“Matthew Barneys epically mystic Egypto-industrial detritus sculpture inspires and transports.”
A lot of people recently suffered for Matthew Barney’s art. Alas, I was not one of them, although I was supposed to be. A year ago October 1, my flight was canceled, so I missed KHU, a sprawling, multi-sited, outdoor, all-day performance Barney staged in Detroit at who knows what astronomical cost for a hand-picked audience of around 200. Detroit was the perfect setting for this tale of woe and reincarnation, an economic and spiritual city of the dead and would-be rebirth. It also rained apocalyptically that day, and Barney’s performance included a freezing barge ride down the Detroit River, where the audience witnessed, among other things, a crane dredging up a 1967 Chrysler Imperial. There was also actress-athlete Aimee Mullins as Egyptian goddess Isis seated semi-naked on an engine block filled with live, writhing snakes. In the spectacular finale, five enormous customized furnaces poured molten metal, including parts of the Imperial, into a fiery casting pit that drained into a mold of a massive Egyptian Djed, an ancient symbol associated with Osiris, whose own body was cut up into pieces before it was retrieved and reassembled. But I missed all of this. Arriving in Detroit the next day to deliver an unrelated lecture, I was regaled with tales of the harrowing extravaganza, including the assurances of two women that Barney’s performance was “more intense than childbirth.”
After a five-year hiatus from the gallery scene here in New York, Barney is back, with, among other things, a huge sculpture that is the result of the Detroit spectacle. The sight is typically visionary, Boschian, and ambitious. Yet unlike his previous outings, there are no live animals in the gallery, no long, elliptical videos with scenes featuring aquatic Asian sprites or the artist as a satyr with seven Jacobean doves lifting his scrotum heavenward. There are no phantasmagorical sculptural objects made of bizarre materials like white tapioca or “self-lubricating plastic.” This is Barney basic, the artist he really is and, I think, has been beneath the trappings all along. What we see at Gladstone aren’t leftovers and docu-fragments from Detroit; we see enormous sculptures that show Barney thinking and, as it were, drawing and dreaming in bronze, iron, and lead. As he recently told filmmaker David Cronenberg, “My interest is the process of making something.” Barney is first and last a sculptor, a maker, who uses narrative, myth, architecture, biology, pageantry, history, geography, geology, music, mayhem, and video to create a palpable sculptural universe. (more…)
(Via nymag.com: Art.)