DANI MARTI
b. 1963, Barcelona
Lives and works in Sydney
DANI MARTI was born 1963 Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works Sydney, Australia and Glasgow, Scotland. Marti works across video, installation and public art. His unorthodox woven and filmic works turns to wider notions of portraiture and sexuality in Modernism, Minimalism, and geometric abstraction.
Oscillating between hopefulness and failure, Dani Marti’s 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. His relation to his subject is consistently fixed: an obsessive, laborious, and often desire-driven attempt to represent something of his subject that is beyond appearances. Something of a deep-rooted lust between him and his subject, something of an essence, something, in other words, beyond surface. But it is surface—quite literally—that we as viewers are left with in Marti’s work, nothing objectively closer to ‘the real’ other than what one chooses to see and read into it. Marti’s work is thus an explicit reminder that viewer subjectivity is the only place where the portrait can truly be generated. His gestures toward it are merely our starting points.
“For Marti, both weaving and (video) taping, represent an act of bondage, a ritual which enables the artist to ‘possess’ the person that is portrayed. Aesthetics, pleasure, fantasy and security come into play reminding us of Foucault’s ideas about violence as an exercise of power that negatively affects freedom, and through which the dignity of the other is perceived under a new light. It’s a question of faith, of mutual consensus, but also and most importantly about portraiture as an impossible act.”
- Paco Barragan
WALL HANGINGS
/ GAGPROJECTS, 2024
Lingering behind the woven works and assemblages of Dani Marti’s third solo exhibition at GAGPROJECTS – simply titled Wall Hangings – is a body longing to be represented and remembered. Wall Hangings continues Marti’s longstanding assertion that abstraction is portraiture, a threshold to what he calls ‘sexual minimalism’. Emptied out and beyond conventional recognition, the body represented on these walls belongs to the artist, now in his sixties, and grappling with the conundrums of aging, health, mortality and existence as a queer man living with HIV since 1989. Stitched and woven back together, this body is like an old coat reunited with its corporeal imprint. Like a seat still warm from human skin.
Marti’s wall hangings are a visual and tactile invitation to human connection and intimacy – elegies for self and others. Polyester ropes of pink, blue and grey are woven into a grid as a tribute to murdered British transgender teen, Brianna Ghey (2006–2023). Elsewhere, a collection of Tupperware containers once belonging to art collector Peter Fay – the subject of Marti’s earlier work of sculptural and video portraiture, Bacon’s Dog (2010) – are torched into fleshy landscapes, referencing bodily interiority. Where skin meets what lies beneath is where hand meets heart, igniting transformation within a swirling landscape of torn and exposed flesh.
Indeed, the hand is what keeps the thread of connection alive for Marti. It’s as if each work is imbued with human traces of the handmade/handheld as a counterpoint to the stone-cold modes of production rife in the machine age and beyond. What lies beyond is the same void uniting us all, tacked to the walls, a public hanging. He regards one work as an anxious act of self-revelation amid the flickering white-noise rabble-rousing of social media. Like dust particles floating in space, Marti trades one abyss for another as his customised road reflectors catch light if not fire.
Wall Hangings. Nothing could be more utilitarian and unadorned as a title. But with it, Marti sets the emotive stage for the stories untold, histories new and old. None blunter than the art historical reference to Wall Hangings, the landmark 1969 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, ‘devoted to the contemporary weaver whose work places him [sic] not in the fabric industry but in the world of art’. Ironic considering the ‘universal’ male pronoun was applied to an exhibition with a gender ratio of twenty-five female to three male artists. Evidence of the gendering of craft-based practices, then. And the queering of that same tradition, now.
Previously, Marti shunned being categorised as a queer artist, despite the flagrant homoeroticism of his video practice or the ‘sissy abstraction’ – a term coined by Australian artist Peter Maloney (1953–2023) – that ensues when the male frat house of modernism is queered. Marti repressed a queer political position that is now in full bloom, ironically, through the so-called purity (or danger?) of abstraction: ‘In the past, I kept saying, “My work is not about gay art. I'm not a gay artist.” With age, I'm starting to realise, “It is about gay issues, gay life, the gay body.” And so, I'm starting to be more relaxed about the queerness that I have repressed in the past.’
Wall Hangings is where Marti is hanging it all out to dry: past anxieties commingling with the tense present against a backdrop of specific cultural histories. We see how the gendered art/craft debate of one art historical moment (New York, 1969) coexisted culturally alongside the urgent (but not yet intersectional) politics of gay liberation birthed from the Stonewall Riots (also New York, 1969). It’s like Marti wishes to underscore how past curatorial gestures can ignite queer capacities for remembrance further down the track. This is what, for instance, the AIDS Memorial Quilt says of queer ‘craftivism’ in another context (or at the very least, the life-affirming power to memorialise through making). Or what, for Marti, the wall does for the ground when abstraction is asked to tell stories and pave the path forward.
Words by Daniel Mudie Cunningham
BLACK SUN
/ Freemantle Arts Centre, 2016
FAC hosted Dani Marti’s first WA solo show as part of the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival. Including a generous offering of new and never before shown hand-woven canvases, audio and video works, Black Sun is both seductive and confronting. Marti uniquely combines video and textiles to create portraits which reflect upon encounters with family, lovers and strangers. His works are intense in their scrutiny, alive in their passion and ask poignant questions about sexuality, intimacy, the efficacy of relationships, encounters and the need to share in others’ stories.
SLOW SHOW
/ 2015
In the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery Marti will exhibit new sculptural wall pieces. The artist’s previous solo exhibition, RUN, RUN, RUN, was infused with high hues of colour, and sexuality by contrast Slow Show is presented to us in shades of black. The artist has had a long fascination with black - embedded in his Spanish heritage. Most recently, ‘Armour’ was his proposal for ‘Dark Heart’ at the Adelaide Biennial 2014, as a response to Goya’s black paintings. Marti states “ Black slows me down with each step I take towards it”.
ADELAIDE BIENNIAL
'DARK HEART'
/ 2014
Dani Marti’s Armour is a series of suspended sculptures woven in synthetic rope, leather and industrial rubber. The artist’s viewing of Samurai armour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provoked the creation of this series. Marti, who trained in Catalan tapestry techniques, has employed the same knot used in the body-wrapping forms of a Samurai’s garments to create his own shadow warriors. A selection of etchings from Goya’s Los Caprichos, drawn from the Gallery’s collection, were included in Marti’s Adelaide Biennial installation, staging a conversation between two artists of Spanish descent across more than 200 years of human history.
THAT'S IT
/ 2011
Ovid tells us that Arachne was a woman from humble origins. her distinction lay in her skill as a weaver: nymphs were drawn from throughout the island of Lydia to see her work; even Athena, the goddess of crafts, was moved. Admirers sometimes suggested that Athena had been her teacher, but Arachne denied it, claiming she could prove her supremacy if only the goddess would compete. And so the two came head to head. Athena wove scenes showing the fates of mortals who had challenged the gods: transfigured into mountains, birds. Arachne answered with scenes denouncing the sex crimes committed by the gods when they took on the forms of bulls, swans, satyrs. When Athena saw the splendour of her rival’s work, she shredded it, beat her with a spindle, and turned her into a spider. and so Arachne’s descendants weave on to this day.
Artists, traditionally melancholics, are sometimes said to be born under the sign of Saturn, but it is easier to appreciate Dani Marti under the patronage of Arachne. For if he is to have a patron, it must be one that comprehends what seems to be the very stark division between his work as a painter/weaver, and a film-maker whose subjects probe the sexual lives of others. This book treats those practices separately, though the puzzle of their connection remains. Colin Perry resolves it by identifying what we could call a complementarity of pain and desire: “The videos are cathartic” he says, “the paintings are sublimatory.” The fact that the paintings sublimate feeling should remind us how indebted they are to Modernist abstraction and Minimalist sculpture – though they offer an eccentric and expressive version of that tradition. They are tributes and fetishes whose reek of bodily yearning puts them at a far distance from the kinds of Modernist objects we usually contemplate with aesthetic disinterest. The Pleasure Chest (2007) tangles necklaces and Rosary beads into a design with the all-over infinitude of a Jackson Pollock and the rich materiality of a Piero Manzoni. Meanwhile, as a filmmaker, Marti delivers catharsis by drawing us into his subjects’ lives of desire: Time is the fire in which we burn (2009), for example, telegraphs the confessions of John, a male prostitute.
But if Marti follows Arachne in one respect, he follows Athena in another: he refuses to judge. For the Greeks, morals were a human concern: the gods, immortal, were free of such taboos; they were thought to live as humans might if they only dared do as they pleased. In that sense – if in no other – John is a god, and some part of the compelling power of tales such as his is the narrator’s apparent indifference to conventional morality. Certainly, Marti isn’t going to deliver any judgment himself.
Or might Marti be neither Arachne nor Athena? Might he instead be Mercury, who traffics messages between the gods and the mortals? After all, his films often take a transactional form. Money might not change hands, but a deal is still done – Marti supplying the listening ear and the sympathy, his confessors providing the revelation. In that exchange – as in so many involving money – moral judgment is suspended. Marti never seeks to deny the appeal of his narrator’s tales, nor to insist that they are the honest and truthful product of documentary enquiry. His narrators, as they describe their experiences, are complicit in his probing; we, his audience, are accomplices, too.
If desire is the common force that binds the strands of Marti’s practice, on a more typological level the strands are also united by his ambition to portray. Of course, these are not conventional portraits, pictures that mistake a visual likeness for a spiritual essence: he does not present faces as windows-on-the-soul. Marti’s painting-objects are metaphorical, his films are allegorical: both use one thing to describe another. Beads describe their wearer; tales of sex describe a life with or without love. Marti doesn’t pretend to offer up the whole, essential individual to our gaze. Indeed, his work insists on the fact that identity is not a stable essence that can be recognised and captured again and again; instead it is something performed, and it changes each time in the performance. The damaged narrators in Marti’s films may well feel themselves to be “mining their souls” when they speak of their experiences, but what they surely come to realise is that that soul is worn on their sleeve – it can be changed at will. A tale told one way offers one version of a truth; told another way it offers another version; neither offers a more honest reflection of feelings than the other.
Finally, though, if it is true, as Marti suggests, that subjectivity is no more than skin deep, then it is surely a folly to go looking for any common strands in his work at all. He makes objects, he makes films; one urge finds its outlet in one form, another finds its outlet in another. The result can be the basis of a rich public discussion, not merely soulful contemplation.
Morgan Falconer
(Foreword from ‘Dani Marti’, Hatje Cantz, 2012)
MISCELLANEOUS
