Matt Marello, The Pollock Project (installation view), mixed media with video, Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2002).
Matt Marello is known for eccentric videos in which he uses digital techniques to insinuate himself into found television or movie scenes. He has, for instance, guest-starred as several famous philosophers in episodes of 1960s television shows like "The Munsters" and "The Beverly Hillbillies," and he has also appeared as the beleaguered protagonist in a string of disaster scenes. This mixing of mass-media fact and homemade fiction continued with Marello's recent video installation The Pollock Project, in which he takes on the role of three cultural icons--all avatars of male artistic virility--who happened to die early and accidentally: Jackson Pollock, Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham and martial-arts movie star Bruce Lee.
Isolating short sequences from films that depict Pollock flinging paint, Bonham drumming and Lee whirling the nunchaku, Marello, in each case, substituted himself for the main figure. There's something devious and hilarious about how Marello, always deadpan, takes over the bodies and mystique of his doomed virtuosos, while replicating their exertions in the herky-jerky fashion typical of rotoscopy, the editing technique he uses. His reworked scenes seem vaguely plausible, but at the same time outlandish and unreal.
The Pollock Project was presented on three home-movie screens set up in a rickety-looking circle. Acting as Pollock on one screen, Marello bends over while pretending to fling paint from a can. Here's the trailblazing master at work in his studio, sort of, but something is seriously amiss. Marello has no paint in his can or on his brush, his clothes are clean, and no drip painting is visible. All of this could be sharply ironic--action painting that's all action and no painting--but the repetitive, even manic, physical activity has a surprising vitality. The same holds true for the incessant drumming and nunchaku-whirling on the other screens. Marello's doctored film snippets draw you into their rhythm and motion. Together, they wind up suggesting a ritual dance or some sort of ecstatic celebration.
All the elements here fit together. The accompanying sound, including a whirring projector, a flurry of drumbeats and the whoosh of nunchaku, was both irritating and captivating, much like the images themselves. Another video projection at the base of one wall showed a car's headlights moving along the darkened road in Long Island where Pollock died in an automobile accident. This mundane event is a reminder of the catastrophe to come.
The paintbrush, drumsticks and nunchaku that appear in the videos were fashioned by Marello from wood found near the site of Pollock's accident. Presented at Pierogi in a vitrine, they took on the aura of quasi-sacred relics. Marello's meditation on, and reenactment of, eclipsed heroes is conceptually intricate and visually lively. It's also a total riot.
© Gregory Volk (Art in America, March 2003)
Matt Marello, The Pollock Project, three channel video, endless loop (excerpt 01:09).
