Tag: Dalibor Martinis

Dalibor Martinis, Open Reel, 1976

Dalibor Martinis
Open Reel, 1976
b/w video, MP4
d=3.4 min
MG-6839 b

Dalibor Martinis (1947) is one of the pioneers of video art in Croatian and Yugoslav art. He made his first video works in 1973 in Graz (Austria), in collaboration with his then partner, Sanja Iveković. Initially, Martinis was attracted by the socio-utopian aspect of the video technology: he actually saw it as a counterpoint to public (state) television. In 1973, for example, together with Iveković, Martinis recorded “TV Timer”, a video that consists of twenty or so one-minute interventions into the regular program of Austrian state television (both artists would later make several other videos openly confronting the medium of public television). The new technology, therefore, soon became a new medium – an instrument suitable for simple and fast production and distribution of video content. However, the full potential of video technology had not been reached, mostly due to technological and institutional limitations in the field of distribution. Marijan Susovski took note of this development in 1982, when in one of the first reviews of video art in Croatia, he wrote that Martinis, after 1976, turned towards the relationship between video technology and his own artistic identity. “Open Reel” belongs to this phase of the artist’s work. It is a recording of a video tape being wound around the artist’s head: the artist’s head plays the role of the second reel on the video recorder. This spooling is the only content of the video, so when the face is completely swathed in video tape, the recording is over. The video (what we see) is thus tautologically connected to video technology (what is making the recording), and technology is then tautologically related to the artist (the one who records). In fact, tautology was one of the favourite procedures of conceptual artists, and in Croatian video art we can trace it through the video works of Goran Trbuljak, Braco Dimitrijević and Mladen Stilinović. The same could be said for the humour or irony that characterise the “Open Reel”, as well as most of the artworks of other conceptual artists.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: a still image from the video / from the National Museum of Modern Art's archives

Dalibor Martinis, Image is Virus, 1983

Dalibor Martinis
Image is Virus, 1983
video, colour, MP4
d=20 min
MG-6839 f

In the video work “Image is Virus”, Dalibor Martinis (1947), one of the pioneers of video art in this part of Europe, continues his preoccupation with the social system and broadens the scope of his attention from the field of public (state) television (“TV Timer”, 1973, “Nature Morte”, 1974, etc.) to the area of global commodity production and communication. The video is a collage of recordings of the Radio Television Zagreb’s main newscast, television commercials, interiors of department stores and office buildings, archival footage of military activities and testing of state-of-the-art weaponry, quotes taken from arcade video games and pornographic films. It starts with a question about the nature of reality written in the background of the video image: “What is reality? There is no true or real reality. Reality is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern.” Is reality, then, something independent of our perception, or is reality the way in which we perceive the world and accordingly interpret the things and phenomena around us? For Martinis, there is no dilemma: it is the latter. The phrase: “The word precedes the image, and image is virus.”, which appears at one point in the video, points to another area of interest for Martinis: is the hyperproduction of images, brought about by technological development, threatening our ability to perceive and distinguish reality from illusion? Martinis found an inspiration of sorts in the novel “The Ticket That Exploded” (1962) by the American writer William S. Burroughs. The novel became popular in the 1980s, mostly thanks to the New York art scene, which, having experienced the new wave of media and economic globalisation under the Reagan administration, found in it ideas that could be applied to different social situations. Laurie Anderson, a popular musician and artist, who recorded the song “Language is virus” in 1986, also found inspiration in the novel.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, senior curator of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: still image from the video © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023

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