9/13/2023 0 Comments Matthew barney news![]() Gone are the sculptural prosthetics the fetish objects here are tools of the modern hunt: custom-built firearms, camouflage-patterned performance wear, cold-weather kit. A scene from Redoubt (Photo: Matthew Barney/Gladstone Gallery/Hugo Glendinning)Īs with his earlier works, Redoubt occupies a world of symbols and rituals, while also connecting to Barney’s own mythology. These natural fortifications offer the redoubt of the film’s title: a protected lookout site in which a militia might regroup and take shelter. Redoubt is beautiful and thought-provoking – strange goings-on in a remarkable landscape of great snowy expanses, burnt pine forests and crags as jagged and forbidding as their name suggests. Set the cynic to one side and open yourself to something weird and spectacular if mysterious. The one-time partner of Björk is taken to task for his obsessive focus on male genitalia and genius, for the impenetrable vocabulary of symbols that structure his works, and for the demands he places on his audience.Īsked about the scale and ambition of making work of such singular focus, Barney has described his admiration for Mailer whose writing emboldened him to risk failure on an ever-larger scale. Such uncompromising extremes can make Barney easy to mock. His extravagantly excremental River of Fundament (2014) – squeaking in at just under six hours – was a loose homage to Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings (1983) and set largely in 13th-century BC Egypt. The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) – a nine-hour five-film series that earned him international acclaim – brought lyric opera, motor racing, extreme prosthetics, Ursula Andress, the Goodyear Blimp and vast quantities of Vaseline to the exploration of masculinity and mythic America. The elemental way Barney displays these materials – accrued, bubbled and pocked – recalls their origins, and the process of extraction that derived copper and zinc from Idaho rock.Īll these links and associations are also woven into the film, albeit rather more subtly: some of the texts provided in this exhibition are so lavish in their interpretation and analysis that I fear Barney has lost faith in his audience’s appetite or willingness to attend to and grapple with his work themselves.īarney is an all-or-nothing kind of artist. The metal plate works make explicit links between the copper and brass of the engravings, and the copper and brass of Diana’s bullets. Barney has used novel techniques to cast portions of burnt Lodgepole pine trees, and equipped them with perforated metal cladding and other accoutrements suggestive of weaponry, astronomy, the wolves and woodland, tying together Redoubt’s various thematic strands. The film forms the centrepiece of a large exhibition of related sculptural works and electroplated engravings. Bringing the hunt full circle, the wolves ransack the hut in which the Engraver/Actaeon processes his engraving plates. The Engraver spies on their moments of private ritual, and scratches episodes from their pursuit onto copper plates. Mesmerised, he begins tracking the hunting party. The hunting party crosses paths with an artist employed by the National Forest Service (played by Barney, and referred to in the artist’s texts as the Engraver.) From Hockney’s ‘sweet disorder’ to Hepworth’s utility wear – what artists’ clothes say about their livesīarney is bringing us into the territory of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so this contemporary Diana and her companions must be interrupted by their Actaeon.
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