Tony Matelli

Fuck'd and The Oracle

In ’Never real and always true’, a drawing by Antonin Artaud., the artist deals with the obsession of the public with the representation of the real. In Tony Matelli’s installation, ‘Fuck’d and The Oracle’ this is turned around. The complexity of his artistic complicity is transferred to the public.

Tony Matelli transforms the assembly hall of the former Rüsch factory located in ‘Stadtgarten Dornbirn’ into a field of tension in the center of which there is a chimpanzee with an artificial limb being attacked and penetrated by projectiles. With his shocking rhetoric in ‘Fuck’d’, Matelli is referring to the genre of martyr imagery as found in St. Sebastian. His model is not an action film but rather the pathos of a lost innocence which Tony Matelli relates here with nature. The tragic reverse side of the repercussions of genetic engineering and practices of globalization is followed by utopias of Progress.

‘Fuck’d’ is juxtaposed with a sculpture entitled ‘The Oracle’ – a potted plant in the lower part of which a loudspeaker has been placed. As soon as a noise penetrates the space, the plant shakes with laughter. This sensor for patterns of movement and noises sounds out the space acoustically in an intensified affective potential. Even if the effects might be drastic, possible forms of protest are manifest in Tony Matelli’s works where his provocation is invested with a seductive Accent.