The Athlete is the Artist
Matthew Barney
“'Art needs to be defended. It's fragile. If a work is shown too many times, something gets stolen from it. You come to it with preconceptions, or you get tired of it. And it's the same with an artist. So I try to protect myself and my work. I want there to be a fraction of the art that even I don't understand.” — Matthew Barney
From the moment of his first solo show at Barbara Gladstone’s Greene Street gallery in 1991, Matthew Barney (b. 1967) was catapulted into art-world fame and cult status. Not since Jasper Johns (b. 1930) made his debut in the1960s has a young American artist received so much attention so fast. Infamously hailed as “the most important artist of his generation” by the New York Times, he is also routinely trashed as a charlatan — or perhaps worse — an avant-garde film maker. In 1985 Barney was recruited by Yale University to play football and enrolled with the intention of studying pre-med to become a plastic surgeon; to pay his way, he modelled, featuring in advertisements for J Crew and Ralph Lauren. After two semesters, he switched majors to art. When he left Yale in 1989 he was an almost instant success, a phenomenon; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gave him a solo shown when he was 24, and in 1993 he was included in the Whitney Biennial and Documenta. That same year the group show Post-human helped secure his success; curated by Jeffrey Deitch, the exhibition explored how the internet, artificial intelligence and plastic surgery were changing what it meant to be human. In his introductory essay, Deitch explained that the “extraordinary self-transformation of Ivana Trump (is) an example of a shuffling of reality and fantasy into a reassembled fictional personality that quickly becomes fact”. Seen by some as a video version of Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) (often appearing naked or, as in one video, pushing a football players blocking sled around a gallery in a backless black evening gown and arm-length gloves), with his surreal films and installations, Barney had captured the art world Zeitgeist of the early 90’s. “It felt like things were moving faster than I could keep up with. I was 24 and I didn't really understand what was going on. I made a conscious decision to take something on that I knew would slow everything down. That’s how the Cremaster series came about.” His art has provoked strong critical reaction, both positive and negative. Some call his works brilliantly inventive and compare them to the radical projects of Vito Acconci (1940-2017), others see them as nothing more than a jokey postmodern meditation on kitsch. Yet, love him or loathe him, one thing is certain: Barney’s work calls into question what it is to be an “artist”. Like Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) and James Lee Byars (1932-1997), Barney is adept at creating stories and myths around every aspect of his work — treading a fine line between comprehension and enigma. Everything he turns his hand to, be it drawing , sculpture, film-making or performance, is in some way interconnected. His aim is not the destruction of formal artistic conventions, but rather a re-exploration of the notion of creative self as a whole. “It’s never been the point to balance out these different mediums into a larger work,” he says. “It's just what is natural for me.”
Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 5 (1989), documentation still, photograph by Michael Rees, c/o the Gladstone Gallery
Matthew Barney, Ancient Evenings: Khaibit Libretto (2009), graphite and ink on paperback copy of Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, c/o the Gladstone Gallery
Barney’s work is not obvious, far from it, requiring mental engagement from the audience in order to function. The majority of his exhibitions have focused on one or two films, around which he displays sculptures and installations relating to the film symbolically, or, quite literally, as production props, and in doing so, Barney creates a site specific universe. From his earliest work the artist has explored the possibility of spiritual and physical transcendence, especially ideas of metamorphosis and creation of form. Athlete, model, pre-med and potential plastic surgeon, these themes of bodily cultivation, discipline and transformation seem to point to a biographical reading. Indeed underlying these themes is the artists fascination with hypertrophy: that being the idea that athletic physicality and strength is built up through muscle resistance. In a 1990 text titled Notes on Athleticism, the artist describes this hypertrophic process, concluding: “THE ATHLETE IS THE ARTIST”. Barney’s Drawing Restraint series (begun in 1987, and ongoing) began with a straightforward proposition: his attempt to make a mark — the most fundamental component of drawing. He sought to apply the idea of hypertrophy to artistic growth, be that physical, cultural or spiritual, exploring the idea that the strongest artists, like athletes, should have endure contests of physical strength and psychological willpower against resistance in order to create something “higher”; something more “powerful” — this involved the artist crawling around his studio, attempting to draw things on the wall or ceiling, while self-imposing resistance on his body e.g. struggling against weights and other impediments. Fellow artist Sophie Arkette observed that “These works do not refer to something static, a composed form, but reveal the way one action precipitates another in the course of making a work.” The most controversial in the series was Drawing Restraint 9, made in collaboration with his then-partner Björk. Set aboard a Japanese whaling ship, the 143-minute film focuses on the central theme of ritual and transformation by taking inspiration from Japanese culture and the constraints inherent to its traditions.
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3 (2002), production still, photograph by Chris Winget c/o the Gladstone Gallery
Barney is perhaps most famous for five films called the Cremaster cycle (named after the muscles that controls the rise and fall of the testes according to temperature, external stimulation, or fear), devoted to the period in utero when a person’s sex is still indeterminate — a window of gender freedom — before the reproductive organs either ascend into ovaries or descend into testicles. Almost wordless, except for increasingly lavish soundtracks by Berlin-based American composer Jonathan Bepler, who pays homage to everything from easy listening to opera, this six-hour plus series is a Wagnerian meditation on what Barney has called “desire in the guise of a digestive system”. An an odyssey of pyscho-sexual drive and desire, it’s unparalleled in contemporary culture — spanning five different geographical locations, from the Bronco stadium in his hometown of Boise, Idaho, to the Chrysler building and the Guggenheim Museum. Dense, compacted and multi-layered, the cycle features Barney in various roles, including characters as diverse as a satyr, a ram, Harry Houdini, and even Gary Gilmore, the double murderer from Utah.
In Cremastar 3 for e.g. Barney, shown wearing a voluminous kilt and a huge, Shocking-pink shako, climbs the interior walls of the the Guggenheim, encountering bizarre obstacles at each level, including the paralympic sports star and model Aimee Mullins who turns into a fanged cheetah-woman and the sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1938) (played by himself) hurling molten Vaseline at the gallery walls. Somewhere between a traditional film and an art installation, perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re not available on home video; other than limited edition laserDiscs — sold for $100,000 a piece — that came in a case “made from hand-tooled saddle leather, sterling silver, polycarbonate honeycomb, beeswax, acrylic and nutmeg” (In 2007, just one-fifth of the series (Cremaster 2) sold at auction for over $500,000). Taking inspiration from a dizzying range of sources, Manx, Mormon and Masonic, as well as sporting, cinematic and sculptural, Cremester is a parallel mythological world exploring the process of creation; with its own language of codes, signs and forms, and almost its own genetic imprint.
The phrase “could double as an installation piece” has often been used in reference to obscure art-house films with hard-to-reach narratives, for e.g. Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux (2012). With Barney, this is quite literally the case, with the props and sets created for his films — including dumbbells made out of tapioca, a weight bench made of petroleum jelly and a mirrored saddle — sold as sculpture to collectors. To that extent Barney can be seen as a kind of “process” sculptor, influenced by Beuys, Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), and Richard Serra (b. 1948), but at the same time, unashamedly caught up in surrealist fantasies. Barney’s oeuvre has — on numerous occasions — attracted the ire of critics who have cast aspersions on his credibility as an artist, qualifying his work as camp and seemingly meaningless self-indulgence. Others see him merely as another entitled white male artist, with critic Terry Myers pointing out at the time of his initial emergence that “Barney is perfect for an art world that prefers that its gay artists be straight, its black artists be white, and its women artists be men.” Others however, have praised Barney for redefining the role of “the artist” in society. One certainty, is the aesthetic and coherence inherent in each of Barney’s projects. Through a vast network of cultural symbols, both historical and autobiographical, Barney has created his own multi-layered, interconnected mythic universe, often deformed and ravaged, into which he invites the viewer, with no explanation and no guarantee it will be understood.
Matthew Barney, Diana on Shooting Bench (2018), Electroplated copper plate with cast copper stand c/o the Gladstone Gallery
In that respect, Barney doesn’t regard any of his works — the sculptures, photographs, books and films — as subsidiary to any others; they’re merely the same idea expressed in different forms, all part of the same continuum. What unites all Barney’s work is its preoccupations with the body, life and death, creativity, belief systems, power and industry. It’s unwise to get bogged down in the minutiae of Barney’s art as it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture; and even then it can be seen as ingeniously complicated or nonsensical, depending entirely on ones own inclination. In order to approach Barney’s art one simply has to accept its ambiguity, he has no aspirations to become a Hollywood director, he’s a visual artist using moving imagery. If you ask him, he will tell you that his work is sculpture; his films vehicles for the sculptures he makes for them. “Art is unresolved, otherwise it is uninteresting” Barney says (Lewis 2006). The fundamental goal of Cremaster, as with other works, is to maintain a state of creative redolence; not unlike twentieth century Surrealists and abstractionists. Whilst Barney’s work is ideas-laded, and a veritable pageant of athletic prowess, cross-dressing and gender-bending, in no way can it be said to preach. He means to make us laugh, and sees his art practice as an ongoing experience of learning and growth. Barney has no public profile and no interest in social climbing; he’s incredibly private, gives little away and says even less, which, to some extent — in a world obsessed with documenting every moment of their life on social media — only serves to enhance his allure. Through his body of work Barney continues to push the boundaries of what we consider as “art”, bringing what Victor Hugo once described as a “new shudder”. A prodigious and and visionary artist, through his use of seemingly perverse and bizarre imagery, Barney poses a series of questions — using far-flung histories, characters, sciences and cultures — to which he doesn’t necessarily provide answers; and this is precisely why his work is so captivating.