Many rise to the challenge: over a decade, Barneyology has effectively become a specialist field of modern art theory. Nearly all Barney's commentaries are in this oracular mode, yet their earnestly systematic nature suggests that he's serious about them, and inviting us to take them seriously too. When I interviewed Barney in the late 1990s, this soft-spoken man described what he called the "metabolism" of one of his pieces: "It starts in glucose as a state of potential, moves to a glucose-sucrose blend of candy, on to sucrose, passes through petroleum jelly, then goes on to the starches, to tapioca, meringue and pound cake – but adding eggs at the end to the complex carbohydrates." It's true that Barney's output, tempered with grotesque humour, could be regarded as partly a joke in the Dada tradition: the matter-of-factness with which he expounds his quasi-scientific systems certainly suggests a sly parody of theoretical discourse in art. That's why his creations have to be seen to be believed: their unorthodox visual and tactile impact speaks for itself. Any one of Barney's abstrusely exotic images can serve as an entry point into his world, whether it's a blood-spattered bagpiper in a pink busby, satyrs tussling in the back of a neon-lit limo, or gym equipment made of Teflon.Īny initial description of Barney's work risks looking like a hoax, spoofing the perceived excesses of the blockbuster avant-garde. Muscular hypertrophy, Japanese whaling practices, Manx legend, masonic lore, theories of sexual indifferentiation: all have a place in his mythology, but the viewer isn't necessarily required to piece together the whole conceptual jigsaw.
Barney has always explained his creations in some detail, but invariably in ways that make little sense outside his own hermetic terms of reference. Not that the work of the protean 40-year-old American – sculptor, conceptualist, performance artist, film-maker, fabulist – is inexplicable per se. In art, our sense of the inexplicable, constantly needs to be refreshed: that's why a major draw this autumn will be Matthew Barney's show at the Serpentine Gallery, London. This year, two high-profile London exhibitions, the V&A's Surreal Things and Dali & Film at Tate Modern, have shown that classic Surrealism is still big at the box office – but also that the old, strange juxtapositions no longer seem so uncanny.
0 kommentar(er)
