Matthew Barney: C/D?

. . 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

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.

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.

6.5 hours?!? no thanks

saw this exhibit tday, p cool - https://artgallery.yale.edu/exhibitions/exhibition/matthew-barney-redoubt