Tright here aren’t many individuals on the earth 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 among them. The New York Instances, again in 1999, referred to as the sculptor, film-maker and performer “an important artist of his era”. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has described The Cremaster Cycle, Barney’s most well-known work, as one of the “good achievements within the historical past of avant-garde cinema”. Kanye West, extra lately, referred to as Barney his “Jesus”.
Once 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 slightly, a snakeskin – the creature itself is hiding in its tank. Its identify 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 primarily based on Norman Mailer’s rewrite of the Egyptian e book of the useless. It options Mailer’s spirits, in numerous incarnations, crossing a river of sewage. “Hardeen,” Barney jokes, “is a retired actor.”
I’m focused on taking my work out into areas that aren’t essentially protected
Barney, who’s wearing a black hoodie and baseball cap, will not be your solitary artist, toiling away silently. His items are at all times productions, involving huge casts together with large names comparable 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 the moment, 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 to be sandbags, Olympic weights and barbells – symbols of energy, all normal 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 fabric that tends to fail will not be. I’ve made massive works from petroleum jelly, for instance, that couldn’t maintain themselves up. It’s [a quality] I’ve been focused on for a very long time. I feel there’s a manner that ceramic connects to a extremely outdated custom of expressing stress and failure that’s actually particular to the fabric.”
After the studio tour, my rapport with Barney steadily develops its personal stress fractures. The softly-spoken artist is in his aspect discussing craftmanship. However after 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 below 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 wished 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 quite a bit about image-making,” Barney says of these days. “And I additionally realized about how versatile my very own id may very well be inside that picture. In a sure manner, it was a coaching floor for among the moving-image work I did. I additionally assume it was one thing I couldn’t have completed 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 earth, when it comes to the making of it,” Barney solutions in his characteristically roundabout method. “The way in which 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 pondering 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 actually 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 area of an imaginary soccer area. 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 an enduring impression on 11-year-old Barney, who had simply began enjoying soccer significantly. 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 function 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 way in which age and reminiscence operate within the movie. “It’s an occasion I’ve a really specific reminiscence of,” Barney explains. “And I feel there’s a collective reminiscence of that occasion, at the very least 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 side of the piece.”
The mythology inside Secondary stretches again to America’s creation tales. “I’ve been excited about the way in which frontier work operated,” Barney explains. “These grand work of the western United States have been used as a instrument to get folks to maneuver west. You’ve 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 form of American fantasy that has carried ahead into the violence of a sport like soccer.”
That violence is inherently linked to masculinity: a continuing theme in Barney’s work. The sports activities area, 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 actually been a fertile topic for me,” he says. “A chunk like River of Fundament, for instance, the place the work faucets into a particular cross-section of masculinity – the character of Norman Mailer being a slightly pure model of that. It helped create many alternative counterpoints for me, to have an archetype that’s actually sturdy positioned within the work. However I feel it’s nonetheless straightforward to search out masculine archetypes in at the moment’s tradition. Sure, issues have modified and there are numerous extra archetypes as tradition has develop into extra advanced. 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 things.”
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 carry?
“I’m actually 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 stunned by it, however horrified by it. I don’t need 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, need to make his artwork extra accessible? You possibly can’t simply view his movies. You must look forward to them to be proven at a movie pageant 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 form of really feel like my work has been made way more accessible than loads of different artists working in shifting picture,” he says. As for streaming, he tried it in the course of the pandemic and the experiment ended there. “I don’t discover it significantly satisfying to think about any person 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 Might to 27 July; Regen Initiatives, 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
