The Three Stooges (2003)



Matt Marello, The Three Stooges (installation view), mixed media and video, Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2004).

It has been said that all men speak the same language when they trip over a chair in the dark. This language of slapstick is captured in the work of the New York-based artist Matt Marello. His is a mixture of sharp comedy and even sharper pain.The Three Stooges was an installation composed of six screens surrounding a central sculpture of a bathtub sitting on a worn rug. The bathtub was turned into a surreal fountain, encased in a maze of plumbing pipes, as though trapped in a cage. A leaky faucet dripped into the bathwater below. The effect was threadbare and cheap, a setup based on an episode in which Moe, Larry, and Curly get mixed up in a tale of bad plumbing in the metropolis.

Playing on the screens were six of Marello's short black-and-white films. Each showed a reenactment of typical
Three Stooges slapstick, but all parts are played by Marello, whom we see in a series of knockabout scenes, hitting himself with the handle of a spade, falling over, and punching himself. It's as though the artist were punishing himself for his own idiocy, his personality neatly split into three parts.

Marello's grainy images resemble pictures broadcast on an old television. The action is stilted, hinting that this is not a seamless comedy of errors. His movements are awkward, and his punches don't necessarily hit home. The artist may be having fun as a ham actor, but the humor is tempered by pathos and something far darker, murkier. Violence is depicted as painless, ridiculous, shown in closed circuit. Seen together, Marello's acts become even more vindictive, and we are bludgeoned by his sense of desperation.

© Jonathan Turner (
Art News, Volume 104, Number 7, 2005)




Matt Marello, The Three Stooges, six channel video, endless loop (excerpt 04:29)