Daria Martin: One of the things that makes me doubt

BiographyDaria Martin was born in San Francisco in 1973 and has been based in London since 2002. She received her BA in humanities from Yale University in 1995 and her MFA from UCLA in 2000.

Martin’s solo exhibitions include Sensorium Tests, MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, UK, 2012, and Three M Commission: Minotaur, a touring exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, New Museum in New York, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, 2009–10, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, 2007, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 2006, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2005, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2005. Martin’s trilogy of films, In the Palace (2000), Birds (2001) and Close Up Gallery (2003), was acquired by the Tate in 2007.

Working between theatre, design and art, Martin’s hypnotic 16 mm films create a magical, mystical, mythical world, activating the spaces of dream and the unconscious. The artist describes her works as ‘daydream machines’.

‘Subjects such as robots, an archive of dream diaries and close-up card magic, are explored within isolated spaces such as the wings of a theatre, a military academy, or a scaled up modernist sculpture,’ she says. ‘These protective yet fragmented settings, full of seams and shadows, stand in for the capacities of the film medium itself, a permeable container that consumes and recycles the world at large.’

In this exhibition, created especially for and with ACCA, Martin presents her largest ever survey of films together with her grandmothers diary notes, drawings and paintings. Significant works including Birds (2001), Wintergarden (2005-11), and Harpstrings and Lava (2007) are presented in stages, all leading to the final encompassing film: One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt.

‘I came to the medium of film because of its open potential, its invitation to travel through time and space within an imagined world.’

DARIA MARTIN

Curatorial RationaleDaria Martin, whose distinctive aesthetic, delivered in 16 mm film, deals with the body’s senses as well as the extra-sensory zones of memory, dream and the unconscious. Martin employs tableaux, linking her films to other depictions from art history, such as the paintings of the Symbolists and Surrealists, as well as the costumes and attitudes of the Bauhaus theatre.

Daria’s films take the viewer into a kind of sombulant state. Hypnotic in pace and curious in their stories which use symbolism and myth as foundational elements, they present as dreams in a continuous exploration of character and experience.

Martin’s works are presented as stages leading to the final encompassing film: One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt. This, like a psychoanalytic session, impinges on the minds of Martin’s actors as they grapple with their filmic personae, with the nature of

artistic labour and Martin’s fictions. Also presented are paintings and diary notes by Martin’s grandmother, Susi Martin, which manifest a collaboration across generations.

JULIANA ENGBERGImages below left to right: Daria Martin Birds (2001), Soft Materials (2004), Birds, Untitled painting by Susi Martin, Soft Materials.

Exhibition Map

Copyright the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

[WORK 1]Daria MartinBirds 200116 mm film7 minutes 30 seconds[WORK 2]Daria MartinIn the Palace 200016 mm film7 minutes[WORK 3]Daria MartinSoft Materials 200416 mm film10 minutes 30 seconds[WORK 4]Daria MartinWintergarden 2005-201116 mm film12 minutes[WORK 5]Daria MartinHarpstrings and Lava 200716 mm film13 minutes

[WORK 6]Daria MartinMinotaur 200816 mm film9 minutes

[WORK 7]Daria MartinOne of The Things That Makes Me Doubt 2010-201116 mm film, 32 minutes

The exhibition consists of seven 16 mm films, plus a selection of typed diary pages and paintings by Daria’s grandmother, Susi Martin.

Birds200116 mm film7 minutes 30 seconds

In her early works at art school Daria Martin created abstract paintings, however her interest in the assemblage works of artist Joseph Cornell lead her to film and an interest in surrealism. Cornell is best known for his boxed assemblages in which he arranged objects reflecting his various interests. For Martin, the medium of film could provide a similar opportunity to combine disciplines and to quote and layer references from art, dance and film history, creating a gesamtkunstwerk, or total painting set in motion.

Filmed in a white studio space, Birds (2001) references the ideals of Modernism with a soundtrack crafted with a moog synthesizer and performers dressed in retro-futuristic costumes reminiscent of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet. Drawing reference from Kandinsky, Martin combines colourful geometric props with playful tableaux vivants that embrace awkwardness and absurdity.

‘I intentionally include in the edit moments in which the performer drops their guard, stops acting, allows themselves to relax, reveals exhaustion,’ Martin has said. Tate curator Carmen Juliá has written that ‘Martin’s films combine sculptural form and painterly colour with the performing body, and are characterised by a lack of dialogue that leaves the body, articulated by pose, as the main means of expression.’

‘I was intrigued by Oskar Schlemmer’s direction of the Bauhaus theatre program: he combined instruction in the arts of vaudeville with an application of his own rigorous painting practice; he created a continuum, not always seamless, between the dress-up games of the Bauhaus’ gala costumed balls and his own self-serious, pseudo-scientific study of abstraction. I’m very attracted to awkward clashes like Schlemmer’s: areas where Apollonian control and Dionysian release come into conflict.’

DARIA MARTIN

Above and left, Daria Martin, Birds (2001); Below left to right Wassily Kandinsky Composition VIII (1923); Oskar Schlemmer Bauhaus performances (circa 1923)

Key works

Daria Martin, Birds (2001)

Key worksIn the Palace200016 mm film7 minutes

As an art student Martin saw Swiss artist Alberto Giocometti’s sculpture The Palace at 4 A.M. 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She was taken by the work’s ‘particularly evocative feeling, as if the figures within it have each been caught within their own dreams, simultaneously sleepwalking through the same house’

She created a scaled up version of the sculpture for her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles. The idea that sparked In the Palace’ Martin has explained, ‘was a desire to literally realise my own fantasy to inhabit this small sculpture, to blow it up to human dimensions and to populate it with performers’.

Martin’s performers are poised in a series of tableau vivants resembling the choreographies of The Ballet Russe and Martha Graham, as well the photographs of George Platt Lynes.

Above and left, Daria Martin, In The Palace (2000); Below left to right Alberto Giacommetti. In The Palace at 4am (1932); Joseph Cornell, Fortune Telling Parrot (1937) photograph by George Platt Lyne (1941); Martha Graham, Lamentation (1930);

‘Joseph Cornell, who filled hundreds of boxes with delicate selections from his collections of objects and images, is an artist who has fascinated me for many years. His boxes seem to compress emotional experience; sometimes, like Giacometti’s early sculptures, they take the form of a game or a maquette that seemed to invite, yet exclude, participation. These boxes seduce you into complicity, yet they also shut you out of their self-contained worlds. Like The Palace at 4am, they suggest a whole world growing from a lap-sized space.’

DARIA MARTIN

Daria Martin, In The Palace (2000)

Wintergarden2005-201116 mm film12 minutes

Daria Martin’s Wintergarden takes place at the De La Warr Pavilion on the east coast of England. A modernist architectural masterpiece, one of the architects, Eric Mendelsohn had envisioned a monumental statue of the Greek goddess Persephone to stand alongside the pavilion. This odd coupling of modernist architecture and classical sculpture was never realized, as the Persephone statue was not approved.Fascinated by the proposal for this sculpture, and its potential implications in the context of a Modernist building, Martin creates a modern day Persephone, based on the Greek myth of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, who was carried off to the world of the dead by Hades. No longer working just with frozen composition and tableau vivant, choreography and the movement of performers becomes an important element in Wintergarden.

All images: Daria Martin, Wintergarden (2005-2011)

‘My 16mm films aim to create a continuity or parity between disparate artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds. Human gesture and seductive imagery meet physically mannered artifice to pry loose viewers’ learned habits of perception. Mistranslation opens holes for imagination to enter or exit.’

DARIA MARTIN

Key works

One Of The Things That Makes Me Doubt2010-201116 mm film, 32 minutes

After viewing Martin’s body of film work and her late grandmother’s dream diaries and painting, the final film in the exhibition One of The Things… layers these works together. Entries from the diaries are read out by the voicless performers featured in Martin’s previous films, combined with outtakes from these ten years’ worth of films.

When Martin began working with the dream diaries she explained that ‘This project was created as a way for me to digest the fact of my grandmother’s recent death. She was an amateur painter and a brilliant, deeply introverted intellect. She kept heavy shelves filled with meticulous diaries, detailed records of her dreams and years’ worth of notes on her Jungian analysis. She agreed, before her death, to allow the family to look at her diaries. I made photocopies of about 100 pages from the late 60’s and early 70’s: a time of intense and agonizing crisis in her life, when her dreams were especially vivid.

I was interested to see that her personal history of escaping from the Nazi invasion of Europe surfaced so strongly in her dreams several decades later. I was also interested in the degree to which these diaries referred so often to arts and artifice: objects, sculptures, paintings, plays and 1960’s “happenings” all make their appearance on the stage of her dreamworld.’

All images, Daria Martin, One Of The Things That Makes Me Doubt (2010-2011)

Key works

‘Susi’s paintings and diaries are the ‘ground’ of the piece, and I layered on top of her relatively private bodies of work my relatively public body of film work. As the film progresses, Susi’s centrality is diffused, spinning off into parallel conversations with actress-es who have appeared in my films. These women perhaps become stand-ins for Susi, or her part per-sonas, the recurring personalities she tracked in her dreams – an internal community.’

DARIA MARTIN

Daria Martin, One Of The Things That Makes Me Doubt (2010-2011)

‘There’s a longstanding romance between art forms at least through the 20th century—writers looking at art, artists listening to musicians, fashion and art in mutual fascination. There’s always something about another medium, which seduces, the things it can do, which one’s own cannot. At the moment I’m amazed by the freedom and discipline of musicians improvising together onstage. That camaraderie, communication, and intense interdependence is virtually nonexistent amongst visual artists today, unfortunately.

My generation has come of age in a time that’s increasingly interdependent and hybrid on the one hand and increasingly fragmented and isolating on the other. It’s a paradox: so much information is at our fingertips, yet collective direction seems unclear. The hybrid art form—the “total artwork” or Gesamtkunstwerk that the Bauhaus celebrated—is all around us in commercial form: video clips, television, and especially films. Of course, even the most commercial Hollywood films integrate image, text, sound, and usually music; they are the legacy of Wagner’s opera. For my generation, coming of age in a time beyond postmodernism, a cross breeding between genres is completely taken for granted.

In my work I try to fold that interdisciplinary approach back into a more intimate and private realm, one where a kind of internal “utopia” can unravel. And so fantasising about past moments where this cross breeding has happened in a less commercialised way—Graham, Noguchi, Rauschenberg—is a way of finding some traction, of escaping from our contemporary culture’s slick version of Gesamtkunstwerk. My work seeks to reassemble this romance between the art forms, to backtrack in time and perhaps suggest a different method for those paths to be forged.’

DARIA MARTIN

Daria Martin, Harpstrings and Lava (2007)

GLOSSARY OF ART TERMSAbstract ExpressionismAbstract Expressionism is a movement in American painting that flourished in New York City after World War II. The work of these artists all looked quite different to each other, however they shared an interest in using abstraction to convey strong emotional or expressive content.

Bauhaus TheatreOskar Schlemmer was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923 he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working some time at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is “Triadisches Ballett,” in which the actors are transfigured from the normal to geometrical shapes. Also in Slat Dance and Treppenwitz, the performers’ costumes make them into living sculpture, as if part of the scenery.

Dream DiaryA dream diary (or dream journal) is a diary in which nightly dreams are recorded. It is often used in the study of dream interpretation and psychoanalysis. Many artists have kept dream diaries and used them as inspiration for their artworks, particularly those working in the Symbolist and the Surrealist movements.

GesamtkunstwerkTranslated from German, gesamtkunstwerk means ‘total work of art’ and describes a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so. The term was first used in 1827, and later became associated with the German opera composer Richard Wagner. Today many contemporary visual artists strive to create gesamtkunstwerk by incorporating many art forms into a work.

Jungian AnalysisJungian analysis is a method of psychotherapy developed by Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychiatrist (1875-1961). The Jungian analyst and patient work together to increase the patient’s consciousness in order to move toward psychological balance and wholeness, and to bring relief and meaning to psychological suffering. Dreams often play a central role in Jungian analysis as Jung believed dreams reflect the richness and complexity of the entire unconscious, both personal and collective.

SurrealismSurrealism was an artistic, intellectual, and literary movement led by poet André Breton from 1924 through World War II. Breton declared that Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”

SymbolismFrench critic Jean Moréas first coined the term Symbolism in 1886 to describe the poetry of Mallarmé and Verlaine. the term was soon applied to art that described continuation, in face of Impressionism, Realism, Naturalism, of traditional mythological, religious and literary subject matter, but fuelled by new psychological content, particularly erotic and mystical.

Tableaux vivantTranslated from French, tableaux vivant means ‘living pictures.’ Used in paintings and theatre performances, a tableau vivant describes a group of suitably costumed actors or artist’s models, carefully posed and often theatrically lit. The casts of characters remain silent and frozen as they represent scenes from literature, art, history, or everyday life.

Surrealist FilmEntr’acte, above, is a 1924 Surrealist film directed by René Clair and written by Francis Picabia.

CURRICULUM LINKS & ACTIVITIESPRE-VISIT DISCUSSIONSWhy is art important?What makes something a work of art?What are the most important skills an artist can have?What materials and tools do artists use to create art today?How do artworks using film or video differ from what we watch on television or in the cinema?Where do artists find inspiration?What is the difference between working alone and collaborating with others?Must artworks be beautiful?What elements of film or video might make it an appealing medium for an artist to work in?

AT ACCAACCA’s FREE education programs mean that students will engage in theory, language and practice while visiting the exhibition. For the Daria Martin exhibi-tion, students may participate in the following programs:TALK Watch selected film works in the Daria Martin exhibition with a guided tour from ACCA’s qualified Education staff. Key themes are explained and tours are tailored to suit all year groups and subjects. THINK Use contemporary art as the stimulus for philosophical dialogue and search for meaning in our THINK workshop. Collaborative inquiry is used to investi-gate the concepts, symbolism and themes students have wondered about in the exhibition. Experience contemporary art as a mode of thinking, and ACCA as an ideas laboratory. MAKE After experiencing Daria Martin’s ‘daydream machines’ create a dream catch-er at ACCA to take home. Use your dream catcher to hold on to your good dreams, and stop the bad ones. Write them down when you wake up, and use them with the following activity suggestions.

Harpstrings and Lava, 2007

Harpstrings and Lava, 2007

VCE STUDIO ARTSUnit 1: Interpretation of art ideas and use of materials and techniques Visit the Daria Martin exhibition to examine how both the artist, and her grandmother Susi Martin have approached the use of dreams through differ-ent mediums - painting and film, and styles - abstraction and surrealism.

Research the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist movements, with par-ticular focus on how dreams and the subconscious were explored and represented. Write down a dream you have had. Try representing the dream through abstract painting, and with a surrealist drawing or collage.

Unit 2: Ideas and styles in artworks Compare and contrast Daria Martin’s Birds (2001) with Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VIII (1923) (Guggenheim collection) Discuss the aesthetic quali-ties in artworks, communicated ideas and developed styles present in each work.

POST-VISIT

VCE ARTInvestigate Daria Martin’s work using the Analytical Frameworks. Formal Framework Look At Birds (2001) What materials and techniques has Daria Martin used? How does the combination of mediums and particular technical skills she has used shape or affect interpretation?

Personal Framework What relationship does the final film in the exhibition One Of The Things...(2011) have to Daria Martin’s life and experiences? What visual evidence supports this reading? Explain a specific process or practice that the artist has used in creating the artwork that reflects the artist’s personal history.

Cultural Framework Daria Martin references different movements and artworks from Modernism in her films. Resarch the utopian ideals of Modern Art and discuss the ways in which this movement in history have shaped the intention of the artist?

Contemporary Framework While the exhibition is credited to Daria Martin, it includes works made by her grandmother. How does the presentation of artworks and noted that have not been made by Daria Martin reflect or challenge artistic or social traditions?

Daria Martin, One Of The Things That Makes Me Doubt (2010-2011)

FURTHER READINGDaria Martin: One Of The Things That Makes Me Doubt exhibition catalogue, Published by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 2013

Daria Martin by Catherine Wood, Beatrix Ruf and Daria Martin. Published JRP|Ringier; Bilingual edition, 2006. ISBN 3905701545

Poor Man’s Expression Technology, Experimental Film, Conceptual Art Edited by Martin Ebner and Florian Zeyfang. Sternberg press, 2011 ISBN 978-1-934105-01-6

www.dariamartin.com

http://www.maureenpaley.com/artists/daria-martin

http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2005/01/24/32701.html

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/martin-in-the-palace-t12744/text-summary

http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/40051/daria-martin-in-the-palace-wintergarden#sthash.PmDy5jwR.dpuf

BOOKINGS & ENQUIRIESACCA’s free education programs are available for Primary, Second-ary and Tertiary groups between 10am - 4pm from Monday to Friday. Maximum 25 students per group for THINK and MAKE programs.

Bookings are required for both guided and self-guided School and Ter-tiary groups. School or Tertiary groups arriving without a pre-booking may be required to wait to see exhibitions. Please be considerate of other classes and the public in gallery spaces.

Contact education@accaonline.org.au or call (03) 9697 9999 if you would like to bring a Primary, Secondary, Tertiary or community group.

AUSVELS ACTIVITIESAfter creating a dream catcher at ACCA, take it home and hang it in your room. It catches bad dreams and allows good dreams through. Keep a dream diary to remember your dreams. You will need to do the following:

Prepare: Keep a pen and paper by your bed. Review: As soon as you awaken review the elements of your dream. Key words: Identify key words from your dream, out of which you can create a title for your dream. Write down the title and key words fol-lowed by as much of the dream as you remember.Journal: Keep a Journal of your dreams and your notes, thoughts and feelings about your dreams. Associations: Write down your associations to the images or symbols in your dreams.Context/Setting: Note the context of events in your outer life at the time of the dream, and also the setting of your dream.Structure: Look at the structure of your dream. a) What is the initial situation? b) What develops or changes? c) What is the action? d) What is the climax?Characters: Note the characters in the dream, and determine if there is an identifiable protagonist.Feeling: Note any particular emotions or feelings associated with your dream.

Now you can use your dream writings to:Create a drawing of your dream (You could try an abstract drawing, focusing on colour, shape and lines that represent how you felt in your dream)Create a musical soundtrack that would fit your dreamArrange your classmates in a ‘tableau vivant’ representing a scene from your dreamWrite a layered/shared dream story with a partner

111 Sturt Street Southbank Victoria 3006 Australia Tel +61 3 9697 9999 Fax +61 3 9686 8830 accaonline.org.au