- posted on 06/04/2007
- posted on 06/04/2007
Born March 25, 1967 (1967-03-25) (age 40)
Boise, Idaho
Occupation Artist
Children Ísadóra.
Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967 in San Francisco, California) is a contemporary artist who works with film, video, installations, sculpture, photography, drawing and performance art. Barney has described himself as being primarily a sculptor.[1]New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman called Barney "the most important American artist of his generation." Barney's work has been described as being part of "the legacy of the performance art of the 1960s and 1970s."[2]
Barney spent his youth partially in Idaho, where he played football in Capital High School, and partially in New York City with his mother, who introduced him to art and museums. This intermingling of sports and art would inspire his later work as an artist. Barney entered Yale University planning on studying medicine, but became enamored with art and fashion. He received a B.A. from Yale in 1989. He also worked briefly as a model for Click Modeling Agency, and was in a J. Crew ad.
Barney lives with his partner, Icelandic singer Björk and their young daughter, Ísadóra, born October 3, 2002.
Contents [hide]
1 Work
2 Critical analysis
3 Prizes
4 See also
5 Notable works
6 References and notes
7 External links
[edit] Work
The film series The Cremaster Cycle is Barney's best-known work. The films have included very high budgets by experimental art film standards, and have featured such varied celebrities as Norman Mailer, Ursula Andress, and Richard Serra.
In 2006, he released Drawing Restraint 9, a collaboration with his girlfriend Björk, who wrote the soundtrack and starred.
In interviews, Barney has mentioned the phenomenon of hypertrophy as a metaphorical inspiration for much of his work; several of his performance pieces have involved Barney restrained or somehow encumbered while attempting to execute a drawing. The performance aspects of Barney's work have been described as predominant, while the resultant drawings have been called "[not] very interesting in their own right." Some have criticized Drawing Restraint 9 for what has been termed a superficial treatment of Japanese culture combined with an undesirable awkwardness in the actors/performers, including Barney.[3] A gallery show accompanying the Drawing Restraint 9 project appeared at Gladstone Gallery in New York, April 7-May 13, 2006, featuring thermoplastic sculptures associated with the film and the remains of a private project performed at the gallery April 2, 2006, titled Drawing Restraint 13: The Instrument of Surrender, for which Barney emerged from a crate dressed as General Douglas MacArthur, walked across a platform, and fell into a vat of petroleum jelly. Barney reused his motif of dressing as MacArthur in a show later that year (June 23 through September 17, 2006) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. That performance involved Barney scaling to the roof of the museum in order to render a drawing on the ceiling surface.
[edit] Critical analysis
Barney has had strong positive and negative receptions for his work. Calling his work a "snooze", a film critic for The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, criticizes Barney as being "a star for attaining stardom."[4]Another critic in the same magazine characterizes elements in Drawing Restraint 9 as "an unabashed display of Oriental kitsch that makes Memoirs of a Geisha look like an ethnographic documentary."[5]Jed Perl has described Barney's work as "phony-baloney mythopoetic movies, accompanied by Dumpster loads of junk from some godforsaken gymnasium of the imagination".[6]
Others have defended his work, comparing Barney to other famous performance artists including Chris Burden and Vito Acconci, and as being simultaneously a critique and celebration of commercialism and blockbuster filmmaking. Regarding the Cremaster series' enigmatic nature, Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward write[7]:
“ "Rather than reading Cremaster, we are encouraged to consume it as high-end eye candy, whose symbolic system is available to us but hardly necessary to our pleasure: meaning, that is, is no longer a necessary component to art production or reception. Left to its own devices-and it is all devices-Cremaster places us in a framework of mutually assured consumption, consuming us as we consume it." ”
Famed art critic Arthur C. Danto has praised the majority of Barney's work, noting the importance of Barney's use of sign systems such as Mason mythology (see Freemasonry).[8]
Others have asserted Barney's works are contemporary expressions of surrealism.[9] "Completely arcane, hermetic and solipsistic, they nevertheless periodically provide some of the most enigmatically beautiful experimental film imagery you'll ever see", writes the critic Chris Chang. [10]
"Is Barney's work a new beginning for a new century?", asks Richard Lacayo, writing in Time. "It feels more like a very energetic longing for a beginning, in which all kinds of imagery have been put to the service of one man's intricate fantasy of return to the womb. Something lovely and exasperating is forever in formation there. Will he ever give birth?"[11]
[edit] Prizes
Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum, 1996
Skowhegan Medal for Combined Media, 1999
James D. Phelan Art Award in Video, Bay Area Video Coalition, 2000
Europa 2000 Prize
Glen Dimplex Artists Award, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2001
[edit] See also
Barney, Matthew. Cremaster 3. Guggenheim, dist. by D.A.P. 2002. photogs. ISBN 0-89207-253-9. pap. $49.95. FINE ARTS
"Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle": at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Catalogue published by Harry N. Abrams; 544 pages;
[edit] Notable works
(1995) Cremaster 4 at the Internet Movie Database
(1996) Cremaster 1 at the Internet Movie Database
(1997) Cremaster 5 at the Internet Movie Database
(1999) Cremaster 2 at the Internet Movie Database
(2002) Cremaster 3 at the Internet Movie Database
(2005) Drawing Restraint 9 at the Internet Movie Database
(2005) De Lama Lamina at the Internet Movie Database
(2006) Destricted at the Internet Movie Database
- Re: 美国当代艺术家介绍系列 American contemporary artists Matthew Barney and othersposted on 06/04/2007
Barney的女友是冰岛歌星Björk。大家一定听过她的天籁之音。他们是我们的同龄人。两位杰出的艺术家联手创作,艺术地生活,将商业成功与艺术完美地结合在一起,还有比这更幸福的吗?艺术家不一定being miserable,这对艺术家的成功是对传统艺术观念的挑战。
- Re: 美国当代艺术家介绍系列 American contemporary artists Matthew Barney and othersposted on 06/04/2007
21世纪的艺术是美术、雕塑、电影、摄影、表演、音乐、高科技完美结合的综合艺术时代。这是一个激动人心的创新时代,陈规与教条土崩瓦解的时代,一个前所未有的思想解放、多元化的时代。西方文化没有衰落,没有走到困境而裹足不前,反而在文化融合兼并中突破,西方艺术家们早已经打破了各类文化艺术的藩篱界限,勇敢尝试应用新的科学发现与技术,新材料、高科技全部都开始应用在艺术领域。那些陈腐的认识,那些过早欢呼“东风压倒西风”的见解恐怕过于井底之蛙了。
- posted on 06/04/2007
"CREMASTER 3"—on location at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY
ART:21: How close does the filming process follow the pre-written script and storyboards for "CREMASTER 3?"
BARNEY: It depends. You've seen the way the storyboard is structured and in certain cases it follows how a real storyboard would be drawn. If there's a detail of something we're shooting that needs to tell a story itself, those tend to be drawn. Bigger, narrative situations are really just organized as written lists. They're scheduled by camera setup in cases like this where the camera car was there for a day, so we covered everything we could from the car. A lot of these angles—aside from the moving camera car are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted, which is something we do often, and it happens a lot with sports references that are made in all the projects.
This is a kind of anchor, a place, mimicking sports cinematography. Like NFL films. Do you know NFL films? NFL films are a real big influence of mine. It's all 35mm material shot on all the NFL teams. It's a fleet of cinematographers that follow the different teams and then I believe that footage is sold to the different teams. Highlight tapes are made and, as a kid, we always had to watch these highlight tapes around lunch time at football camps and stuff. We'd go to different football camps at different universities and things, and there was always a sort of film hour or something like that which would be sometime around a meal. And you'd sit there with a bunch of football players and we'd watch highlight films from different NFL teams. But it's great... it's really great camera work. All that stuff.
ART:21: So many of your interests are all-American in nature. How does this fit into your work?
BARNEY: Well, I think a lot of the references I make to American traditions—whether it's athletics or a kind of car culture—I think those are things that I've certainly grown up with and understand. It makes those things very available to me to use, and I consider them as kinds of vessels. I don't think that by the time they've been hashed through the project they're representative of what they necessarily are in everyday life. They're used as carriers, which is one of the reasons why the vehicles, in general, keep reappearing in the pieces in that they are carriers, literally. The concept of a vehicle draws a line between locations, such as the Isle of Mann and Budapest. If there was a structure that was greater than the "CREMASTER" structure, it would have to be something like UPS—something that's fleet oriented, that would have air transport and a kind of local transport to really finish that line. You have a kind of consistent color in the way that UPS is brown and the logo is gold. I think that I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. So, in other words, that's the way I would say I have a relationship to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort of about needing them.
ART:21: You also make a lot of references to ancient myths.
BARNEY: Yes. Sometimes I take on stories quite directly, like with "DRAWING RESTRAINT 7." That referred to Marsyas and Apollo. But it's also about taking on a mythological structure and then imposing an internal logic on it. Like if you were inside the stomach and esophagus, you'd probably say that same thing about somebody throwing up. You'd say, "Wow, the stomach is heroic for getting that mutant material out." In other words, it is about taking a structure that's mythological and putting it into a frame that's more about something doing what it's compelled to do, there to do. So a lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it. But it could also be looked at from a heroic, mythological angle for sure.
ART:21: Do these films grow organically one from the other?
BARNEY: I was working on a piece in Kassel, Germany at DOCUMENTA IX which involved a bagpipe narrative. It involved a parking garage and a set of elevator shafts that first brought you from the parking garage up to the plaza between the different museums of DOCUMENTA. And the different elevator shafts in those museums continue this form with the parking garage as the bag. The first shaft was the chanter, and then the bass and tenor drums were the different elevators of the different museums so a story kind of took place and exploded over these different locations, and it excited me to tell a story that took on that kind of geography. Around that time I started thinking about making a piece that would do that over a great distance, and that a drawing could be made on a map and a single piece could be made involving these locations. So these locations were selected ahead of time, and they follow more or less a single line of latitude from west to east. The individual stories were developed one by one, really, and were executed out of order. We started with "CREMASTER 4," and as "CREMASTER 4" was in development, some of the other stories started to fall into place. But it did happen organically that way—that we started the project without having the separate stories in place. The locations were in place and a certain subtext that tied them together was in place, but the individual stories were not developed when we began.
For me that's to do with the fact that the stories themselves are somewhat interchangeable. In a sense they're kind of carriers. In other words, "CREMASTER 2" could have had a couple of other stories other than Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song" to carry it. "The Executioner's Song" was its carrier, in that the Rocky Mountains were the real story.
ART:21: Do you have a conscious system in mind before you start to write your script?
BARNEY: In the interest of creating a system that has an internal logic, I think there are points in the story where biological systems are referred to or used as art direction in a certain way. I've always thought of the project as a sort of sexually driven digestive system, that it was a consumer and a producer of matter. And it is desire driven, rather than driven by hunger or anything like that. It's a desire in the sense of a kind of sexual desire. If that doesn't answer the question at all it does indicates that these are things I think about—that there is an interest in creating a kind of internal system. So those sorts of biological systems are really useful to look at. Literal systems that exist have their own sets of logic and their own sorts of pressures and conflicts.
ART:21: Could you talk about the character you're playing at the Guggenheim Museum in "CREMASTER 3?"
BARNEY: That character at the Guggenheim is a sort of prosthetic manifestation of the Mason's Apprentice, who is central to the rest of the story really. The story has two principals, the Architect and the Mason's Apprentice. The shift in the narrative occurs at the needle of the Chrysler building in the form of a broadcast signal from the Guggenheim, televising this kind of game. The Guggenheim is a kind of flat space that's not specific to any period; it has some of the feelings that video games have. And there are a number of characters in that game space that are manifestations from another part of the story. The Apprentice is one of them. The Architect, who's played by Richard Serra, is shown sort of as himself in the game, throwing Vaseline on the top of "Level Five." And he's throwing hot Vaseline in exactly the same way that he threw hot lead in the late '60s. Amy Mullins, whose role is the Moll, is a bit of a reflection of the Mason's Apprentice. She appears in "Level Three" as three different characters. She keeps morphing as she attempts to eliminate the Mason's Apprentice. To solve "Level Three," her character has to be killed.
ART:21: Could you explain the significance of masons and Freemasonry in the story?
BARNEY: The story has primarily to do with the construction of the Chrysler tower. And, as the Architect is described, it starts overlapping with the mythology of the Freemasons. Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon's Temple, is the martyr in Freemasonry, in that he was killed by corrupt stonemasons who worked beneath him. They believed he knew the name of God and they wanted to be told the name of God. Hiram wouldn't tell them so he was killed by a plumb and a level to the temple and a maul to the forehead. So "CREMASTER 3" starts to fold into some of the mythologies of Freemasonry that way. Richard Serra's character, the Architect, becomes like Hiram at a certain point. And the Chrysler tower is actually never completed in the same way that the Temple of Solomon is never completed.
- posted on 06/04/2007
b. 1967, San Francisco
Matthew Barney was born March 25, 1967, in San Francisco. In 1989, he graduated from Yale University, New Haven. Since then, he has created work that fuses sculptural installations with Performance [more] and video. His singular vision foregrounds the physical rigors of sport and its erotic undercurrents to explore the limits of the body and sexuality. In this, the artist’s work reflects his own past as an athlete, while also being attuned to a new politics of the body evident in the work of many contemporary artists. Barney’s ritualistic actions unfold in hybrid spaces that evoke at once a training camp and medical research laboratory, equipped as they are with wrestling mats and blocking sleds, sternal retractors and speculums, and a range of props often cast in, or coated with, viscous substances such as wax, tapioca, and petroleum jelly. Indeed, his earliest works, created at Yale, were staged at the university’s athletic complex. Within this alternative universe, Barney’s protagonists—including an actor dressed as Oakland Raider Jim Otto, and the artist himself naked or cross-dressed—engage in a metaphoric dance of sexual differentiation.
Barney’s exploration of the body draws upon an athletic model of development, in which growth occurs only through restraint: the muscle encounters resistance, becomes engorged and is broken down, and in healing becomes stronger. This triangulated relationship between desire, discipline, and productivity provides the basis for Barney’s meditation on sexual difference. These athletic and sexual references converge in Otto’s jersey number “00,” which becomes a leitmotif for the artist’s ongoing exploration of a polymorphous sexuality. Woven cipherlike throughout Barney’s work, this motif variously appears as if marking elapsed time in his videos, and in altered form as a single oblong, resembling a football field. For the artist, however, the oblong represents “the orifice and its closure—or the body and its self-imposed restraint.” Homonymic with the word “auto,” Otto also suggests autoeroticism, or a closed, self-sufficient system.
Barney began work on the Cremaster cycle in 1994. Eschewing chronological order, he first produced Cremaster 4 (1994), followed by Cremaster 1 (1995), Cremaster 5 (1997), Cremaster 2 (1999), and Cremaster 3 (2002). Along with each feature-length Cremaster film, which Barney writes and directs, and in which he often plays one or more roles, the artist has created related sculptures, drawings, and photographs. This epic cycle has as its conceptual departure point the male cremaster muscle, which controls testicular contractions in response to external stimuli. The project is rife with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most “ascended” (or undifferentiated) state, Cremaster 5 the most “descended” (or differentiated). The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown—in Barney’s metaphoric universe, these moments represent a condition of pure potentiality. As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney looked beyond biology as a way to explore the creation of form, employing narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology, and geology.
In 1991, at the age of 24, Barney was honored with a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, organized a solo exhibition of his work that toured Europe throughout 1995 and 1996. Barney has been included in many international exhibitions, such as Documenta in Kassel in 1992, the 1993 and 1995 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Aperto ’93 of the 48th Venice Biennale, for which he was awarded the Europa 2000 Prize. Barney has been awarded numerous other prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize 1996; the Skowhegan Medal for Combined Media in 1999; the James D. Phelan Art Award in Video by the Bay Area Video Coalition in 2000; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 2001. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, an exhibition of artwork from the entire cycle organized by the Guggenheim Museum, premiered at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne in June 2002 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
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