Tright here aren’t many individuals on the planet who may produce a literal river of excrement and be hailed as a genius. However Matthew Barney, the 57-year-old US artist whose maximalist work typically options intercourse, violence, testicles and shit, is one in all them. The New York Instances, again in 1999, known as the sculptor, film-maker and performer “an important artist of his technology”. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones has described The Cremaster Cycle, Barney’s most well-known work, as some of the “sensible achievements within the historical past of avant-garde cinema”. Kanye West, extra not too long ago, known as Barney his “Jesus”.
After 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 somewhat, 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 varied incarnations, crossing a river of sewage. “Hardeen,” Barney jokes, “is a retired actor.”
I’m curious about taking my work out into areas that aren’t essentially secure
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 huge names comparable to Maggie Gyllenhaal, Salman Rushdie and Paul Giamatti. There are greater than 100 individuals 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. Immediately, virtually two dozen individuals are busy at work within the Lengthy Island Metropolis studio, the place buzzing as they finalise the sculptures accompanying Secondary. We go what seem like 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 cloth that tends to fail will not be. I’ve made giant works from petroleum jelly, for instance, that couldn’t maintain themselves up. It’s [a quality] I’ve been curious about for a very long time. I feel there’s a method that ceramic connects to a very previous custom of expressing stress and failure that’s actually particular to the fabric.”
After the studio tour, my rapport with Barney step by step develops its personal stress fractures. The softly-spoken artist is in his aspect discussing craftmanship. However once 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 underneath a highlight, regardless of selecting to carry out in his movies, typically 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 discovered lots about image-making,” Barney says of these days. “And I additionally discovered about how versatile my very own id could possibly be inside that picture. In a sure method, it was a coaching floor for a number of the moving-image work I did. I additionally suppose it was one thing I couldn’t have executed any longer than I did. It began to really feel prefer it was utilizing up one thing in me, representing a worth system that I didn’t essentially consider in.” What was it, precisely, he didn’t consider in? Tennis? Chinos? The all-American masculinity of J Crew? Barney shrugs: “No matter it’s.”
On the floor, Barney appears to suit neatly inside 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 typically 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 planet, by way of the making of it,” Barney solutions in his characteristically roundabout method. “The best way that communities are introduced collectively within the making of the work. They’re typically 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 areas 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 secure.”
Masculinity has actually been a fertile topic for me
Secondary, which was shot at Barney’s former studio a couple of blocks away, takes place on the decidedly unsafe area of an imaginary soccer subject. 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 power 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 severely. Removed from placing him off, the violence drew him in.
Tatum and Stingley had 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 best way 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, a minimum of 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 facet of the piece.”
The mythology inside Secondary stretches again to America’s creation tales. “I’ve been desirous about the best way frontier work operated,” Barney explains. “These grand work of the western United States had been used as a instrument to get individuals to maneuver west. You may have 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 type of American fable 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 subject, the athleticism, the frilly 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 bit like River of Fundament, for instance, the place the work faucets into a selected cross-section of masculinity – the character of Norman Mailer being a somewhat pure model of that. It helped create many alternative counterpoints for me, to have an archetype that’s actually robust positioned within the work. However I feel it’s nonetheless straightforward to seek out masculine archetypes in at the moment’s tradition. Sure, issues have modified and there are lots of extra archetypes as tradition has change into extra complicated. 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 file that he’s no fan of the previous president. After Donald Trump’s inauguration, Barney collaborated on an artwork set up during 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 fearful about what November will deliver?
“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 could 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 wish 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 cause 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 like. However I feel we’re inside that.”
Whereas America’s mythology could also be unravelling, Barney retains his personal abstruse private mythology rigorously guarded. Does he ever, I ask, wish to make his artwork extra accessible? You’ll be able to’t simply view his movies. It’s a must to anticipate them to be proven at a movie competition or know somebody who might need dropped $100,000 for a restricted DVD. Would he ever make his work accessible on streaming platforms?
He bristles. “I type of really feel like my work has been made much more accessible than numerous different artists working in shifting picture,” he says. As for streaming, he tried it throughout the pandemic and the experiment ended there. “I don’t discover it notably satisfying to think about any individual watching on a laptop computer.”
As I go away 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 Could 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
