Syndicate: text

["Ryszard W. Kluszczynski" <rwk@krysia.uni.lodz.pl>]

Please find enclosed the text of Croatian artist Dalibor Martinis,
published last year in his catalogue prepared for his prtesentation at
Venice Biennal.


Ryszard W. Kluszczyñski

The Material Versus the Virtual
On Dialectics of Dalibor Martinis' Art


1
Dalibor Martinis belongs to the first generation of European artists who
employed electronic technologies in their creative activities. It was
already a quarter of a century ago when Martinis produced his first video
piece. Since then, the medium he had chosen has undergone a significant
transformation. In its incubation period it was perceived as an important
and helpful a technological novelty, however aesthetically dependent and
reliant on the existing arts, while broadening their scope of expression.
Video was useful to happeners, as well as it was an ideal tool for
conceptual activities. Besides, it was regarded as a media and artistic
continuation of film . Nowadays it enjoys a status of an independent art
discipline. In fact in comparison with the presently developing kinds of
interactive multimedia art it seems already classic. After years of having
functioned in disperse, in an aesthetic Diaspora, video art has finally
found its stable place in the viewers' awareness, in the history of art, in
the gallery and museum structure and in their collections. It can boast of
its masters, its genres, styles and poetics.
2
It was very early in his career when Dalibor Martinis specified his
artistic interest. Hardly had he graduated a fine arts academy he turned
his attention towards media art, towards video, which ever since has
remained the area of his artistic activity. Moreover, the internal logic of
his work has been subsequently, and not without a deep-grounded reason,
recognised as identical with media art characteristics, i.e. with the
system of its essential features . This fact clearly shows to what an
extent has Martinis decided to identify his artistic career with the media.
However, it is not solely the relation to the medium which is a constant
quality in Dalibor Martinis' work. Almost from its very beginning a
characteristic internal tension could have been sensed, a dual conflict has
marked the works' structure. At the beginning the opposition was of formal
and semantic nature. The central element organising his video tapes'
structure, as well as his video installations, was a pair of contradictory
view-points (e.g. in VIEW TO ANOTHER VIEW, 1986), opposing discourses
(BLACK AND WHITE, 1985), or a collision of construction and narration
(SUPPER AT LAST, 1990-92). A seemingly trivial concept of the presence of
the sign at the absence of the object turned out to be an interesting basis
of the structure and conflict of some works (TAVOLA CALDA, 1987, or
aforementioned SUPPER AT LAST). The formal dualism was rather frequently
linked to and underlined by a conflict man - woman relation as in CHANOYU
(1983) or in BLACK AND WHITE (Dalibor's collaboration with Sanja Ivekovic
on some of the tapes was undoubtedly a conductive factor here). The
relation is rooted in the universal opposition of male and female elements
and however miscellaneously verbalised (for instance in the yin-yang
opposition), it forms a multi-periodic (multi)cultural pattern and a basis
for various world view constructions. It was actually the above mentioned
opposition that was of particular interest to the artist .
Nevertheless, the prevalent opposition which for many years has built the
character of Dalibor Martinis' work and which also unites both mentioned
aporetic structures (the formal and semantic one) was the antinomy of form
and medium. Martinis has begun his artistic dialogue with video in the
epoch when analytical and conceptual tendencies were dominating in the
European art. Due to these circumstances Dalibor concerned himself with the
technological aspect of this kind of art and what is more, his imagination
and his art gained a foundation for its dialogue-like and dualistic
structures. Narrations undertaken by Martinis always referred equally well
to the context in which they developed. In other words, they conversed with
the medium itself. Thus, the meta-artistic discourse is undertaken as a
parallel to the artistic one.
3
In recent years, however, one can observe a new phenomenon, a new quality
arise. A progressing process of overcoming and nullifying the oppositions,
which until recently were fundamental for Dalibor's works is appearing. The
process does not lead to the abolishment of the structural variety and
complexity of the works. On the contrary, we can see at present the
antagonistic relation of a work's elements or aspects yield to their
co-existence. In this new, appearing paradigm, the relation between the
material and the virtual aspect of the piece is gaining ground and taking
up the position in the centre.
Numerous excellent examples of the new Martinis' stand are shown at the
"Observatorium"  exhibition. Installations presented in its scope represent
various types of relations between the material and the virtual. Put
together they create a paradigm of co-existence. The exhibition actually
presents the possible forms the meeting of the two spheres. In actual fact,
the variety of  forms the virtual can take: light, sound or/and image (e.g.
sound installation STORMTELLERS, 1997), or presumably a narrative or a
presented world, is by no means less numerous than the variety of forms of
the material.
Narration, by the way, spreads in Martinis' work beyond the regions planned
for it. It happens that it trespasses the borders of the piece's structure.
Martinis' art addresses a belief that the story has not to be told even if
we want it to appear in the artistic communication discourse. We can refer
to stories each of the viewers carries inside of her/him, and that is what
Martinis does. In such a case, a work of art functions as a factor
liberating stories, it provokes their placement in the process of artistic
communication. At the same time it is one of the ways of neutralising the
conflict-bearing contradiction between the material and the virtual aspect
of a work of art, the latter being represented here by the story. Narration
is perceived as a physical component of a work of art and it is
incorporated into its structure in a way similar to and governed by the
same rules as its material elements.
An illustrative example of this form of co-existence of material and
virtual elements in the structure of a piece is the installation entitled
ECLIPSE OF THE MOON (1997). Here, as well as in many other Martinis' works,
both spheres are combined in a dynamic relationship heading towards the
state of equilibrium. Time and again the one or the other aspect gains over
and influences decisively the form of the whole, but anyway each of those
states is solely a transitional one and in some time it yields to another
one, it eventually and inevitably recedes into a flow of incoming
transformations.
Searching for and establishing a temporary and unstable equilibrium has
become the main area of Dalibor Martinis' artistic experiments. A game
between the material and virtual of a piece and of art itself has been with
grandeur and in a virtuoso way realised in CIRCLES BETWEEN SURFACES
(1994-95). The narration here, apparently belonging completely to the
virtual sphere, reveals its deep dependence from the material, the physical
sphere of the work, but to a careful viewer it discloses its true
character, that it is spread between the two spheres. The piece as a whole,
in its two-dimensionality (material-virtual), becomes in this case a
narration itself, and simultaneously it reveals the materiality of the
virtual spheres and the virtuality of matter.
That is how the term "game" introduced above turns out to be the basic
structural category of the latest phase of Dalibor Martinis' oeuvre. The
game takes place between the material and the virtual, between the space
and time, the narration and its frames, the past (tradition) and the
present, the art work and its recipient. 
4
In the scope of the creative strategy shaped in the way described in the
previous paragraphs, the recipient is granted a specific and responsible
position. Being a carrier of the stories, which are actualised and
incorporated in the piece's structure and with the mediative role of the
work of art,  s/he becomes at the same time a hero of the narrative, a
figure spoken by the story. S/he becomes an observation object for
her/himself. It applies to the installation ECLIPSE, discussed above. It is
even more visible in the installation COMA (1997), where the viewer is
provoked to interfere and it is not possible that s/he does not see her/his
presence in the image. The button pressed by her/him is located in this way
that the shadow of her/his hand inevitably appears as a part of the image.
In a lot of other works projectors are placed so that the receiver cannot
avoid his unintentional inference - and thus s/he becomes a work's
component, an object and subject of observation.
A desire to include the recipient into the work's structure was in a way
ever-present in Dalibor Martinis' work, including the pieces prior to his
entering the realm of media art. The installation MODUL N&Z from 1969 may
serve as an example here. In this work the viewers' movements have been
incorporated into their reception experience as their indispensable
element. The beginning of the very consistent and visible entangling of the
viewer in the video installation structure, in my opinion, can be traced
down to the project ON YOUR OWN (1990).
Speaking about the viewer's presence in the piece structure, it should be
underlined that the artist himself makes his position in the work no less
visible. A lot of his video works take a form (or structure) of
performance, and numerous tapes and installations bear trace of material
artist's presence. Juxtaposing those two strategies - the one which
emphasises the author's presence and the other which includes the viewer in
the frame of the work may serve for another evidence of Martinis' tendency
to transform the structure antinomy into the poetics of co-existence, which
has been so visibly present in the installation COMA, discussed above. 
This way of viewer treatment and her/his new position in the structure of
artistic communication is also a result of influence of the concept of
interactivity, which presently transforms (multi)media art, on the
definition and the process of reception of the work . Martinis approaches
interactivity with some caution and reticence, but he does not rejects it
completely. It is not his artistic activities' objective, but it becomes
their structural aspect  and component. It helps to develop the strategy of
an artist who wishes the viewer took the challenge as a task for
her/himself. Activity on the part of the viewer becomes a source of
meaning, in which s/he is entangled and of which it turns to be a part of.
The viewer can no longer perceive her/himself apart from the experienced
art work. 
There exists another aspect of the process, in the scope of which the
viewer participates in the structure of the work observed. It should be
pointed out that when a part of a person becomes a part of the image at the
same moment a part of the image becomes the viewer, and her/his body
becomes a screen. This strategy is a fragment of the image analysis carried
out in Martinis' oeuvre. As a result the image is liberated from the
surface. The installation PRISM (1996) is another example of this
phenomenon. It reveals the materiality of image (and the material dimension
of virtuality) as well as makes us aware in this way that the consequence
of the above mentioned fact is the self-sufficiency, the autonomous being
of the image, which becomes its own base, its own screen.
5
There exist many more problems evoked by Dalibor Martinis' work, their
process-like nature, ironic discourses, scepticism to cite just a few
issues deserving a close analysis. Symbolic aspects and tendency to address
some subjects (e.g. journey) or elements (e.g. water) seem exceptionally
important, too. The number of those issues and their scope far exceeds the
scope of this essay. I mention them hoping that I will have an opportunity
in the future to discuss them in detail. To sum up, it should be restated
however that undoubtedly Martinis' oeuvre makes up one of the most
interesting chapters of the world media art history.