s key influences. The latter’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) consisted of an installation of a pile of cellophane-wrapped sweets that gallery visitors are allowed to take away and consume. The work is essentially a devotional portrait with a twist on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: the subject of the work was the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an Aids-related illness in the year that the work was made. Untitled (portrait of Ross in LA) suggests with a morbid and subversive intonation that Laycock might live on through the transubstantiation of sweets into human flesh, assisted by the perhaps-unwitting gallery-goers sweet tooth. It is this oddly generous subversiveness – quietly critiquing the viewer’s appetite for art and the mainstream press’ fear-mongering of the spread of Aids by infection, whilst adoring a loved one in a public anti-monumental monument – that gives Gonzales-Torres’ work such a potent edge. Marti’s works are – likewise – platforms for enacting a public tribute to persons whose secrets are nonetheless discretely withheld behind an abstract and inscrutable surface. It is, however, important to note certain key differences between the two artists. Gonzalez-Torres’ work is an art of absence, utilizing the notion of the dematerialization of objecthood prevalent in late 1960s/early 1970s conceptual art as an analogue for the loss of human life wrought by HIV/Aids. By contrast, Marti’s works exist in a world that has already traversed the high-tide of identity politics in the 1990s and the shocking effects of Aids, and as such are often concerned not so much with loss and mourning, but the surprise of still being alive; not with the migration of souls but with bare life; not with absence but with presence. His paintings emphasise the rich flatness of a person’s sensorial, sexual and emotional existence – the facticity of bodily presence.
How might we theorise such a celebration of pure existence? Perhaps, we might listen again to Gonzalez-Torres, who in an interview with Robert Storr in 2005 stated his particular, pragmatic, take on the French philosopher Louis Althusser’s writings: “Something what I tell my students is to read once, then if you have problems with it read it a second time. Then if you still have problems, get drunk and read it a third time with a glass of wine next to you and you might get something out of it, but always think about practice. The theory in the books is to make you live better and that’s what, I think, all theory should do. It’s about trying to show you certain ways of constructing reality.” It is not known which text by Althusser Gonzalez-Torres was concerned with here. However, in discussing Marti’s paintings it seems fruitful to look to Althusser’s essay ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in which the latter describes a hidden tradition of the ‘materialism of the encounter’. In the essay, Althusser outlines and theorizes a long and hitherto undocumented history of philosophy that extends from Lucretius to Epicurus, Spinoza, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger and Derrida – writers for whom materials are present as facts of a human life subject to chance and forms of individual, social and collective agency. He notes that in the work of such thinkers: ‘It is no longer a statement of the Reason and Origin of things, but a theory of their contingency and a recognition of fact, of the fact of contingency, the fact of the subordination of necessity to contingency, and the fact of the forms which ‘gives form’ to the effect of the encounter.’ As such, these writers tend to reject notions of essence, idealism and teleology.
To return to Marti’s practice, it is evident that what he presents is not the essence of a person, but the material margins of their everyday existences – beaded necklaces, rosaries, domestic scourers, melted plastics, and taut expanses of sexualised polyester, polypropylene and industrial rubber . These are traces of encounters in which the woven materials act as metaphors not so much for a person’s evanescent being, than as redoubled forms of their material presence. Here, for example, a person’s taste – or at least Marti’s sense of that person’s taste – might be key. For example, in the exhibition ‘You make me feel like love, peace and happiness’ at Gallery 4A in Sydney in 2001, all the works are named after a woman called Linda – a former neighbour of the artist who’s rather egocentric, self obsessed persona ( or something like that: when I make those work I tried not to choose the color that the subject admires, but I color that is a direct response of my reading of them. Linda loves to be admired, desired, requires attention. She comes through as a strong woman, but there is a fragility that I pick with the use of the delicate tubular mesh wrapping the core polyproplyne rope ) prissy taste for bright, warm colours are manifested as red, pink, orange and white paintings and minimalist objects woven from polyester rope and industrial tubular mesh . Here, on the gallery floor, Marti’s re-working of a minimalist cube looks hilariously akin to small forest of footstools. This, of course, is wickedly impious portraiture that takes both Linda’s bourgeois taste and the ideals of sculptural discourse down a peg.
Another sample ??
2. Knots of Desire
In order to unpick the meaning of these paintings, it is necessary to give an account of the life that has been distilled into them. Marti first began weaving in school craft lessons when he was 11 years old, and he had relished mastering the skill of turning bare thread into ply. Later, adolescence kicked in and cultural pressures and the impending uncertainties of manhood put feminine activities such as clothwork beyond the pale. After leaving school, Marti set to study business and he also (goes with the duality embedded in both my life and the nature of the work) himself up as a freelance fashion designer, a job he held for four years (he continues to draw upon the technical skills and material knowhow of the fashion industry needed to produce his large and intricately crafted woven paintings). In 1989, Marti, then aged 25, was diagnosed with HIV. At this time he was working as a trade commissioner in Australia, and ‘just trying to stay in control’ of a life that seemed on the verge of slipping from him. At the age of 33, he contracted pneumonia – an attack that was so serious he thought he was going to die. Finally, in the late 1990s, he began to turn to art, painting abstract forms on canvas]. More than colour or abstraction, Marti was obsessed with the idea of surfaces: with their fragility and dermis-like properties. When he finally hit on the idea of weaving his surfaces from coloured materials rather than daubing them with paint, everything began to make sense. It was, after all, a return to a creative impulse.
When we look at Marti’s paintings with his life experiences in mind, it is important to understand also the spirit with which they are made. Each work is shot through with a sense of levity, irony, and wit coupled with an unabashed commitment to sexual politics. Take, for example, the brilliantly subversive series Variations in a Serious Black Dress (2003-04): a group of void-like squares of woven polyester, nylon and rubber, that recall Frank Stella’s proto-minimalist Black Paintings (1958-60) (the title also recall Stella’s usage of the term ‘variations’ in later works). It is almost impossible not to notice that these works are keyed in to the sadomasochistic scene’s aesthetic of tightly bound ropes, straps and girdles. Variations in a Serious Black Dress, no. 11, which is subtitled Strictly Porn (2003), is a modernist-looking grid composed of fetishistic black industrial rubber. Seen up close, each loop and stitch suggests constraint, entanglement, control and domination. The sexual/S&M nature of these works is often spelled out in titles such as Lost in Desire (2005), The Last Sins of St Francis (2004), and – more bluntly – A Hundred Lashes (2006). Similarly punning is the golden shimmer (or golden shower? No in that case, the work TROUGHMAN (THE YELLOW PERIL) , 2006 relates to a golden shower_ refered underneath) fully refers to of Give a bit of Hmm to me (2007), whose precious constituent materials include gold thread, brass ball chains, metallic braid and Swarovski glass. No doubt, even with such hints, the coded undercurrents of such a work might pass by some viewers (the elderly or very young, perhaps?). In fact, part of the delight of these works is the notion that some viewers will not get the references. In his exhibition ‘The Seven Pleasures of Snow White’ at the Sherman Galleries in Sydney (2006), Marti installed a large 180cm-tall yellow woven cube titled Troughman (the Yellow Peril) (2006). Resembling a large modernist cube, it in fact pays homage to a local Sydney man, well known in certain circles, who gets his kicks from laying in the troughs in men’s toilets and being urinated on by strangers. In these works, sexuality, domination, sadomasochism, as well as religion and aesthetic pleasure are fused. If we were to look for real examples of materialist ‘encounters’, these works suggest that the fetish scene is a good place to start.
Of course, Marti’s works are much more than emblems of a subcultural scene. Rather, they frequently utilize its imagery to deflate the rhetoric of high culture. The monochromatic white painting Canvas (2007), maybe we can include here as well BOOK OF MIRACLES )2011, a dualistic play between the industrial polish surface and crafted emotional skin, for example, is made not from the titular fabric, but from the artist’s almost trademark weave of polyester and nylon rope. Ultimately, Marti asserts that he wants to bring the beauty of minimalism ‘down to earth’ – a statement that places these works within a postminimalist discourse. More specifically, they recall the evolution of what might be dubbed queer minimalism: a coded look that winks knowingly at the norms of certain puritanical strains of minimalism. Critic Jörg Heiser has explored wider facets what he calls ‘perverted minimalism’ – which he sees evident in art practices as diverse as Eva Hesse and Richard Artschwager. His persuasive argument is in fact, that minimalism has always been somewhat ‘perverted’ by aesthetic pleasure, metaphor, and the messy anti-formalism of postminimalist practices that arrived almost in chronological parallel with a putative rarefied minimalism. Indeed, we might state that, of all art forms, it is minimalism – with its advocacy of surface over depth, and what the art critic Michael Fried notoriously called its ‘theatricality’ – that places it squarely in the path of queer appropriation.
In order to understand the complex location of Marti’s practice in recent art history, and to return some agency to our understanding of it, we must also highlight strategies adopted by Second Wave feminist practitioners in the 1970s, which were deliberately targeted at the assumptions of the (male) modernist avant-garde. Notably, these strategies entailed a return to craft and decoration in the face of a modernist vision of art-as-art. Pioneering feminists such as Joyce Kozloff and the Pattern and Design Movement of the 1970s sought to place the term ‘decorative’ back within an art lexicon that had hitherto placed, as she put it, ‘women’s art above men’s art’. Reading this carefully, it is clear that despite Kozloff desire to return to surfaces, her rationale was based on yet another spurious notion of essence that Marti’s work renounces. For, Kozloff’s essentializing analysis defines and limits as much as the patriarchal art history that she critiques: what, after all, constitutes ‘men’s art’ and ‘women’s art’? Are they not both cultural constructs? Are the borders not porous? The fundamental queer critique proffered by Marti’s paintings is their dual resistance to the discredited (and never real) minimalist denial of the pleasure of haptic experience, and its resistance to the homogenizing conceits of certain practices within Second Wave feminism. What they explore, rather, is a realm of bound and unbound desire. We might go further and note that the sadomasochism in the works forms a pointed comment on the restrictions placed on individuals by society at large, and suggest ways that social agents might take hold of known images of domination (for example, the Nazi-police-torture aesthetic of the S&M scene) in order to appropriate its agency.
3. Painting and Video: Conflict and Contemplation
The notion of duality is fundamental to Marti’s practice, not least in his exploration of the tensions between the private (sex, sexuality) and the public (the display of art work). Marti makes two bodies of work: painting and video. How might we understand this doubling? Are they complimentary or antagonistic? Certainly Marti’s paintings and videos could not be more different in their temperament: his videos are frequently highly explicit, featuring sexual encounters and personal stories orchestrated by the artist precisely for the purpose of producing an art work. His paintings, by contrast, are quiet, contemplative entities, redolent of an individualized skill and a host of undisclosed subjectivities. Indeed, the problem of reading Marti’s work as a whole is rendered more acute by the manner in which he frequently presents his paintings and videos together in a gallery space, often partnering works of different media together. For example, in his recent exhibition ‘Bacon’s Dog’ at Breenspace in Sydney, Marti showed the painting It’s All About Peter (2009) alongside the video Bacon’s Dog (2010). In the latter, Peter, a middle aged Australian arts professional is shown in the throes of his first real – mind blowing and identity defining – sexual experience. By contrast, It’s All About Peter is a painting constructed from cheap plastic objects collected by the subject of the video over a ten year period (traces, perhaps of an underemployed aesthete seeking beauty in the everyday rather than in the bedroom?) Marti has partially melted these garishly colourful buckets and spades, and arranged them on an armature according to hue and tone.
How do these two bodies of work relate to one another? Might we define it as a conflictual relationship, based on a dialectical opposition between the two art forms and their modus operandi? Collision as practice and concept is certainly a key aspect of Marti’s videos, which often document a subject’s cathartic or painful real-life experience as they confront the ruthlessly penetrative (aggressively male?) lens. Repeatedly, the videos portray men admitting to feelings of loneliness, sexual inadequacy and deep psychological pain. The videos are not for the faint hearted. In Time is the Fire in Which we Burn a Glaswegian rent boy recalls having marathon group sex whilst high on crack cocaine; in Disclosure (2009), an elderly Scottish man appears wretchedly unhappy with his own body (he is fat and suffers the indignity of piles). As artistic parallels to psychotherapy sessions, the video works mine the depths of a subject’s psyche, and can be seen as tools for the subject’s better self-understanding and queues to enacting a better life (not unlike Gonzalez-Torres’ reading of Althusser). Certainly, Marti’s video work relates to other practices that unsettle the ethics of display. Elsewhere in this monograph, Kirsten Lloyd has insightfully explored Marti’s video work in relationship to contemporary artists such as Artur Żmijewski and Santiago Sierra. Like them, Marti’s videos are deliberately self-reflexive and imply a degree of manipulation (even coercion) on the part of the artist. We frequently see Marti himself in bed talking and coaxing stories from the men who lie or sit beside him. Such works tread the line between exploitation and exhibitionism, posing difficult question about the relationship between the author of a work and the subject, as well as the viewer and the consumption of art. In Bacon’s Dog, the experience is a positive one (Peter, the man in the video, now has a steady boyfriend) – although the experience was certainly a difficult one – and the positive outcome is certainly not necessary to the realisation of the work. Needless to say, Marti’s videos are at once compelling and uncomfortable to watch.
In this reading, we could say that the videos and paintings are fundamentally unalike. The videos are cathartic and the paintings are sublimatory; the videos are explicit and representative, the paintings are abstract; the videos offer the subject the possibility of defining their own self-image, while the paintings lack the option of feedback. As much as this makes sense, we might seek alternative ways to read Marti’s twin body of works. They may be viewed not as conflictual or antagonistic, but as holistically coherent: both aspects of the artist’s practice might be said to be fundamentally similar. One model for such a unity within an apparently split practice would be Andy Warhol, whose film and painting output were similarly centred on an expanded notion of portraiture. But here too, the comparison falls apart rapidly. While Warhol’s films placed the performer in the role of exhibitionist and the viewer in the role of voyeur, they also suggested that the mechanism of the camera apparatus was determinate (everyone under its gaze would be reduced to a frustrated celebrity); likewise in his screen-printed portraits, the individual loses his or her agency to the serialism of the machine age, each face being subjected to a technological process that reduces their presence to a blank icon. Warhol’s art is modernist and technocratic; he wished to be a machine, and to produce machine-like art. If his diverse practices were internally coherent, it was because of a vision of modernity that has since been superseded. While Marti certainly draws on Warhol’s mix of anti-humanism and Catholic-devotional image making, he moves it into a territory that Warhol would have found alien and un-modern.
I would argue that it is more accurate to view Marti’s video and painting as instantiating not an internal logic of conflict or a secret singularity, but rather as enacting a form of multiplicity in which contradictions are accepted as a political and aesthetic strategy. From a British perspective, I would push the associations drawn by Lloyd to Artur Żmijewski and Santiago Sierra back towards works that are both agonistic (to borrow Chantal Mouffe’s terminology) and concerned with the politics of identity: Jayne Parker’s Almost Out (1984), Michael Curran’s Amami Se Vuoi (1994), or Isaac Julian’s Trussed (1996), as well as the video portraits of Jordan Baseman and Hilary Lloyd. This genealogy might enable us to more easily touch on theoretical discourses fomented in the 1980s and 1990s, which unsettles the notion that a singular artistic or sexual identity is either necessary or possible. Theorist Judith Butler has pointed out that the notion of gender upends the very foundations of a stable and fixed identity from which we may claim to recuperate meaning. In her analysis, gender is based not on a pre-given quality of a person (as one’s physical sex might be), but rather on a set of cultural norms and codes. As such, gender itself can be performed anew to create new modes between the hard and fast categories (for example, Kozloff’s ‘men’s art’ and ‘women’s art’.) Such an analysis leads to the notion that Marti’s split practice offers both the audience and the artist a set of polarities that should not be synthesised or defined under a single essence – save, perhaps, the leitmotif of multiplicity itself.
Finally, we must note a central modus operandi that unifies Marti’s practice. It is performative creation – the notion that one might instantiate an image for oneself through an act of image making. As he weaves a portrait of a subject, Marti at the same moment inscribes his own identity. While it is a truism that all portraiture is a form of self-portraiture, it is also clear that Marti’s works are constantly doubled so that subject and author comingle. It is important that the artist continues to occupy the role of maker – as he did aged 11 in school craft lessons – using his own hands to fabricate the works. Marti operates as a double agent, between media and subject/author positions. When the artist melted together plastic objects in It’s All About Peter, his act of image-construction knitted together his own subjectivity with that of Peter’s. In The Pleasure Chest (2007), the artist entwines his own magpie sensibilities with that of the countless people whose necklaces and rosaries form the work’s surface (his own mother’s necklace is apparently in there somewhere too). In such works, the motivation is at one with the videos, which knits together the interviewer and interviewee in a ballet of problematic ethical questions and self-inscription. These works are about surfaces and material presence, conflict and contemplation, portraiture and abstraction. Depth is besides the point.
By Colin Perry
Publishers PDF – Hatje Cantz- DANI MARTI
i in Conversation with the author, 18 August 2011.
ii ‘Etre un Espion: Interview with Robert Storr’, ArtPress,
January 1995,
pp.24-32. Available at: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixInterv.html
iii Louis Althusser, ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87 (London: Verso, 1996), pp.163-207.
iv Althusser, p.170.
v in Conversation with the author, 18 August 2011.
vi in Conversation with the author, 18 August 2011.
vii In an interview for Mousse magazine with Maurizio Catalan shortly before he died, Gonzalez-Torres noted the advantages of having ‘coded’ works:
‘You know, when I had a show at the Hirschhorn, Senator Stevens, who is one of the most homophobic anti-gay senators, said he was going to come to the opening and I thought he’s going to have a really hard time trying to explain to his constituency how pornographic and homoerotic two clocks side by side are. He came there looking for dicks and asses. There was nothing like that.’
The interview is available online at: http://www.moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=59
viii Jörg Heiser, ‘Surface Tension’, Kaleidoscope, 2009. Available online at: http://kaleidoscope-press.com/magazine/?p=mag&iss=4&art=2#art2
ix ‘Art and Objecthood’, Minimal Art a Critical Anthology, ed Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p.116.
x Joyce Kozloff, eds Kristine Stiles, Peter Howard Selz, Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) p .154
xi This is clearly expressed in artist Hito Steyerl’s video Lovely Andrea (2007), a film centred on Japan’s self-suspension scene. Pablo Lafuente notes that Steyerl looks at ‘local and global structures of political control and domination, the position of women within those structures, the constructed nature of documentary images, the modes of availability of images through video and the internet, the commercial value of those images (including artworks) and the subversive potential of submission and role play.’ Pablo Lafuente, ‘For a Populist Cinema: On Hito Steyerl’s November and Lovely Andrea‘, Afterall, Autumn/Winter, 2008
xii Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (Routledge, 1990)
Should be add those two works somewhere?
George, 2001
Portrait of a friend, architect , a sense of narrative within the work.. from subte randomness to strict pattern.
Collection NRAG, australia
Shadow after shadow, (portrait of the artist’s mother at the age of 73) take 2, 2007 / Llorona, video
Portrait done of my mother after she suffered a heart attack. Small rope, delicate, gentle , fragile surface, dark as shadow.. very demanding in the making as it irequired a long time. Video: her listening to classical mushic and letting it go.
Collection MCA Sydney.
One Breath below consciousness, 2008 / David, video 2007 (commissioned by Glasgow International)
The work is done with white ropes that have been dragged behind the car along different road surfaces ( from bitumen, to mud ) , the surface of the rope subject to stressed and torn..
David: a homeless person drifting in and out of conciousness.
Book of miracles , 2011 (as I explained beforein the text)
portrait of joni waka as a fallen angel crying behind the
wall 2006-2011
codpiece , 2011 ?
matt leave it up to you..
lets talk