Matthew Barney--Power

It's Matthew Barney Season...
And it's time to carefully pull apart Barney's...what should we call it? Sthick? Oeuvre?

So I will start, and I am going to start in a way designed to get Kat's goat. I have written that I think Barney is important. That he has good intentions, that he is working hard to move the Sculpture Discussion past the Minimalism v. Fried argument. Yes, yes, he bungles constantly and is so in love with his pretty face onscreen that he makes awful choices often. But he is reaching for something enormous, and that is what distinguishes him.

Sculpture has been a meditation on power for millenia. Magical fetishes are imbued with it; monuments embody it; Serra personified it; Bourgeois tickles and smacks it. Sculpture became largely irrelevant as a medium and began this "post-medium condition" stuff-in-a-gallery phase when using power became a lame intellectual strategy and critiquing power structures fully took over. (Sorry, Rosalind, I don't buy that this is a media thing. I think it's a power thing.)

Barney is interesting to me because he smacks of power. Often failed power, and usually self-absorbed small-minded power that has a lot to do with Barbara Gladstone's power and his own good looks. But it is this (often awkward) embrace of power in all its forms--including the power of celebrity, logo/branding, money, high production value, baroque overmaking, process, scale, size, and... I hate to say it... gravitas--that makes me think he could actually do something one day. I say that because he is not his elders. He understands that he is not living in modernism (which is why his work is, IMO, so tedious and couched in these booorrring personal mythologies that ground his power squarely within the self). And he understands the power structures of now. He's not fighting for truth or goodness for all. He's fighting for his corporate identity.

What is he doing with this power? Well, I have to admit that I don't know. I have guesses, but I may just be projecting my hopes and fantasies about what I would do if I had MB's resources.

I think he's making films because sculpture has an extremely slippery relationship to time, and he's hoping to pin it down.

And I think that his obsession with self could be rooted in a similar desire to explicate the relationship between sculpture and the body. (Although it is more likely that he is a raving narcissist).

But is his sculpture any good? And what is the difference between the sculptures and the movies? Delving deeper next time...