#Matthew barney series

I’m interested when a material that has certain histories and chemical properties is placed in proximity to another material with opposing properties and histories. This plays out through juxtaposing images in films, but it’s more elusive in sculpture, which is ultimately more engaging for me. It’s often inciting a reaction that resonates with me through these conflicting oppositional forces. What are you trying to confront in the tangible object? It feels like they’re coming from opposing entities concerned with particular material histories. The typology of film work and that of physical objects is so different. I would say that the sculpture ends up being a distillation of the various forms within the narrative that also belong to that mapping. I’m a system maker more than anything else, and I tend to work out the system through drawing. I liked reading about how you always return to the drawing no matter if you’ve finished the piece or not.ĭrawing is an important tool for me - it’s part of the method of mapping the system. Matthew Barney, Secondary, 2023 Five channel video installation with sound, 1:00:00 hour. Matthew Barney, Drawing RestraBlack-and- white video with no sound 05:01 min. I think the way the piece functioned archaeologically excited me a lot. You can see all of those histories converging at once. When I was location scouting in Detroit for the Khu performance in River of Fundament, you could really feel the different layers of history in the city, from the prehistoric salt mine and the mineral deposits that brought the auto industry there to the opulent architecture of industrial wealth and the ruins and relics of it that still remain.

Being in an opera house feels like being inside someone’s chest, in the sense that it’s a resonator.ĭo you treat your studio practice like a soundstage? Stadium and opera-house architecture speak to me because of their corporeal qualities. I often want architecture to function like the larger body within any work - a kind of body that can occupy different scales simultaneously. In Secondary, my studio is serving a double role, both as a stadium and a place where sculpture is made. It deals with the same set of dynamics that were at play in my work 30 years ago, specifically the Jim Otto and Harry Houdini works from the early 90s, where the gallery served as an athletic arena of sorts. I think my primal scene would be the stadium, which I have revisited a lot recently because of my forthcoming project, Secondary. It’s easier for me to think of architecture as a character within the narrative. Matthew Barney: When I’m working on a larger project it usually begins with a place. © Matthew BarneyĮmmanuel Olunkwa: What is your relationship to architecture? Matthew Barney, Blind Perineum, 1991 color video, silent, 1:29:30 hour. In this conversation, he delves into these two modes of his practice, while discussing his forthcoming project, Secondary, which will revisit his athletic roots, his mapping of geological time, and his early-career anxieties. Barney has generally leveraged the mundanely corporeal and the mythically grandiose in equal measure. Blood, feces, hormones produced by the placenta during pregnancy, self-lubricating plastics, and petroleum jelly make up the raw micro-material of his works, which often play out at massive scales - think football stadiums, opera houses, the Chrysler Building. In the film River of Fundament (2014), he represented the body of Norman Mailer as three different American cars, one of which is a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial, which also appears in Barney’s career-defining epic The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002, named for the muscle that raises and lowers the human testes).

In another early work, Blind Perineum (1991), he scaled the walls of New York’s Gladstone Gallery using ice picks, dressed in a blue swimming cap and almost nothing else, before inserting a screw into his rectum. In a similar manner, the body is a recurring element in Barney’s elaborate aesthetic systems. It’s an embodied performance that draws on Barney’s youth spent competing as an athlete, rooted in a fundamental truth of sports training: (muscle) growth only comes from subjecting yourself to forces of restraint.

#Matthew barney series

Artist Matthew Barney describes his ongoing series Drawing Restraint, which he began as studio experiments in 1987, as “an endless loop between desire and discipline.” In the piece, which brings together performance, film, and sculpture, he created serpentine obstacles for himself - impeded by obstacles, harnesses, and ramps, he struggled to put a pencil to paper.