Matthew Barney

To follow up on Ron Mueck and continue to have a discussion on artists that use imaginative culture and special affects influences in their work; an influence on my mind as early as I can remember, I find it fitting to write about the work of Matthew Barney. Although the use of many of the materials and processes used by Matthew Barney have not shown up in my work, I believe similar processes and ideals are there and will begin to surface as I continue the investigation of the meanings of my work.

Certainly, Barney is one of the few artists in America who can generate such deeply divided opinions about his work. At once gorgeous and gross, fascinating to some and impenetrable to many, his art incorporates such unconventional materials as petroleum jelly and almost always involves the transformation of one body into another, often of an uncertain species or gender. Commenting on this writer Flood says, “There was not only a fascination but an awareness that he was liberating materials no one had ever seen in art before.” “There were ten different layers of new.”

“I’m attracted to things that embrace mystery,” he says. I think that the obscure use of material is initially what draws me in to Barney’s work. It is always a challenge to use “non-traditional” materials in creating work. I have attempted pieces that used Vaseline, a direct influence from Barney, to portray a living membrane on the surface of organic forms. There is much to be learned from Barney’s perfection of material use and there is much to be studied concerning the way in which he works. The mentioning of the word “mystery” has often come up in my readings of Barney and other artists and I think it ties in to my thoughts mentioned in earlier posts concerning imagination and the need for it in my work.

Influenced by the task-oriented performance work of Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, and Bruce Nauman, and by the site-specific sculptural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, Barney took the exercise mats, barbells, and Vaseline of his athletic training into his studio and made them the focus of his art. Unlike most artists, Barney was able to obtain a cult following very early in his career; I have a lot of respect for his dedication and his motivation. Having investigated many of the artists mentioned above, I can see a relationship being set up historically in his work, though this is something I don’t necessarily dwell on in my own work, I think it is of great importance and like Barney I’m certain there will be influential artists such as himself that begin to show in my work.

Barney’s esthetic vision has always been rooted in the biology of reproductive function, as the delicate drawings using graphite, petroleum jelly, and iodine. In looking at these works it is noticed right away that Barney is letting the concepts drive the piece, and he uses the materials necessary to best portray the idea; something I am continually working on and learning within my own bodies of work.

Henry Jenkins writes about Matthew Barney in regard to the “horror esthetic,” though this is not an esthetic of my choice, I have great appreciation in regards to the films/directors that influence the work and appreciate that Barney not only borrows from Art History in his works, but also looks to pop/cult culture to fuel the works. The works that most of the public are familiar with and have been written a great deal about is the Cremaster Cycle. This body of work is overwhelming in-terms of material and content. In relation to the horror Genre and the Cremaster Cycle, Jenkins comments: In regards to Cremaster 3 - - Barney explained that the “dryness” of the classic zombie figure had always “repulsed” him, whereas “the creatures that attract me are wet, sensual, and more unseen” than the undead on view in most contemporary horror films. In the sequence described above, Barney focuses on the sensuality of the zombie figure, the wet earth that clings to her nakedness, the ways that decay re sculpts her body, the stiffened grace of her movements, and the saturated colors of her thinning hair and decaying flesh. In this, he would seem to be drawing inspiration from other horror filmmakers–Mario Bava and Dario Argento come most immediately to mind–who wanted us to celebrate the transformations that the human body undergoes after death as a thing of intense, otherworldly beauty; they wanted to blur eros and thanatos so that we could confront the natural human fascination with death not as morbidity but as desire.

The popular aesthetics’ demand for affective intensity and novelty requires that popular artists constantly renew their formal vocabulary. Representing the monstrous gives popular artists a chance to move beyond conventional modes of representation, to imagine alternative forms of sensuality and perception, and to invert or transform dominant ideological assumptions.

The most hardcore segments of the horror audience are, in effect, avant-garde in their tastes, with fanzine critics functioning as the low-culture counterpart of arts journals in identifying and interpreting what is distinctive about emerging figures within the genre. Documenting how fanzines helped to promote the “art horror” of Lynch, Craven, and Cronenberg, David Sanjek writes, “This devotion to uniqueness of vision has led the fanzines to value most works which bear the mark of an uninhibited visionary sensibility, one which pushes the boundaries of social, sexual, and aesthetic assumptions.”

This is where yet again I have found a source for the ideas of the human body or figure, in a contemporary light. Most specifically the idea of the “posthuman” and the identity that artists are portraying humans to have in regards to responses to the abundant usage of new technologies and current research in biology. Cronenberg has summed up these new attitudes toward the body: “We are physically different from our forefathers, partly because of what we take into our bodies and partly because of things like glasses and surgery. But there is a further step that could happen, which would be that you could grow another arm, that you could actually physically change the way you look–mutate. Human beings could swap sexual organs, or do without sexual organs as sexual organs per se, for pro creation…Artists, both high and low, have been tempted to explore the further implications of these changes, to imagine radically different ways of living within our bodies.

Critics have labeled the popular representations of these “posthuman” identities as “body horror,” pointing to a new degree of explicitness in the depiction of the body and its processes, a new anxiety about bodily invasion or transformation, a new fascination with images of mutation and plague, and a new openness about the intersection of horror and sexuality, pleasure and pain. These themes have both fueled and exploited significant improvements in special effects and make-up technologies that enable filmmakers to morph and mutate the human body beyond recognition.

Barney, Matthew, Nancy Spector, and Neville Wakefield. Matthew Barney: the Cremaster Cycle. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2002. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. "Monstrous Beauty and Mutant Aesthetics." The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York UP, 2007. Print.

Yablonsky, Linda. "A Satyr Wrapped In an Enigma." ARTnews June 2006: 131-33. Web.