![]() In the series “Drawing Restraint”, produced during the early years of research and study, the artist, physically “restrained” in different ways, creates drawings (or marks, at least), recording these operations with A/V instruments, as they did for performances in the 70’s, when they analyzed the frontiers of language in similar ways, though with different objectives. Every initial impulse (a raw and impure state) is followed by some opposing forces, which mediate and discipline this initial state. In this state of coerced evolution, Matthew Barney connects the metaphor of creation.Ī work is created among psychophysical resistances of the artist. The Body’s continuous training, its exceeding among self-imposed forces, creates an hypertrophic state, where the matter it is composed of grows as an indeterminate and asymmetrical mass, out of its natural control. Since the beginning, the Body, as an evolving machine, as a system in which the pivotal points of his poetics are realized, is the element from which everything starts and is realized. The universe created or described by Matthew Barney starts from the idea that the mainstay of all its artistic evolution is the artist himself and his Body. A space where, if you have not been warned, image’s description increases awkwardly the work’s structure.Īs it should be done in every wide-spreading environment, and with all the risks that it implies, I will only point out the central aspects of the artists’ work and career. It is a space where funambulism is worthy and well tolerated, where imagination awakes neurotically among the references it has to start from. Matthew Barney’s analysis has a plasticity and a mobility which makes it very similar to those books full of symbols and with mythopoietic orientation, in which the artist’s performance moves on the tracks of “Gesamtkunstwerk”, the total work. In some way, it grows rapidly into something aseptic and dull. Matthew Barney is one of those few and long-awaited cases in which the difference between theoretic and artist becomes irrelevant. In a site-specific set, composed by 5 screens arranged in a circle and others following the site’s perimeter, Barney’s work was exhibited in all its spectacular mood and in its entirety, together with sculptures and drawings which guided the visitor to a better comprehension. In Turin, at the F ondazione Mario Merz, a retrospective of one of the most visionary and discussed contemporary artists, Matthew Barney, has just ended. ![]() Cinema Report Video Art Digimag - Issue 41, February 2009
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