M+M
«Call an Artist»

Not Call-Girl or Call a Pizza, but Call an Artist: M+M work ironically with the expectations placed in a service from which the artists have apparently withdrawn. In this early work by the artistic duo of M+M (Marc Weis and Martin de Mattia) the telephone network turns out to be a virtual space containing self-referential texts, a non-transparent, telematic textual space. 10 texts on 10 answering machines in different institutions form an endless, self-referential, circular system. A story in the style of a detective novel – the graphics are reminiscent of a German crime series – is told without any clear solution to the unspeakable crime being given.
The work called «12 Marias» (1999) is a corresponding variant on the telephone poll and the phone-in, transposed into the museum context on the occasion of the exhibition called 'Talk.Show' in the Wuppertal Von-der-Heydt-Museum.

Rudolf Frieling