Power v. Tyrrany: Serra Interlude



Because Barney is all about sculptural power, it is impossible to talk about Barney without talking about Serra. And modernism.

Richard Serra: Power.



Serra is the king of sculpture power not because he uses massive amounts of weight, and not because he is stern looking and has meaty forearms. It's what he does with all this weight and meat. He uses weight to describe, activate and electrify specific negative spaces. Nobody else really does this in the same, elemental way. My favorite things about Richard Serra dovetail nicely. He is extremely intellectual and knows that what he is doing is more than formal, and he can write about this in a very clear way. But he doesn't really need to. His work manages to be quite generous. I have never taught an art appreciation class in which Serra wasn't immediately understood by non-art majors. He does one thing that everybody else does, too: displaces space. And he does it again and again, honing as he goes, making baby steps. He comes across all kinds of other things to do with space in his journey: he carves up space, describes elevations, which are vertical space...

And this is a concept the average ninteen-year old accounting major can easily grasp. It's elemental--we all displace space with our own flesh all day long.

Serra's generosity as a thinker lies right here, in this act of taking on weight itself. And of course to anyone who went to college in the eighties and beyond, this reads as just beyond arrogant because nothing is elemental. Artists in the postmodern academy are taught to stay the fuck away from the very idea that we share experiences because it's almost never true. One person's truth is another's tyrrany, know what I mean?

This is as it should be--I'm no Hilton Kramer. The very fact that my skinny little female self can do whatever I want with big tools is a testament to the fact that Serrra's worldview changed. I am a product of pluralism, and so is Barney.

But what about power?



In some ways, Barney's contemporary take on power is right on the money. Working with impossible materials, using restraint, a disaster-management aesthetic--these tactics resonate, and manage to project as much humility as power. The physical world is not at our beck-and-call the way Serra thinks it is--it's much more fluid than ten tons of cor-ten would have you believe. Barney has this fact in his grip and is not letting go, and that is good.

But there's the logoisimus, Barney-as-brand, obsession with getting viewers to decode personal mythology and personal narratives--all the ways Barney manages to use his zeitgeist to create a whole new tyrrany of the self.

Punchline: Serra manages to be much more generous than Barney is about power, because he is working toward what we share.

Serra's work does not collapse into tyrrany because of this basic generosity. He makes more assumptions about his power over the world as a human. But he also makes critical, correct assumptions about the way in which this experience of displacement is shared. Barney, because he's smart about power, sees that we share very little. But this means that Barney's freaky truth gets to become my tyrrany. I never think about myself in terms of freemasonry, the Chrysler building, hacking my legs off and turning into a whale, or being able to cajole Richard Serra into flinging vaseline. All this obtuse mythologizing is digging a moat around Barney, and because this is art power and not political power, that's a bad strategizing. This kind of power is boooring.

Matthew Barney, are you going to use your power-gift for good or evil? I prefer the Barney that keeps his eye trained on what we share. So few people are doing that.

Matthew Barney--Outsider?

So I went and looked at the show again, and don't feel particularly gypped for doing so. His sculpture is getting better as his filmmaking is getting worse. Less propshop, more active search for meaning in the making of things.

Jerry Saltz says Barney is practically an outsider artist in his review of DR9, and Saltz is showing both his provincialism and the devaluation of sculpture as a practice with this remark. Barney fits nicely within the discussion LA sculptors Charles Ray, Jennifer Pastor and Liz Craft are having. And Barney is pushing that discussion into strange new places, mostly as a function of his ego. This is not a value judgement. In fact, I wish all four of them could share Barney's ego, so that a little fucking momentum could build up under their joint project. These four people are working at figuring out the world through the discipline of sculpture. All four of them are riding the line between representation and a very specific kind of process-based thinking. They are all asking the same question:

what is it because I am making it?



This question is powerful because humans make so much and depend so much on the built world we have surrounded ourselves with. With this question you can go dig up a lot of meaning that you just can't find anywhere else. You can look at the Hoover Dam and turn it all around in your head until it becomes a weird spatial puzzle--a representation of the sculptor trying to figure out how the damn thing works. Jennifer Pastor's will to do this, to represent a thinking state of mind in three dimensions, is rich and beautiful and points to a specific existential truth: yes, I am always clawing for the chance to give the world inside my head a life outside.



If you ask what it is because you are making it, you can represent a car too much and make a weird, vibrating, visually strange thing that is a total fucking mystery until you find out that it's weird because each part of the original car was handmade and put together again. Of course it's not going to fit exactly right, and so Unpainted Sculpture becomes a meditation on this space between things. Charles Ray excels at probing this specific space for meaning. He is a creator of queer abutments, mental and physical.



Of the three, Craft is the best at playing actively with this question, relying least on rigorous formulas. She prefers to just make really freaky shit. But this freaky shit would not work if she didn't have a disarmingly earnest and straightforward relationship to material that is more intuitive than Pastor or Ray's approach, but just as smart. She makes bronze fresh because she makes stuff that must be bronze in order to make any sense at all.



When Barney is at his best, he gives himself over to process as completely as Charles Ray, but with less rigor and much more acceptance of the unknown. The Deportment of the Host is by far the smartest piece at Gladstone right now. Rather than lapsing into propshop, it actively presents itself as an answer to the question: what is it because Barney made it? It is explosion management. It is a feat of moldmaking and material innovation, and these technical facts of making are allowed to become a gesture. A moment blanketed and set, frozen in time, a state of becoming. It is a treat to see that meaning delivered sculpturally, to see sculpture not as artifact or a simple word that denotes three-dimensionality, but as a set of ideas that govern our relationship to making, to the things we make, to the meaning we create when we turn raw materials into something else.

This aspect of DR 9 was gorgeous. Not ponderous. I don't care that the sculpture he was making over and over again was his logo. The attention lavished on the spaces between things, the differences between materials, and bodies in space was worth it, worth every minute of my life that Barney took. I trust Barney as a sculptor.

I wish Barney trusted himself as a sculptor. Jerry, if he was an outsider, he would embrace this sculptural vision and bore us less with these aggrandized mythologies. No, let me rephrase that. He can aggrandize himself all he wants: sculpture is an arrogant act and sculptors are arrogant people. But putting all of this personal mythology into everything, especially because he depends on a linear format for much of his sculptural thinking, crosses the line. It is tyrrany of the self. If he gets up thinking these fantastically creative thoughts about his love of Bjork and wants to make some sculpture, or even a film about sculpture, that is based on these symbols and narratives, he should go for it. But rather than ask us to get the symbols and narratives, he should be guiding us toward understanding the sculpture. Because the thing Craft, Pastor and Ray get, the thing they can really get across to Barney, is that whatever egomania that pushes them to make is relatively unimportant to viewers. They are pushing their selfish bullshit through a translating machine, making it our selfish bullshit, pretty consistently, and that is the generous gesture most often lacking in Barney's work.