Between 1994 and 2002, American avant-garde artist Matthew Barney released five film series called "The Cremaster Cycle, which caused a sensation in the art world. The film is dazzled by one inexplicable visual spectacle after another: the half-human, half-beast artist himself, the cave made of Vaseline, the floating beads all over the water, the floating airships on the gymnasium... The film's makeup and avant-garde styling, coupled with surreal furnishings and fragmented plots, are so much so that when someone sees Barney's work, they exclaim that it is "the existence of the most dreamlike".
Photograph from Cremaster 1, 1996, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
Matthew Barney is certainly not a completely unfamiliar name to Chinese audiences. Hanging Silk 4 was presented at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000, and he himself came to China for the first Asian premiere in September 2016 with his other fanatical work "River of Fundament" after "Suspension".
Photograph from Cremaster 3, 2002, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
From March 1 to June 16, 2019, Matthew Barney will present an exhibition called Redoubt at the Yale Art Museum, the first time he has brought the exhibition back to his alma mater. He was accepted to play American football at Yale in 1985 and planned to attend pre-med, but later abandoned his medical career under the influence of his mother. Before studying art, he tried to become a plastic surgeon before studying art— which seems to have laid a footnote for the alienation of the human form in Barney's later works.
The Fortress will tour to the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in the fall of 2019. It will also be Matthew Barney's first solo exhibition in China!
Cover of Matthew Barney: Redoubt (Yale University Art Gallery, 2019)
His latest film, The Fortress, together with the artworks that appear in the film, made up the exhibition. Covering ecology, politics and mythology, involving copperplate engravings, dances, sculptures and images, Barney showcased his interdisciplinary and cross-media artistic talents through his latest film, The Fortress.
Matthew Barney, Redoubt, 2018. Production still. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning
The film is more than two hours long and is based on the myths and legends of the goddess of the moonlight and Diana, the goddess of the hunt. In the Roman poet Ovid's mythological work Metamorphosis, the young hunter Octane inadvertently sees the goddess bathing after the hunt, and Diana soon discovers the uninvited guest who has broken into the forbidden land. She angrily pointed at the hapless Octane, turning him into a deer. Transforming into a deer, Octane panicked and was soon bitten to death by his own and Diana's hounds.
In Barney's film The Fortress, Diana and her two entourage travel through Idaho's rugged Jagged Mountains, spending seven days and seven nights looking for wolves. The engraver, played by Barney himself, secretly recorded their actions in copperplate engravings, sparking a series of conflicts and confrontations. These copperplate engravings, which appear in the film, are also on display in this exhibition. Barney painted on copper plates in the form of electroplating, all of which were from the film and were created during filming.
Matthew Barney, Redoubt: Diana, 2018. One electroplated copper plate with vinegar patina and seven engravings, on asphaltum ground in copper and charred pine frames. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
Like most of Barney's previous video works, The Fortress still has no dialogue, and the communication of the characters is done through a dance choreographed by Eleanor Bauer. The dance responds and predicts their encounter with wild animals, and Eleanor herself appears in the film's dance.
Barney chose Gunlogger Anette Wachter, a national rifle association long-range champion, to play Diana. After all, one of the hard skills to become a protagonist is to shoot Barney's carved copperplate engravings from hundreds of feet away.
In addition to the engraved copperplate engravings, the exhibition will also feature four large sculptures that appear in the film. Barney collected the wreckage from the forest fire from the Jagged Mountains and poured the melted copper and brass into the corpses of dead trees.
Matthew Barney, Diana, 2018. Cast and machined brass, and cast and machined copper. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
The transformed and regenerated dead tree is indestructible, achieving immortality in this combination of hardcores. Shaped like heavy machine guns and cannons mounted on a fortress, these abstract sculptures dottedly make a gesture of final resistance. Barney's treatment of the details of the form inadvertently reveals its inherent fragility, like the half-human, half-mechanical creatures that often appear in cyberpunk or science fiction and movies, reminding us of the harm they have suffered.
Matthew Barney, Diana (detail), 2018. Cast and machined brass, and cast and machined copper. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
This project demonstrates Barney's interest in depicting the central Idaho region. He lived in Idaho from 1973 to 1985, attending elementary and secondary school in Boise.
"I lived there in the '70s and '80s, and the feeling of being isolated was more pronounced then than it is now, and it was a challenge for a child who was in adolescence and had a strong interest in what was going on in the world over the mountain. Even now, however, there is a strong trend toward isolationism. Barney said in an interview with Yale Museum magazine.
Matthew Barney, Redoubt: Base Plate Conductor, 2018. One electroplated copper plate with vinegar patina and seven engravings, on asphaltum ground in copper and charred pine frames. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
His father, who provided catering at Boise State University and a mother who was an abstract painter, divorced his father when he was 12 and moved to New York. Barney began to visit New York frequently after that, and was exposed to a more lively art scene.
Matthew Barney, Diana on Shooting Bench, 2018. Electroplated copper plate with cast copper stand. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
Since 2011, an extremist movement advocating a break from government and urban life and a return to land has been waged in central America, including Idaho and eastern Oregon, and this political migration movement has been called "American Fortress.".
"A fortress usually refers to a defensive military bunker, especially an isolated earthworks, or a defensive posture against a social or psychological threat. But for me, the word 'fortress' is a more abstract description of isolation or retreat. "
In Barney's Fortress, vast tracts of snow-capped land stand in stark contrast to the tiny humans who walk through it. The loneliness and fragility of human beings, and the alienation from their fellow human beings, are infinitely magnified in the face of nature, but we are still silently retreating and resisting in the spiritually constructed fortress.
· Spreadtrum ·
fortress
Redoubt
March 1 - June 16, 2019
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
September 28 - December 15, 2019
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
Matthew Barney, Matthew Barney
Artist Matthew · Barney
Matthew Barney (b. 1967, USA) graduated from Yale University and is a distinguished American contemporary artist. His work mixes linguistic forms such as performance, photography, video, installation, and film, exploring the connections and conflicts between geography, biology, geology, and mythology. His early works were primarily a combination of performance and video sculptural installations. Between 1994 and 2002, Barney created The Cremaster Cycle, which was named "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema" by The Guardian. Barney's notable works also include Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) and River of Fundament (2014). Matthew Barney has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Tate Gallery in London, the Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennale, etc., and in 1996 won the Hugo Boss Award at the Guggenheim Museum Contemporary Art Award, and was named "the most important American artist of his generation" by The New York Times.