THERE IS NOTHING AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW, BY ANTHONY GARDNER MELBOURNE 2005
Dani Marti – There is nothing at the end of the rainbowAnthony Gardner
A curious dream-image beckons: Michel Foucault tied down, chained up, whipped, whipping, a bald brown pate and pleasure. Pleasure in the sado-maso moments that undertowed his later texts, that wove throughout his life, that he himself admitted defined his whole career. Such pleasure, he said, perverted social norms, could battle social forces that disallowed this pleasure. A creative enterprise, he called it, a powerful perversion, disrupting the norms that contain and constrain, constraints biting the skin for the pleasure of the body, of strange parts of the body, strange ways of engaging the body for pleasure. Cords ripped taut, tight, looped and woven, under and over; two bodies wrestling, struggling as Dani Marti grips the cords, pinning, caressing the work into being.
Two bodies bound in physics for sensual creating. It is the hallmark of Marti’s oeuvre, treating the object as a body, a conscious continuity that binds his own career. In the past, Marti has treated these bodies solemnly, respectfully, with a mannerly perversion muted through the monochrome: the grave blacks varying throughout his Serious Black Dresses, the stately ochre homages in Looking for Rover. The constraints of history have been firm and treated with politeness, a gentle grappling with the burden of influences past – Rover Thomas, Minimalism, Catholicism, friends. A submission to constraint.
But this new series, his Rainbow series, has unleashed a different body, a seductive body, a seducing body of rampant, joyous colour. The diaristic homage to another body is swept aside for a powerful, pleasurable process, even politics, of production. For Marti, colour marks new freedoms: from a 9-to-5 job into making art full-time, from nods to the past into the embrace of the present, to reconfigure the future. These bodies and the state of their making is a new play with constraints and an embrace of new power, as Foucault described his beloved S&M. They desire new becomings from the power that still pulses between the cords and now the colours that fight against each other, that bite into each other, energy rippling, bubbling, engorging the frame, spilling out, spilling beyond the confinement of categories – painting? sculpture? two dimensions? three? This body and its pleasures cannot be contained; powerfully perverse, they leak past social norms and into social space.
And this is the real power Marti seeks: a desired embrace – his own, our own – of Indigenous creations within that social space. Marti’s desert dunes billow like a Napangardi landscape. A rainbow serpent weaves through the binding of immigrant and Indigenous bodies, stories, art: a powerful, pleasurable desire to spark new reconciliations. Marti’s rainbow is a fantastical encounter seeking to defy the racist norms, an unexpected intimacy that brings ethical demands, fresh ways of commencing new ethical becomings. And rather than focus on the ungraspable, the unknowable end of each new rainbow, we should realise that the pleasure’s in the rainbow, in the moment of this meeting, to play with constraints, to pervert constraints to recreate the social landscape. For Marti, each rainbow’s a seduction, a new power, and there’s pleasure to be had.
Anthony Gardner is an art historian and freelance critic based in Melbourne and Sydney.