Tony Matelli at The Green Gallery East

Tony Matelli, more or less, claims that he often felt like an outsider when he was trying to break into the insider art groups in New York City. I spoke with him the day after his opening at The Green Gallery East. When I strolled in, he was holding court with the proprietors and two local artists, Santiago Cucullu and David Robbins, who have exhibited at GGE.

Matelli, a 1993 MIAD graduate and Cranbrook Academy alum, gave me a tour around the space, explaining along the route how he fabricated the bronze replica of weeds that poke through the edge where the drywall meets the concrete floor. The installation is sparse and certainly not just another bunch of arty bramble. In the backroom, a bronze tower of playing cards, cigarette butts and Budweiser beer cans teeters on top of a pizza box that is balanced on a keg, but fear not. Yesterday isn’t about to collapse, though perhaps it signals that our culture is about to. Gambling, smoking, boozing and wolfing junk food … but why be puritanical and pronounce them “bad!” I say, deal with it.

These are sensational works by a fully mature artist, though quite a bit of the labor was performed by numerous persons skilled in welding, casting and various intricate methods. Matelli has mooched Jeff Koons, the megastar he apprenticed with for several years, so he’s heavy into replicating, replicating, replicating. It’s trailer-trash stuff that’s good for laughs, and the best work I’ve seen in Milwaukee in 2009. I’m thinking the Milwaukee Art Museum needs a clump or two of weeds, but well, they already have a Robert Gober hole in the floor, plus a few other items to take the edge off too damn-much seriousness. I can also envision the towering Yesterday sitting in a casino in the Menomonee Valley, or why not at the new Harley-Davidson Museum?

The artist says his art-making isn’t about calling attention to environmental concerns. He does not espouse tree-hugging, though there was a time when he harbored a “Thoreau-like” attraction to living in solitude somewhere in the boonies. I told him I’d tried that for a decade, and when I realized that the “land doesn’t give a damn,” all my romantic woozy notions of living in 500 square feet, in tandem with multiple weeds, disappeared over the nearest Kettle Moraine ridge. Currently, I live in an urban space where weeds are regularly attacked with Weed-B-Gon.

Does it really matter what fuels any artist’s work? I suspect, but can’t confirm, that the trailer-trash attitude perhaps memorializes a world Matelli has never experienced … but, so what. He’s foxy enough to have figured out that to be a major artist involves (as his artist statement claims) “locating one’s self within the configuration of our social world.”); but that’s verbal spin. He’s an excellent maker of art, having nailed the basic elements: construction, concept and consistency of vision.

Fuck it, Free Yourself! is an amazing poke at the smarmy idea of the eternal flame; in this instance, the fuel is two hundred-dollar bills burning casually on a table, but ah ha! The bills never burn completely. So what’s the point of this concept of porcelain and steel? Is it really to demonstrate how useless the pursuit of money is? Or, is it uber-virtuosity on parade? It’s a bit of both.

For you readers who ponder the meaning of art and life, dare you compare/contrast Matelli’s gloriously “magic” symbols with the blowin’ in the wind reed and weed assemblages by Roy Staab. You have until Dec. 6 to do your homework. Light a cig. Pop a Bud. Scarf a pizza. It’s all in the lay of the cards, folks.
Yesterday: New Work by Tony Matelli
Through Dec. 6
The Green Gallery East
1500 North Farwell Avenue
414-226-1978
Thursday, 4 – 8 p.m.
Friday, Saturday & Sunday, 2 – 6 p.m.