![]() With these works under his belt and largely funded by gallery owner Gladstone, Barney began his enigmatically titled five-part cycle of films in 1994, the "Cremaster" series. Barney presents an outrageous and baffling arena in which issues of gender, the body and the construction of identity do battle."īarney's follow-up performance after the 1991 work was a video for the 1993 Whitney Biennial where he was featured as one of two ram-horned satyrs eternally grappling in the back seat of a limousine. As Margo Crutchfield, the director of the Fast/Forward series notes, "Fact and fiction are blurred. This is not to say that one should park a 2-year-old in front of "Cremaster 4," but Barney does seem to capture a sense of childlike play and absurdity that mutates and morphs and ultimately remains unresolved. Both have a truly banal quality lots of repetition, inane gesturing, a clinical artificiality, lush colors and most importantly, quirky, sexually ambiguous creatures. While genitalia and Crisco-covered orifices may seem the stuff of X-rated fetish flicks, Barney's films have a closer affinity, in my opinion, to the Teletubbies. This, however, does not really go to explain why the films are stressed as "recommended for adults only." He has found visual poetry in scrotums and ovaries. But if this sounds too abject to provide a foundation for one's artistic corpus, think again. This performance was the impetus for several motifs that reappear in later "Cremaster" films: orifices, petroleum jelly and the remnants thereof. The visitors to the gallery the next day were greeted with a video of this bizarre action, climbing marks on the walls and the leftover greasy equipment. He made his New York splash er, skid rather when on the eve of his debut, Barney scaled the walls and ceiling of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery naked, and engaged in a number of exertions that included lowering himself into a refrigerated chamber full of Vaseline-covered sports equipment and promptly applying the ointment to his orifices. (Audiences should keep this in mind when they see how he gloriously effaces his own American good looks by transforming into a fissure-headed goat boy in "Cremaster 4"). in sculpture from Yale University after being recruited from Boise, Idaho to play football), his most famous works of art are his four "Cremaster" films created between 19.īarney emerged on the art scene in 1991 after a stint at modeling, even working briefly for J. While he is foremost a sculptor (he received his B.A. But what makes the New York artist so important? A peek into his career and bizarre art may provide the first clue into cracking the Barney cipher.īarney, the 32-year old artist celebrated initially for sculpture and video explorations of his own body, has propelled himself quickly into the art world since his 1991 debut. The Virginia Museum's Fast/Forward series will feature two of Barney's films, "Cremaster 4" and "Cremaster 5," on April 13 to a sold-out audience. Matthew Barney, the artist recently called "the most important new artist of the decade" by the New York Times Magazine, is coming to town in celluloid form and he's definitely not singing "I love you, you love me." If the first thing you think of when you hear the name "Barney" is a big, dopey, purple dinosaur, then you may be way out of the loop.
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