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.
― Hurting 2, Saturday, 24 November 2007 07:15 (sixteen years ago) link
Besides Bjork, I'm guessing.
― nickn, Saturday, 24 November 2007 07:22 (sixteen years ago) link
heh
― Hurting 2, Saturday, 24 November 2007 07:37 (sixteen years ago) link
is this guy still a thing
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Saturday, 25 February 2012 07:06 (twelve years ago) link
the Busby Berkeley style shit from C1 is something I still think bout loads.
― mmmm, Saturday, 25 February 2012 11:03 (twelve years ago) link
my girlfriend's dad once accidentally kicked part of a Matthew Barney installation
― Nicholas Pokémon (silby), Saturday, 25 February 2012 15:52 (twelve years ago) link
he kicked a tv?
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Saturday, 25 February 2012 16:03 (twelve years ago) link
nah it was some sculpture thing, I think what he kicked was like some paper piled up on the floor or something
― Nicholas Pokémon (silby), Saturday, 25 February 2012 16:08 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Iago Galdston, Saturday, 25 February 2012 16:38 (twelve years ago) link
like a prestigious art gallery
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Saturday, 25 February 2012 16:40 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Iago Galdston, Saturday, 25 February 2012 16:41 (twelve years ago) link
is it in the crapper? (that was kind of the point of this semi-drunk revive)
― A Little Princess btw (s1ocki), Saturday, 25 February 2012 17:06 (twelve years ago) link
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
― Iago Galdston, Saturday, 25 February 2012 18:30 (twelve years ago) link
http://static.squarespace.com/static/51117ee2e4b0e580c19e2c53/t/511473e3e4b0f297c48665f2/1360294885084/ekat%20barney%20transam.png?format=1000w
― johnny crunch, Friday, 19 July 2013 17:41 (ten years ago) link
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
― Brakhage, Saturday, 20 July 2013 00:06 (ten years ago) link
I will see anything this dude does ever.
― You pieces of shit. (jjjusten), Saturday, 20 July 2013 06:57 (ten years ago) link
What's the deal with River of Fundament?
― This Is Not An ILX Username (LaMonte), Wednesday, 26 March 2014 19:31 (ten years ago) link
sounds typically insane
― akm, Wednesday, 26 March 2014 23:26 (ten years ago) link
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 :(
― espring (amateurist), Wednesday, 26 March 2014 23:38 (ten years ago) link
i watched all of cremaster over the course of about a week, it was totally fun
― akm, Thursday, 27 March 2014 03:52 (ten years ago) link
Best review I've seen of it yet
― sonic thedgehod (albvivertine), Thursday, 27 March 2014 03:58 (ten years ago) link
:)
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.
― espring (amateurist), Thursday, 27 March 2014 04:13 (ten years ago) link
Re: the DVD issue, these all seem to be on Youtube. Any point watching them there?
― sonic thedgehod (albvivertine), Thursday, 27 March 2014 04:26 (ten years ago) link
should i see 'river of fundament' in london in a couple weeks y/n
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, 17 June 2014 17:31 (nine years ago) link
i might go on the monday. Just thinking it through.
― woof, Wednesday, 18 June 2014 10:05 (nine years ago) link
― Pew Nornographers (contenderizer), Wednesday, 18 June 2014 10:35 (nine years ago) link
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?
― Desert_Fox, Monday, 27 April 2015 07:29 (eight years ago) link
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?
― the late great, Tuesday, 28 April 2015 06:02 (eight years ago) link
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?
― Desert_Fox, Tuesday, 28 April 2015 18:00 (eight years ago) link
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...
― You guys are caterpillar (Telephone thing), Wednesday, 29 April 2015 01:06 (eight years ago) link
Sorry, that second link should be:https://www.wellesley.edu/sites/default/files/assets/departments/davismuseum/object%20imgs/benglis-1991.2.jpg
― You guys are caterpillar (Telephone thing), Wednesday, 29 April 2015 01:07 (eight years ago) link
Not sure I see the connection to the Field Emblem, though you may be on to something with the materials. Cremaster used Vaseline/plastic/beeswax (very explicitly in Cremaster 2), and Fundament moves over to gold leaf and metals, roughly following Benglis's trajectory. And I should maybe also add that Fundament features many gold-leaf phalluses and turds.
― Desert_Fox, Wednesday, 29 April 2015 17:57 (eight years ago) link
The general "lozenge" shape with a horizontal division at the center- it's not as apparent on all of Benglis's beeswax paintings but there's a line where she started brushing outward vertically.
I'll have to check out River of Fundament if I can.
― You guys are caterpillar (Telephone thing), Wednesday, 29 April 2015 22:33 (eight years ago) link
6.5 hours?!? no thanks
― the late great, Wednesday, 29 April 2015 23:53 (eight years ago) link
saw this exhibit tday, p cool - https://artgallery.yale.edu/exhibitions/exhibition/matthew-barney-redoubt
― johnny crunch, Monday, 4 March 2019 01:33 (five years ago) link