And Drawing Restraint 7 (1993), which was shown in that year's Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in Aperto '93, the 45th Venice Biennale, includes mythological satyrs, who battle for supremacy while riding in and out of Manhattan in a limousine. The multi-channel video installation OTTOshaft (1992), which premiered at Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany (1992), features bands of dueling bagpipers. In 1992, Barney introduced fantastical creatures into his work, a gesture that presaged the vocabulary of his subsequent narrative films. These works, along with those listed above, were featured in Barney's first solo museum exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1991–1992. The related sculptures, including case BOLUS (1989–91), TRANSEXUALIS (1991), and REPRESSIA (1991), are environments containing such athletic items as wrestling mats, a walk-in cooler, a cast petroleum jelly incline bench, and dumbbells of cast petroleum wax.īetween 19, Barney also created video, photography, and sculptural pieces such as The Jim Otto Suite (1991) (with subsections titled OTTOblow and AUTOblow), which feature fictional characters who function as metaphors for thematic motifs that run throughout the work: football hero Jim Otto and the "Character of Positive Restraint," in either the guise of escape artist Harry Houdini or the feminine Jim Blind, who appears in drag. In his first solo exhibitions, and (both 1991), held at Stuart Regen Gallery, Los Angeles, and at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, respectively, Barney exhibited elaborate sculptural installations, which included videos of himself interacting with various constructed objects and performing physical feats such as climbing across the gallery ceiling suspended from titanium ice screws in performances entitled BLIND PERINEUM and MILE HIGH Threshold: FLIGHT with the ANAL SADISTIC WARRIOR. In this series he explored the feasibility of creating something under severe physical constraints, just as one tears down muscle tissue in order to build it up through weight lifting. Between 19, Barney developed the Drawing Restraint series for which he devised situations of self-imposed restriction, such as jumping on a trampoline, climbing over obstacles, or restraining himself with surgical latex hosing, through which he would produce artworks. His thesis exhibition at Yale, Field Dressing (1989), featured an installation of video and sculptural objects that combined the physicality of sports, the fetishistic nature of athletic equipment, and the endurance involved in performance art. Thereafter, he moved to New York City, where he lives and works today.įrom his earliest work, Barney has explored the transcendence of physical limitations in a multimedia art practice that includes feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing. He attended college at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, receiving his BA in 1989. An introduction by Nancy Spector, essay by cultural critic Maggie Nelson, and a new text by the artist offer a key to understanding major themes that appear throughout Barney’s oeuvre.Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and was raised in Boise, Idaho. The exhibition is accompanied by Matthew Barney: OTTO Trilogy, an in-depth publication distributed by Yale University Press, that traces the progression of the artist’s three most significant early projects: Facility of INCLINE, Facility of DECLINE, and OTTOshaft. This large-scale work includes 44 cast petroleum wax and jelly dumbbells punctured with the same ice screws and carabiners Barney used to scale the gallery ceiling in BLIND PERINEUM. The climbing path featured in those pivotal early videos is recreated in the Chelsea gallery forming a guide through the sculptures, including for the first time in this configuration, DRILL TEAM: screw BOLUS, an expansive and intricate installation that occupies its own room. These videos set the stage for an elaborate narrative featuring Oakland Raider Jim Otto, and the escape artist Harry Houdini, a story line that incorporates the two sculptures, REPRESSIA and TRANSEXUALIS, which bookend the exhibition. In October 1991, two filmed actions, BLIND PERINEUM and RADIAL DRILL, were performed by Barney, on-site at the gallery.
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