Matthew Barney Report

Body-work concept: shaping muscles
Form cannot materialize or mutate unless it struggles against resistance in the process.

Barney: “a mouthpiece that could also be inserted anally.” An action that would “close the circle” and seal off the body in a hermetic self-contained state.

Barney: “Only a possible narrative of what might have happened in that space; rather than being truths, there’ re proposals.”
From Nancy Spector’s Guggenheim show catalog: “With the sterile, incubator-like garage urging them on. Otto and the Character of positive restraint plot to hijack the hubris pill and force it to achieve its most distant horizon of possibility, which is imagined in the form of a bagpipe. Taking the pill hostage, they induce a metabolic transfer of energies. Following a biological model of digestion, they impel the pill to travel from glucose (the pill’s existing state of potential) to hard candy (a glucose-sucrose blend_ to pure sucrose. After passing through petroleum jelly it moves on to the starches – tapioca – and then meringue. If they’re able to make it reach the state of pound cake, a complex carbohydrate, with the penultimate addition of eggs, the bagpipe will play “Amazing Grace” and thereby communicate with God.“

The Cremaster Cycle (1994 to 2002)

Cremaster is the name of a muscle in the lower abdomen that is used to retract the testicles, helping to keep them warm and protect them from injury.
Five videos and installations
Not created in numeric sequence. Cremaster 4 was the first production, followed by Cremaster 1, 5, 2 and 3.

Parodies the musical extravaganzas of Busby Berkeley as filtered through the lens of Leni Riefenstahl’s Third Reich athletics. Chorus girls form shifting outlines of reproductive organs on a football field, their movements determined from above by a blonde starlet, who miraculously inhabits two Goodyear blimps simultaneously and creates anatomical diagrams by lining up rows of grapes.

Is a gothic Western premised loosely on the real-life story of Gary Gilmore, who was executed in Utah for the murder of two men. Gilmore’s biography is conveyed through a series of fantastical sequences, including an occultist séance enacted with ectoplasm and bee pollen to signify his conception, and a prison rodeo staged in a cast salt arena to represent his death by firing squad.
Starring Norman Mailer as Harry Houdini and Barney as Gary Gilmore.

The final installment in the cycle, the film is a distillation of the artist’s major themes and signature aesthetic devices, filtered through an elaborate symbolic matrix involving Freemasonry, Celtic lore, and Art Deco design. Set in New York’s Chrysler Building, the film also includes detours to the Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building, to the harness track in Saratoga Springs, to Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, and to Fingal’s Cave, on Staffa, an island in the Scottish Hebrides.
Starring Richard Serra as Hiram Abiff, Barney as the Entered Apprentice, and double amputee, model, and para-athlete Aimee Mullins as the Entered Novitiate.

Is set on the Isle of Man—a topographical body punctured by orifices and passageways—where a feverish motorbike race traverses the landscape, a dandified, tap-dancing satyr writhes his way through a treacherous underwater canal, and three burly fairies picnic on a grassy knoll. Part vaudeville, part Victorian comedy of manners, and part road movie, this film portrays sheer drive in its eternal struggle to surpass itself.

Set against the Baroque backdrop of the Hungarian State Opera House. Performed as a lyric opera complete with ribboned Jacobin pigeons, a love-lorn queen, and her tragic hero, this narrative flows from the gilded proscenium arch of the theater to the aqueous underworld of Budapest’s Danube River to humid Gellért baths inhabited by hermaphroditic water-sprites frolicking in a pool of pearl bubbles.
Starring Ursula Andress as the Queen of Chain, and Barney as her Diva, her Magician, and her Giant

Last edited on Wednesday 23 November 02005 0:25:19