Everything about Matthew Barney totally explained
Matthew Barney (born
March 25,
1967 in
San Francisco,
California (External Link
)(External Link)) is a contemporary
artist who works with
film,
video,
installations,
sculpture,
photography,
drawing and
performance art. Barney has described himself as being primarily a sculptor.
New York Times art critic
Michael Kimmelman called Barney "the most important American artist of his generation." Barney's work has been described as being part of "the legacy of the performance art of the 1960s and 1970s."
Barney lives with his partner,
Icelandic singer
Björk and their young daughter, Ísadóra, born
October 3,
2002.
Early life
Barney has one sibling, an older sister named Tracy. When Barney was six, his father Robert got a job running the food services at Boise State University and the family moved to Idaho. When Barney was 12, his parents divorced and his mother Marsha Gibney (an abstract painter) moved to New York. Barney and his sister remained with his father in Boise, but he frequently visited his mother in New York, where he was exposed to contemporary art. Consequentially, Barney spent his youth partially in
Idaho, where he played football at
Capital High School, and partially in
New York City with his mother Marsha, who introduced him to art and museums. This intermingling of sports and art would inspire his later work as an artist. Barney entered
Yale University planning to study medicine, but became enamored with art and fashion. He received a B.A. from Yale in 1989. He also worked briefly as a model for
Click Modeling Agency, and was in a
J. Crew advertisement.
Work
The film series
The Cremaster Cycle is Barney's best-known work. The films had very high budgets by experimental art film standards, and featured such varied celebrities as
Norman Mailer,
Ursula Andress, and
Richard Serra.
In 2006, he released
Drawing Restraint 9, a collaboration with his partner
Björk, who plays the female of the two central roles in the film, and contributed the music for the soundtrack.
In interviews, Barney has mentioned the phenomenon of
hypertrophy as a metaphorical inspiration for much of his work; several of his performance pieces have involved Barney restrained or somehow encumbered while attempting to execute a drawing. The performance aspects of Barney's work have been described as predominant, while the resultant drawings have been called "[not] very interesting in their own right." Some have criticized Drawing Restraint 9 for what has been termed a superficial treatment of
Japanese culture combined with an undesirable awkwardness in the actors/performers, including Barney.
A gallery show accompanying the Drawing Restraint 9 project appeared at Gladstone Gallery in New York,
April 7-
May 13,
2006, featuring thermoplastic sculptures associated with the film and the remains of a private project performed at the gallery
April 2,
2006, titled
Drawing Restraint 13: The Instrument of Surrender, for which Barney emerged from a crate dressed as General
Douglas MacArthur, walked across a platform, and fell into a vat of
petroleum jelly. Barney reused his motif of dressing as MacArthur in a show later that year (June 23 through
September 17,
2006) at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. That performance involved Barney scaling the museum's atrium to execute a large sketch of his iconic pill-shaped symbol—another recurring motif in his work.
Critical analysis
Barney's work has provoked strong critical reaction, both positive and negative. Calling his work a "snooze",
The New Yorker art critic
Peter Schjeldahl criticized Barney as being "a star for attaining stardom."Another critic in the same magazine characterizes elements in
Drawing Restraint 9 as "an unabashed display of Oriental
kitsch that makes
Memoirs of a Geisha look like an
ethnographic documentary."
Jed Perl has described Barney's work as "phony-baloney mythopoetic movies, accompanied by
Dumpster loads of junk from some godforsaken gymnasium of the imagination".
Others have defended his work, comparing Barney to such canonical performance artists as
Chris Burden and
Vito Acconci and arguing that his art is simultaneously a critique and a celebration of commercialism and blockbuster filmmaking. Commenting on the Cremaster series' enigmatic nature, Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward write:
Arthur C. Danto, well known for his work on aesthetics, has praised the majority of Barney's work, noting the importance of Barney's use of sign systems such as Mason mythology (see
Freemasonry).
Others have asserted Barney's works are contemporary expressions of
surrealism. In the words of Chris Chang, Barney's
Cremaster films, though "completely arcane, hermetic and solipsistic ... nevertheless periodically provide some of the most enigmatically beautiful experimental film imagery you'll ever see."
"Is Barney's work a new beginning for a new century?", asks Richard Lacayo, writing in
Time. "It feels more like a very energetic longing for a beginning, in which all kinds of imagery have been put to the service of one man's intricate fantasy of return to the womb. Something lovely and exasperating is forever in formation there. Will he ever give birth?"
Barney's work for the 2007 Manchester International Festival received mixed reviews.
"Barney is the real thing. When he brings his boundless imagination to a subject he goes down to its depths to create images and implant ideas that stay in your mind for ever" writes Richard Dorment in the Telegraph.
Prizes
Further Information
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