Matthew Barney: C/D?

this new one, from the look of it (and, god help us, its eight sequels)

Drawing Restraint 1 through 8 already exist. Try Google.

i. avant-garde art is somewhat about refusing conventions (rarely as totally as it says it is: but def somewhat)
ii. conventions provide (among other things) useful constraints and obstacle courses for problem solving which allows for leaps of energy and imagination as HOOKS
iii. avant-garde art is generally also pinched for funding in ways mainstream and traditional art aren't
iv. lack of funding provides (among other things) useful constraints and obstacle courses for problem solving which allows for leaps of energy and imagination as HOOKS
v. MB never has to worry whether something he's doing WORKS -- there isn't a convention metric, there isn't a technique metric, there isn't a budget metric -- so a. he plans it all out, complete w.hidden conceptual whatever in his BRANE, and then b. he executes it, except where anyone else would come to FORMAL or STRUCTURAL or EXECUTIONAL obstacles*, he can always just spend his way round them
vi. so there's a actually a kind of evasive deadness haning over the whole thing -- you can't tell when he's ON IT and when he's NOT bcz HE can't te;ll, bcz there's no gradient for him between skin-of-yer-teeth brilliant cobble-together-after-the-fact solution and the re-envisioning (= thinking about it afterwards) that problem-solving would bring to it... problems don't arise

*like as an example: the glaciermelt footage -- he never has to worry in respect of "i could only afford one day's shooting", i have to make what i've got WORK as it is, and restucturte everything round my limitation; which wd give its presence a kind of torque in the body of the film: he can always just film as much as he first thought he wanted -- he never has to rethink or replan, and everything stays shallow, bcz the maker's mind is neverv thrown into relief, or even into second gear really...

??

(bear in mind i have only seen 2, and quite liked it) (certainly i remember sensual images from it very clearly)

Except that the avant garde has been around for so long that refusing convention has become, itself, a convention, and therefore is now exactly the sort of constraint and obstacle course that can provide the structure you're talking about. In other words, there's the kind of repetition and redundancy required already there, and it's been there since Duchamp, at least.

There's even more when an artist establishes a sub-genre as recognizable as Barney's. Watching Pierre Hughye's film A Journey That Wasn't, I couldn't help wondering if it was a parody of Barney's apparently not-so-sui-generis genre. The music by Joshua Cody sounds exactly like Jonathan Beppler's scores for the Cremaster series. Even if it isn't a parody, it shows that this genre of art film now has as much usable convention and redundancy as Hollywood film-making.

Well, the films are very much about weird labours of Hercules. Barney always has to shin up an elevator shaft, walk along the surface of the sea, climb through a tunnel connecting two cars, climb around the proscenium arch of a theatre, etc. These scenes resemble the crossing-the-pool-with-a-candle scene in Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia" or the hauling-a-boat-over-a-mountain in Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo", and act as a sort of metaphysical "Jeux Sans Frontieres" as well as providing an epic narrative structure.

There's also the constraint that each film has to incorporate Barney's sculptures and installations. For instance, the vat of liquid vaseline on the deck of the whaler in "Drawing Restraint 9" or the sex-organs-based installation in the blimp. This is the films' raison d'etre, to turn the space-based medium that is sculpture into the the time-based medium that is film. It's in itself a "trial of Hercules", and the way Barney accomplishes it is with music, a kind of intermediate artform between space and time. Beppler's scores not only brilliant, they're hugely important to the success of the whole enterprise.

Tokion is the proud sponsor of the premiere of Drawing Restraint 9, the new film by Matthew Barney.

DRAWING RESTRAINT 9
Director Matthew Barney in person today at 6:40 & 9:30 shows!

EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT STARTS TODAY! TWO WEEKS ONLY
IFC Center
http://www.ifccenter.com

Saw DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 a couple of weeks ago. Seriously gruesome finale, but if you liked the the Cremaster series, you'll like this. Otherwise . .

. . and, yeah, I'm up for DR10 and or Cremaster 6. Anyone who can connect me for a Cremaster 5 soundtrack, get in touch. And, Matthew, how about those action figures?

After straining hard to appreciate that Guggenheim show a few years ago and a few of the films, I never again felt the slightest desire to see anything this guy did.

Besides Bjork, I'm guessing.

heh

is this guy still a thing

the Busby Berkeley style shit from C1 is something I still think bout loads.

my girlfriend's dad once accidentally kicked part of a Matthew Barney installation

he kicked a tv?

nah it was some sculpture thing, I think what he kicked was like some paper piled up on the floor or something

remember when they used to call him, "The most important artist working today"? oh my god, he is so terrible. now if they'd only banish cindy sherman to the same place

like a prestigious art gallery

i'm talking about how his reputation was once so stellar and is now the crapper--he'll continue making his merch and have plenty of buyers

is it in the crapper? (that was kind of the point of this semi-drunk revive)

I remember seeing his first(?) show at Barbara Gladstone in the early 90s and it was pretty incredible...even though his various inspirations (Serra, Nauman, Burden, Acconci) were still being worked through, it was an interesting blend of sculpture, video, and performance. He coasts along now but his work isn't really looked at by other artists and the whole enterprise of making photographs and tchotchkes to fund the films resulted in alot of junk bought by rich collectors on the basis of a big industry of boosters around him that works when they are hot but dooms them in the long run

http://static.squarespace.com/static/51117ee2e4b0e580c19e2c53/t/511473e3e4b0f297c48665f2/1360294885084/ekat%20barney%20transam.png?format=1000w

Ahhh hah awesome - is that from Khu?

Early on, at an abandoned glue factory, assembly-line machinists turned steel sheets into 16 working viols, which were played by musicians in a mournful aria before Detroit blues singer Belita Woods belted out incantations from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The audience was then packed onto a barge, which floated down the Rouge and Detroit Rivers and eventually stumbled upon a crime-scene investigation on the shoreline. Actress Aimee Mullins played an FBI detective who also happens to be an incarnation of the goddess Isis, and soon, as four towboats loaded with musicians circled the barge, the cadaver of the Chrysler from “REN” was pulled from the river. In turns, the car’s remains were autopsied on deck, separated like mummified organs, allowing Isis the opportunity to have sex with the engine—notably filled with live snakes—before being taken into custody herself by two twin baritones. The car’s body was lifted off the barge, cut into pieces, and as the audience stood after sunset in the rain on a platform in front of a steel mill shooting sparks, the pieces of the Chrysler were eventually melted into molten liquid

I will see anything this dude does ever.

What's the deal with River of Fundament?

sounds typically insane

i admit to finding the idea of this guy's movies--or more like, sections of the movies--more pleasant than watching a whole part of the cremaster cycle :(

i watched all of cremaster over the course of about a week, it was totally fun

Best review I've seen of it yet

:)

i guess i just felt, when watching them, that the shots don't seem to have any large-scale interaction that would make them more than the sum of their parts. it's like a series of maximalist images, one after the other like a slide show. but i admit i saw them years ago.

Re: the DVD issue, these all seem to be on Youtube. Any point watching them there?

should i see 'river of fundament' in london in a couple weeks y/n

i might go on the monday. Just thinking it through.

I will see anything this dude does ever.

Just saw Fundament in Los Angeles. Thought it was excellent. Not as complex, dense, or conceptually interesting as Cremaster, but very visceral and immersive. The art-kids were down on Barney's hubris, as they always are, but truthfully I have a lot of trouble thinking of anyone else who does "blockbuster art films" like these. Are there any?

Visionary artist Matthew Barney makes his BAM debut with the world premiere screening of River of Fundament, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

hahaha one of the absolute worst books, and i say that as a big mailer fan

now i want to see this, though ... how long was it?

It was 6.5 hours (including two 30-minute intermissions). So not that far off from the entire Cremaster Cycle. The Mailer thing is a pretty good send-up of his obscurantism: a novel no one has ever read, and an author who is world-famous but (at least from the perspective of academia) is hardly read nowadays, even in the United States, aside from White Negro and American Dream. And I imagine Mailer's profile is even lower in the mostly European countries where this has been screening?

Not related to River of Fundament, but I'd be really interested to learn what if anything Barney's said about Lynda Benglis. I'm finishing a paper on Benglis (undergrad, nothing fancy or probably even particularly good) and it really seems like there's a connection between her beeswax lozenges (here or here or etc) and Barney's "field emblem," especially the Vaseline version in Drawing Restraint 9.

Probably either not really or totally obvious, but fuck it, why not...

Sorry, that second link should be:
https://www.wellesley.edu/sites/default/files/assets/departments/davismuseum/object%20imgs/benglis-1991.2.jpg