The Material Versus the Virtual–The Art of Dalibor Martinis

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 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 a dispersion, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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This text was originally published last year in the catalogue prepared
for Dalibor Martinis' presentation at the Venise Biennal.