Artist OTW: Eva & Franco Mattes
Eva and Franco Mattes were both born in Italy in 1976. Their work started when they met in Berlin back in 1994. Their artistic name is 0100101110101101.org. They are considered to be among the pioneers of Net Art Movement and widely known for their subversion of public media. They have focused their art to reflect ethical and political issues developing from initiation of the internet. The Mattes’ is the investigator who sorts out fact from fiction. In addition, they manipulated both fact and fiction to create an alternative reality. Their home base is in New York. Their art has been shown in Biennale of Sydney in 2016, Whitechapel Gallery London, Hammer Museum in 2016, Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2013, SITE Santa Fe in 2012, and Venice Biennale in 2001.
The Mattes’ notoriety exploded to the world in 1998 under the domain name Vaticano.org, where they took this domain to challenge the Catholic Church official website. After the Catholic Church website fiasco, they have continued to hijack other websites such as Jodi.org and Hell.com. These websites were close to the public so they made them public. The couple toured the most famous museums in Europe and while in the museums they stole 50 fragments from well-known works from artist such as Duchamp, Kandinsky, Beuys, and Rauschenberg. And they named their work, “Stolen Pieces”. The stolen pieces of art are displayed in glass cabinets. Their manipulations of the media include video games, internet, technology, and street advertising. They have also put together surprising performances involving willing and unwilling audiences. These performances have such a realistic feel that it is almost impossible to tell what is real and what is fake. The Mattes’ have created false media campaigns for a non-existing action movie. They try to convenience people of Vienna that their history plaza was going to have a name change from “Karlsp;atz” to “Nikeplatz”. Another art project was Darko Maver who was a made up artist who gained cult status in which was celebrated in the 48th Venice Biennale.
The Mattes’ goal is to unmask the truth concealed by modern society. The couple created works have made the government, the public, and the art world to have an unpredictable reaction. Some embarrassing and other truly beautiful. They want the public to be free to search the website and they believe the public is constrained to the preselected option set by the website creator or the artist in an art gallery. Instead, they want to let the observer chose where to start and where to go. For example in the art project titled, “Emily’s video”, they had volunteers watched “The Worst Video Ever” while the audience was recorded and the audience reactions were the final project. The videos were displayed in a gallery where the audience can also see themselves react to the previous audience reaction while watching “The Worst Video Ever”. Darko Maver was a functional artist who created the gruesome and realistic model of murder victims and published them on the web to obtain media attention. The photographs were taken from Rotten.com and the pictures were altered to showcase brutal alternative reality.
I have some reserve feeling toward their art and how they decide to display it to the world. I know art is raw and unforgiven; however, I do find their method of art making questionable. Even though their works are raw and real however falsifying stories and making people believe lies does not sit well with me. In addition, desecrating and stealing art from other works is wrong.
