Photo: David Regen/Matthew Barney/Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and BrusselsĪll these things came to fruition in Barney’s 1991 Gladstone debut. This is the mad “maleness” my wife responded to and I fell in love with. The story ends in quiet stillness as the two cycle teams attach seven clear cords to Barney’s scrotum - perhaps the cremaster muscle controlling the testes - suggesting that the body in question is about to distend into a masculine one. I watched the 1994 Cremaster 4 more than 75 times (I told you I was a fan) and surmise that the dandyish goat-man played by Barney (he crawls through goo, tap-dances, and tunnels under water), as well as the two motorcycle teams racing in opposite directions around the Isle of Man, are all metaphors for testes moving down in the body and ovaries up. The five-part, six-hour-plus Cremaster series (1994–2002) is essentially a multilevel Wagnerian narrative devoted to the millisecond of morphogenesis when, after about seven weeks in the womb, the reproductive organs either ascend into ovaries in females or descend into testicles in males. To create this, he uses far-flung histories, characters, trades, sciences, and cultures consider Barney as artist James Lee Byars reincarnated from a gold-leafed ambulance in the transept of a Detroit church, flaying himself and his now-ex-partner Björk with whaling knives or his use of New Orleans marching bands, porn stars, cars crashing off bridges, then being dredged up, smashed, and cast again. The bigger picture is of whole biological, mythical, religious, or industrial systems building up, breaking down, and evolving. Barney’s work appears hermetic, but it often has to do with transforming one material into another against a resistant force - sugar into muscle and muscle fighting gravity, for instance. His particular obsessions, though inspired, are less important than the size of the screen onto which he projected them (which is one reason you can see his legacy in such divergent contemporary offspring as Ryan Trecartin, Andra Ursuta, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Lucy Dodd, and Josh Kline). And the full scope of that mythos appeared unmistakably in the epic, and epically weird, films themselves, into which Barney submerged himself totally. Barney was mythic like Jason and his Argonauts or Daedalus. In a way, Basquiat had been mythic - but only like Lou Reed was mythic. In those films, Barney brought us into the realm of genuine myth - the idiosyncratic inner life of an artist scaled up to match not just the swaggering stature of art-historical giants who came before but the operatic scale of the universe itself. Now I see Barney as a mystic bridge between the ambition, absurdity, first-person identity politics, and pseudo-autobiographical Arabian Nights fiction of 1980s artists like Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Martin Kippenberger and the populism, love of beauty, craft, dexterity with scales large and small, unusual materials, and grand activism of 1990s artists like Kara Walker, Pipilotti Rist, Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Hirschhorn, later Robert Gober, and even Richard Serra - who actually appeared in one of Barney’s films. A tree fell within me here was the art of the 1990s beckoning. (I’d never thought of the penis as a hole before.) I saw a self in transformation, and, thunderstruck, I said to my wife, “This is one of the futures of art.” She looked up and said, “Yeah, but it’s so male.” It was the first time I saw Barney’s intricate syntax of endurance art, video, post-minimal and process art, which delivered a picture of a strange masculinity: conflicted, involuting, ludicrous, neutered, Kafkaesque. Hanging there, he’d finger dollops of jelly and methodically fill all the holes in his body - eyes, ears, mouth, penis, anus, nose, navel. The previous year, in an otherwise unremarkable large group show in the now-defunct Althea Viafora Gallery in Soho, I saw a TV monitor depicting a naked male - Barney - scaling a rope to the ceiling, then descending over a shape of cooled Vaseline. Photo: David Regen/Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Galleryīy the time Matthew Barney’s debut solo show opened at Barbara Gladstone’s Greene Street gallery in 1991, the work of this 24-year-old artist had already rocked my world. Matthew Barney, DRILL TEAM: screw BOLUS (1991).
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