Tuesday, April 25, 2006


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...

6 Comments:

Blogger fisher6000 said...

Yeah, key words big and exploding.

I like that he's daring materials to do things they shouldn't do. That's arrogant in a way that tickles me.

His movies are arrogant in a way that makes my butt pucker.

5:58 PM  
Blogger gypsy_kat said...

One of us spent 10+ dollars on his movie, and one of us did not. And one of us regrets her decision about that movie. Somebody's goat got got. Not my goat, but somebody's.

love, and peace!

1:03 PM  
Blogger fisher6000 said...

Aw, Kat, are you going to hang out on poorly written first line or are you going to at least put your feet in?

I refer to the Night Of Peruvian Steak Dinner That Never Came... we discussed Barney and you are roundly dismissive of him. Maybe the goat was in the kitchen getting butchered or maybe it was just my stomach growling like a goat in heat.

But I remember that your criticism of Barney's Cremaster Cycle was insightful and that I did not agree. Come on... play a little?

5:20 PM  
Blogger Lisa Hunter said...

Give Barney credit for trying to break out of the mold when so many other artists are busily trying to break IN to it.

10:18 PM  
Blogger fisher6000 said...

So it comes down to this, Matthew Barney is an artist that I love and hate. I love what he is able to do (actually I’m quite jealous) and I hate what he is doing with it.

Why do you think I am writing about him so much?

6:59 PM  
Blogger KillBillyburg said...

Would like to see the female equivalent. Why don't they give a woman unlimited funds for this drivel? Haven't we "come a long way, baby?" (JOKE!) Barney is an unrepentant narcissist. It's not a joke. He's incapable of humor. HIs work literally, physically gives me a stomach ache. Got in a fight once with his set designer's wife that almost resorted in a girlfight on the floor of Union Pool (a bar that literally gives me a stomach ache). She kept saying what a nice person he was, but she was an unrepentant narcissist as well, so that and a cuppa coffee...I think it's when I said "I think his work is fucked" that she decided maybe we weren't going to go shopping and get our nails done together.

10:40 AM  

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