And the full scope of that mythos appeared unmistakably in the epic, and epically weird, films themselves, into which Barney submerged himself totally. Barney was mythic like Jason and his Argonauts or Daedalus. In a way, Basquiat had been mythic - but only like Lou Reed was mythic. In those films, Barney brought us into the realm of genuine myth - the idiosyncratic inner life of an artist scaled up to match not just the swaggering stature of art-historical giants who came before but the operatic scale of the universe itself. Now I see Barney as a mystic bridge between the ambition, absurdity, first-person identity politics, and pseudo-autobiographical Arabian Nights fiction of 1980s artists like Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, Anselm Kiefer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Martin Kippenberger and the populism, love of beauty, craft, dexterity with scales large and small, unusual materials, and grand activism of 1990s artists like Kara Walker, Pipilotti Rist, Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Hirschhorn, later Robert Gober, and even Richard Serra - who actually appeared in one of Barney’s films. A tree fell within me here was the art of the 1990s beckoning. (I’d never thought of the penis as a hole before.) I saw a self in transformation, and, thunderstruck, I said to my wife, “This is one of the futures of art.” She looked up and said, “Yeah, but it’s so male.” It was the first time I saw Barney’s intricate syntax of endurance art, video, post-minimal and process art, which delivered a picture of a strange masculinity: conflicted, involuting, ludicrous, neutered, Kafkaesque. Hanging there, he’d finger dollops of jelly and methodically fill all the holes in his body - eyes, ears, mouth, penis, anus, nose, navel. The previous year, in an otherwise unremarkable large group show in the now-defunct Althea Viafora Gallery in Soho, I saw a TV monitor depicting a naked male - Barney - scaling a rope to the ceiling, then descending over a shape of cooled Vaseline. Photo: David Regen/Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Galleryīy the time Matthew Barney’s debut solo show opened at Barbara Gladstone’s Greene Street gallery in 1991, the work of this 24-year-old artist had already rocked my world. Otto wants to win at all costs, and is willing to deplete all of his energy to compete.Matthew Barney, DRILL TEAM: screw BOLUS (1991). He seeks to open more orifices in himself and others, as an orifice is a site for the ingestion and release of energy. “The double zeros on his jersey suggest the many openings into his body. “ Otto is, by contrast, a porous, perforated, external being,” Barney writes. In Barney’s Playbook 91-92, the artist describes Houdini as his Character of Positive Restraint, a “self-enclosed, internal, hermetic being,” who “wants to preserve and store the energy generated during his training regimen,” by avoiding “expending energy in competition.” Loosely told, the OTTO trilogy depicts a vaudevillain Tom and Jerry struggle, wherein the Oakland Raiders’ fabled center, Jim Otto, tries to squeeze Houdini’s energy out of the magician's sealed bodily orifices. The Jim Otto Suite -OTTOblow-Houdini: OctoOcto- The Whopper - AUTOblow -Gluco Jack -Clean and Jerk, 1991 Light reflective vinyl, prosthetic plastic locker, NFL jersey, hydraulic jack with glucose syrup, petroleum jelly, videoįor those lost in the conceptual spume of contemporary exhibitions, Facility of DECLINE is a gut-punch worthy of Harry Houdini, one that will take you back to the days in which modern giants like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst still had things to prove.
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