In disaster films, the audience can anticipate with delicious dread the inevitable violence, pathos, and eventual pay-off of a morally uplifting message, but, alas, this anticipation and participation is pointedly undone in Matt Marello's re-interpretation of Hollywood's disaster genre.
In his versions, we are left with the nagging, even annoying, lack of fit between the image of the artist and the unfolding tragedies of the great San Francisco Earthquake, the death of Pompeii, the sinking of the Titanic, etc., the specificity of each of which are elided by Marello's presence and its delivery of some sense of the banality of tragedy.
The initial thought is about how nicely this work coincides with the postmodern obsession with constructedness; such a masculinist act of postmodern intervention and insertion, this forceful and ungraceful penetration by the artist into the narrative. But beyond pointing out the constructedness of the filmic image, Marello's discordant insertion highlights that essential and unfortunate alienation of contemporary humanity from some sort of seamless narrative. These days, participation in teleological history, a plot with set-up, crisis and denouement, is necessarily uncomfortable and forced. But Marello bypasses any sense of nostalgic mourning for modernist certitude, heading straight for postmodern sardonicism in his parodic dramatization of the present theoretical and artistic juncture.
Finally, in a return to the visual material, these works are darkly hilarious takes on a moribund genre, the artist wrapping disaster films around himself as a funny, awkward, and biting contradiction.
In his versions, we are left with the nagging, even annoying, lack of fit between the image of the artist and the unfolding tragedies of the great San Francisco Earthquake, the death of Pompeii, the sinking of the Titanic, etc., the specificity of each of which are elided by Marello's presence and its delivery of some sense of the banality of tragedy.
The initial thought is about how nicely this work coincides with the postmodern obsession with constructedness; such a masculinist act of postmodern intervention and insertion, this forceful and ungraceful penetration by the artist into the narrative. But beyond pointing out the constructedness of the filmic image, Marello's discordant insertion highlights that essential and unfortunate alienation of contemporary humanity from some sort of seamless narrative. These days, participation in teleological history, a plot with set-up, crisis and denouement, is necessarily uncomfortable and forced. But Marello bypasses any sense of nostalgic mourning for modernist certitude, heading straight for postmodern sardonicism in his parodic dramatization of the present theoretical and artistic juncture.
Finally, in a return to the visual material, these works are darkly hilarious takes on a moribund genre, the artist wrapping disaster films around himself as a funny, awkward, and biting contradiction.
© Jenny Liu (New York, 1998)
Matt Marello, Hiroshima, video, 3:09.
Matt Marello, The Last Days of Pompeii, video, 3:13.
Matt Marello, San Francisco, video, 3:15.
Matt Marello, Titanic, video, 3:26.
