9/14/2023 0 Comments Matthew barney![]() The lack of sound in the videos makes the action heavygoing, the effort infinite and useless, the lightness of the movement apparent, the distance between spectator and image insurmountable. Extreme physical undertakings unfetter the individual from psychic and social agony, projecting him into a soothing, timeless dimension, protecting him from the idea of death. The football player, the bodybuilder, and the freeclimber all represent the possibility of overcoming the ‘ego’ by means of a fanatical ritual. With his body, he is brought back up to date with a society in the clutches of both incommunicability and information. Moreover, in a condition of mental dissociation and modification of sexual psychology, the artist is re-endowed, by means of a psychic excursion, with his long-lost shamanic role. The star system symbolism of the ’80s is replaced by the presentation of the heroic and epic dimension suppressed by contemporary artists. On one hand it overcomes aesthetic formalism, and on the other, it surpasses political action. The irrational element is a vehicle through which to clarify the somewhat confused, collective psychic terminology of the current historical and social moment.īy bringing the psyche back into the organism and its anatomical location, the work is freed from a potentially puritan interpretation of Western civilization and affords an unexpected perspective on the artist’s role, obliging him to reconsider the limits of his actions. The first thing to manifest itself is the collapse of any psychological analysis of the work. Comprehending his work is like a surgical operation, an autopsy free of intellectual hierarchies. This could be brought about even via a reconsideration of the creative ‘self.’ This is the direction currently undertaken by Matthew Barney, who is proving capable of leaving behind him an artistic corpus of which we are privy to neither its identity nor the personality behind it. Looking at Matthew Barney’s work, I am convinced that the system could survive and revive itself only if its central elements - the artists - have the courage to revolutionize their role. While the ensemble is still inconsistent, the profile of the artist takes on new connotations to the extent that we might reconsider our concept of ‘the artist.’ For some time now, we have been directing our attention toward the changes that are needed within the art system for it to survive. However, within his apparently unstructured poetics there are sufficient clues for us to grasp the innovation in Barney’s creative process. Barney operates in an atrophied, temporal dimension and in a space which is expanded to the extreme with no narrative discourse between the various points of the production - every element demands separate interpretation. Only after one’s perception of the event has been analyzed can we talk more completely about the artist’s ‘bloodlines.’ We are still concerned with the athletic undertaking which should be looked at independent of all other references. The angle on this artist is circumscribed in the present with Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Rudolf Schwarzkogler left aside, at least for the time being. Consequently, Barney’s work and the phenomenon it represents (stirring up what is only apparently conventional attention in the art world) demands immediate analysis, just like a sports event. We are dealing with a sporting event just like the ones lived out in real time. The running of it all is left to a team which analyzes and boosts the results. Barney deals in the (suitably) unpredictable suspension of statements on his work that might thwart the development of his surprising and dynamic output. The artist’s coming has been sufficiently heralded over many months and without any concrete references to his actual work, to give ‘epiphanic’ clout to his art. The very young Matthew Barney has unveiled one such vision capable of reconferring a degree of credibility to the system’s stifled mechanisms. What is particularly noteworthy is that a generation caught between economic heaven and puritan hell should unexpectedly generate apparitions disconcerting enough to alter something as inveterate as the art system. 1įelix Gonzalez-Torres is operating along a particularly illuminating political track, especially since it pushes us to the very threshold of the limbo where the best part of American culture is centered. At this point, to recall history seems impolite. ![]() So these pieces were an attempt to create a kind of historical picture, a reminder, to reinstate certain events. Now you can’t trust someone under thirty. When you see that the Republican Party’s biggest voting block is kids below thirty, things have changed. I was teaching… and the one thing that terrified me no end was that most of these kids had no historical references. ![]()
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