The Artist Trilogy (1999)





Matt Marello, The Artist Trilogy (installation view), The Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2001.

Roger Corman's Bucket of Blood (USA, 1959), Dr. Terror's House of Horrors with Christopher Lee (UK, 1965) and Paint Me Dead, a BBC TV Hammer's House of Horrors episode (circa 1970) are all grounds for Matt Marello's spectral doppelganger re-creations. In The Artist Trilogy, Marello is tremulously re-incarnated as contemporary artist observing himself (and us). We follow him following the script which has been laid down for him to follow. Better yet: we observe the life-script of Artist (any artist) being superimposed upon him: artist as outsider, visionary, demiurgic avenger, madman and mystic.

Matt Marello is a quick-change "illusionist," I suppose. But isn't he, actually, a quick-change "elisionist" slipping as he does withing the gaps of ready-made horror narratives? These films are tantalizingly refashioned as he digitally inserts himself, nearly seamlessly, within the existent flow of the dark and forbidding imagery. Marello becomes subject/object of these re-forgotten (or once-forgettable) cinematic flows. As does Jorge Luis Borges in his
A Universal History of Infamy, the slippage between the dream and the real that Marello offers in cinematic format parallels what the magic realist offers in his own literary effort "...narrative [s][which]...overtly exploit certain tricks: random enumeration, sudden shifts in continuity, and the paring down of a man's whole life to two or three scenes." After seeing The Artist Trilogy a number of times it becomes evident Marello's fantasies strike at the center of complexes and desires that affect all artist (at least all of the artists I have ever known). What artist, pray tell, hasn't dreamed of the Eternal Return of Truth, clothed in righteousness. Doesn't that Truth always strangle the sneering critic's voice in order to straighten the historical record in one future vindicating moment of revisionist triumph?

Marello giddily feeds us back our fantasies of art and artist, and it packs a hilarious wallop. Artist as psychopathetic-mystic-genius-martyr-madman while art unveils the world through a monstrously deranged verisimilitude as its creator delves into madness, ecstasy and death for our reawakened consciousness. Sure, Marello makes us chortle at the dark and forbidden contrivances that horror feeds on. But he also makes us choke at our contemporary collective insistence of treating the imagination in a pathological light. The fascination that we all have with horror and the horror-genre flick is the vehicle with which Matt Marello makes us ponder on the often-miasmic duality between the so-called "real" world of moral practice and the "unreal" world of art.

© Dominique Nahas (New York, 2002)






Matt Marello, Bucket of Blood, video, 5:02.


Matt Marello, The Hand, video, 4:44.



Matt Marello, Paint Me Dead, video, 3:05.