Matt Marello, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (installation view), Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy, 1999.
At the end of the sixties, "body" artists were trying to extend their psycho-physical limits to the point where the act became a primary gesture, a creative gesture. Matt Marello pushes the concept further by taking digital possession of his body and the gestures of others. He inserts himself in the actor's role not to eliminate the double fiction - understood as a double denial - but to increase the distance between reality and interpretation, between true and false, between imitation and representation.
By exploring from inside the drama inherent in cinema and its actors, Marello exposes the truth contained in his game - grasping what we are by diving inside what we believe ourselves to be - an exercise of mental and physical flexibility, explored in our generation through the technological sliding of boundaries between reality and simulation. This simulated reality is the focus of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a large installation in which the spectator is shown an "altered" video projection of one of the most noted films of the German Expressionist period. The effect of the piece is one of total immersion. The spectator becomes part of the spectacle.
In the Caligari installation there is a reconstruction of one of the film's sets which serves to distance and distort the traditional aspect and the two dimensional quality of the original work. The container and the contents fuse together in the experience, and Marello becomes the only actor playing a role, becoming at the same time both the object and the subject of the performance.
Can all of this cause confusion of roles? Can we find in this something incorrect or damaging? These questions are purely rhetorical and by themselves useless, but they are fundamental to introduce the argument from another point of view. We will always, if we so desire, be able to produce a scene, and environment, a social context, suitable for us to play our roles. This act of imagination and the artificial preparation of the place in which we move represents more precisely our character, our sense of humor, our potential if not in fact our true being. Models, symbols, and projections of our thoughts are built on all that the mass media, the street, and the home offer us already pre-packaged. The sin of wanting to imagine and change ourselves builds instead a fantastic means, perhaps only partially practical, to understand what we are, what we are not, and what we are becoming.
By exploring from inside the drama inherent in cinema and its actors, Marello exposes the truth contained in his game - grasping what we are by diving inside what we believe ourselves to be - an exercise of mental and physical flexibility, explored in our generation through the technological sliding of boundaries between reality and simulation. This simulated reality is the focus of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a large installation in which the spectator is shown an "altered" video projection of one of the most noted films of the German Expressionist period. The effect of the piece is one of total immersion. The spectator becomes part of the spectacle.
In the Caligari installation there is a reconstruction of one of the film's sets which serves to distance and distort the traditional aspect and the two dimensional quality of the original work. The container and the contents fuse together in the experience, and Marello becomes the only actor playing a role, becoming at the same time both the object and the subject of the performance.
Can all of this cause confusion of roles? Can we find in this something incorrect or damaging? These questions are purely rhetorical and by themselves useless, but they are fundamental to introduce the argument from another point of view. We will always, if we so desire, be able to produce a scene, and environment, a social context, suitable for us to play our roles. This act of imagination and the artificial preparation of the place in which we move represents more precisely our character, our sense of humor, our potential if not in fact our true being. Models, symbols, and projections of our thoughts are built on all that the mass media, the street, and the home offer us already pre-packaged. The sin of wanting to imagine and change ourselves builds instead a fantastic means, perhaps only partially practical, to understand what we are, what we are not, and what we are becoming.
© Francesca Pietracci (Time Out Rome, 1999)
Matt Marello, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (excerpt), 3:46.
