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.