“Reality Is Overrated”
Postmasters Gallery, New York
Through June 19, 2010

I visited the new solo show from Eva and Franco Mattes (aka, a bit obnoxiously, as 0100101110101101.org) at Postmasters Gallery directly after catching the final weekend of Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present” at MoMA. This is significant, considering that the Matteses once staged virtual renditions of key Abramovic works — like “Imponderabilia” — using the virtual medium of Second Life. There’s more Second Life-facilitated art here at Postmasters — all of it oddly beautiful and bizarre, humorous yet also ingenious in its exploration of how digital animation and virtual reality can affect human interaction (and the nude anatomy).

The videos are displayed on monitors that are offhandedly set on the floor, propped against the wall. Gallery visitors can sit on crummy air mattresses and watch the Mattes duo, as avatars, flying, contorting, or suffering quasi-epileptic fits. The decorative aesthetic in the gallery is half college dorm room, half Bushwick squat. In one video, Medication Valse, Franco’s avatar “melts” into a chair in the center of a room; other avatars float around the space in various states of undress, part of a Second Life orgy fantasia. I know that it’s all a state of mind features the virtual Franco and Eva twitching, convulsing, falling through each other’s bodies, and generally performing the sort of high-pain, high-endurance antics that would be right at home over at that Abramovic retrospective. (If these descriptions don’t fully convey the content of the videos—and there’s little chance they do—all of the work can be screened in its entirety on the artists’ Web site.)

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