Tright here aren’t many individuals on the planet who might produce a literal river of excrement and be hailed as a genius. However Matthew Barney, the 57-year-old US artist whose maximalist work usually options intercourse, violence, testicles and shit, is one in every of them. The New York Occasions, again in 1999, known as the sculptor, film-maker and performer “a very powerful artist of his era”. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has described The Cremaster Cycle, Barney’s most well-known work, as one of the crucial “sensible achievements within the historical past of avant-garde cinema”. Kanye West, extra lately, known as Barney his “Jesus”.
After I arrive at Barney’s New York studio on a gray spring day, the very first thing I see isn’t the son of God however a snake. Or relatively, a snakeskin – the creature itself is hiding in its tank. Its title is Hardeen, Barney tells me, after Harry Houdini’s brother. It isn’t a pet. The snake made an look in Barney’s 2014 movie River of Fundament, a six-hour opera loosely based mostly on Norman Mailer’s rewrite of the Egyptian e book of the lifeless. It options Mailer’s spirits, in varied incarnations, crossing a river of sewage. “Hardeen,” Barney jokes, “is a retired actor.”
I’m desirous about taking my work out into areas that aren’t essentially protected
Barney, who’s wearing a black hoodie and baseball cap, shouldn’t be your solitary artist, toiling away silently. His items are all the time productions, involving huge casts together with massive names similar to Maggie Gyllenhaal, Salman Rushdie and Paul Giamatti. There are greater than 100 folks listed within the credit for his newest work, Secondary, a mesmerising five-channel video set up that re-enacts a well-known accident in US soccer. At this time, virtually two dozen persons are busy at work within the Lengthy Island Metropolis studio, the place buzzing as they finalise the sculptures accompanying Secondary. We move what appear like sandbags, Olympic weights and barbells – symbols of energy, all customary out of fragile terracotta.
“Embracing ceramic is new to me,” Barney explains as we linger over a weightlifting rack dotted with welds. “However embracing a cloth that tends to fail shouldn’t be. I’ve made giant works from petroleum jelly, for instance, that couldn’t maintain themselves up. It’s [a quality] I’ve been desirous about for a very long time. I feel there’s a approach that ceramic connects to a very outdated custom of expressing stress and failure that’s actually particular to the fabric.”
After the studio tour, my rapport with Barney regularly develops its personal stress fractures. The softly-spoken artist is in his aspect discussing craftmanship. However once we sit upstairs – he chooses a seat fairly a distance from me – and I nudge the dialog in direction of the broader cultural themes in his work, he turns into uncomfortable. Barney doesn’t appear to love being beneath a highlight, regardless of selecting to carry out in his movies, usually within the nude, and regardless of an early profession as a mannequin. After pre-med at Yale (he initially needed to be a plastic surgeon), he briefly supported his artwork by doing catalogue work for the likes of J Crew, posing in preppy shirts and tennis gear.
“I realized so much about image-making,” Barney says of these days. “And I additionally realized about how versatile my very own id might be inside that picture. In a sure approach, it was a coaching floor for a few of the moving-image work I did. I additionally assume it was one thing I couldn’t have finished any longer than I did. It began to really feel prefer it was utilizing up one thing in me, representing a price system that I didn’t essentially imagine in.” What was it, precisely, he didn’t imagine in? Tennis? Chinos? The all-American masculinity of J Crew? Barney shrugs: “No matter it’s.”
On the floor, Barney appears to suit neatly throughout the prevailing worth system. Born within the American heartland, he’s a former high-school quarterback who graduated from the Ivy League and located virtually quick success within the New York artwork world. But his artwork usually offers with freaks and filth. Does he consider himself as an insider or an outsider?
“One of many issues that’s uncommon about my artwork is that it’s very on the planet, by way of the making of it,” Barney solutions in his characteristically roundabout method. “The best way that communities are introduced collectively within the making of the work. They’re usually coming from a spot that doesn’t have any connection to the cultural world. I’m considering of working in environments just like the Salt Flats in Utah and industrial places in Detroit. There are additionally specialists who come into the work who don’t actually have artwork backgrounds in any respect. I’m within the threat of taking my work out into areas that aren’t essentially protected.”
Masculinity has definitely been a fertile topic for me
Secondary, which was shot at Barney’s former studio a number of blocks away, takes place on the decidedly unsafe house of an imaginary soccer discipline. The 60-minute movie re-enacts the second in 1978 when Jack Tatum, of the Oakland Raiders, barrelled into Darryl Stingley of the New England Patriots, with a lot drive that Stingley was left paralysed. The violent collision was performed repeatedly on TV, leaving a long-lasting impression on 11-year-old Barney, who had simply began enjoying soccer severely. Removed from placing him off, the violence drew him in.
Tatum and Stingley have been younger males in 1978. In Secondary, Barney, who performs the position of Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, casts males of their 50s and 60s. The fragility of the ceramic sculptures accompanying the video set up, he notes, intertwine with the best way age and reminiscence operate within the movie. “It’s an occasion I’ve a really explicit reminiscence of,” Barney explains. “And I feel there’s a collective reminiscence of that occasion, a minimum of inside a sure group of individuals. Given the mythological facet of a few of that, it was a straightforward factor to then translate to performers who had older our bodies and will work with reminiscence as a facet of the piece.”
The mythology inside Secondary stretches again to America’s creation tales. “I’ve been occupied with the best way frontier work operated,” Barney explains. “These grand work of the western United States have been used as a device to get folks to maneuver west. You have got these caricatures of ‘cowboys’ and ‘Indians’, the place the topic comes nearer and nearer, after which at a sure level it turns into frontal. It’s coming proper at you. And people American west work, these extra frontal Remington work of charging horses, galvanised a type of American delusion that has carried ahead into the violence of a recreation like soccer.”
That violence is inherently linked to masculinity: a relentless theme in Barney’s work. The sports activities discipline, the athleticism, the flowery rituals of soccer: Secondary appears to boil conventional notions of American masculinity right down to their sweaty essence. And but the older our bodies appear to recommend that maybe that mannequin of masculinity has reached its expiry date.
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Barney doesn’t appear satisfied. “Effectively, masculinity has definitely been a fertile topic for me,” he says. “A chunk like River of Fundament, for instance, the place the work faucets into a selected cross-section of masculinity – the character of Norman Mailer being a relatively pure model of that. It helped create many various counterpoints for me, to have an archetype that’s actually sturdy positioned within the work. However I feel it’s nonetheless simple to seek out masculine archetypes in immediately’s tradition. Sure, issues have modified and there are numerous extra archetypes as tradition has grow to be extra complicated. And so I really feel like my palate has grown in that sense.” He wouldn’t say, then, that there’s a disaster of masculinity? Effectively, he laughs, “there’s a disaster of nearly all the pieces.”
Barney doesn’t like speaking about politics, however it’s a matter of public document that he’s no fan of the previous president. After Donald Trump’s inauguration, Barney collaborated on an artwork set up by which the identical countdown clock that options in Secondary was positioned above New York’s East River and ticked off the minutes till the Trump presidency ended. Is Barney anxious about what November will convey?
“I’m definitely involved,” he replies. “I grew up in Idaho, which already had excessive division in its politics. So in that sense, it isn’t a brand new situation. I feel that you may monitor it again to extra remoted communities within the US. So I’m each not shocked by it, however horrified by it. I don’t wish to see it worsen.”
Nonetheless, he appears considerably resigned to the inevitability of decline. We’re surrounded by storyboards from Secondary – which is called after the time period for the final line of defence in American soccer – and Barney gestures over my shoulder. “I imply, there’s a motive why, on that panel behind you, there’s a picture of the Roman Colosseum. I feel it stays to be seen what America’s model of the autumn from grace seems to be like. However I feel we’re inside that.”
Whereas America’s mythology could also be unravelling, Barney retains his personal abstruse private mythology fastidiously guarded. Does he ever, I ask, wish to make his artwork extra accessible? You’ll be able to’t simply view his movies. You must await them to be proven at a movie competition or know somebody who might need dropped $100,000 for a restricted DVD. Would he ever make his work obtainable on streaming platforms?
He bristles. “I type of really feel like my work has been made much more accessible than numerous different artists working in shifting picture,” he says. As for streaming, he tried it through the pandemic and the experiment ended there. “I don’t discover it significantly satisfying to think about anyone watching on a laptop computer.”
As I depart the studio, I cease to attempt to discover the elusive Hardeen. However he’s nonetheless hiding: all I can see is his discarded pores and skin.
Matthew Barney: Secondary is at Gladstone Gallery, New York, till 26 July; Sadie Coles, London, 24 Could to 27 July; Regen Tasks, Los Angeles, 1 June to 17 August; Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, 7 June to 25 July; and Fondation Cartier, Paris, 8 June to eight September
