reviews matthew barney
MAtthew BArney:
DrAwing restrAint
Serpentine Gallery, london
20 September – 11 november
below: Holographic Entry Point, 2005 (installation view).
facing page: Drawing Restraint 16, 2007 (installation view).
both photos: hugo Glendinning. Courtesy the Serpentine Gallery, london.
Much art, even interesting and important art, is effectively without use.
However, the desuetude of Matthew Barney’s work is insufferable. This
exhibition focuses not on the Cremaster film cycle (1994–2002) but on his
longer-running and undeservedly lesser-known Drawing Restraint series
(1988–). The show should be all the stronger for doing so, but isn’t. The
series began already in Barney’s Yale studio and went on to provide the basis
for his unquestionably inspired entrance into the artworld. That was already
nearly a generation ago. The promise and potential of Barney’s early work
has not so much been squandered or even spent, but left to waste away
like the melting of atrophied muscle. Soon the prospects produced by his
remarkably quick start will be all but forgotten amid the ever-expanding
haze of metaphysical self-absorption that not only envelops, but also – in a
more fundamentally meretricious manner – is his work.
I don’t know if there is a backlash afoot against Barney and his work,
and I don’t care. Fame and fortune will always attract as much, especially in
an artworld given over to the staccato forces of fashion; fancy that. Whether
for or against, one will always be preaching to the converted in Barney’s case.
The real challenge is not so much to convince others to change minds and
sides, but to get to something other than the bipolar positions his art has
offered since the late 1980s. To those ends, the serene and dispassionate
neutrality this near-survey of Drawing Restraint engenders is impressive,
particularly given the number of visitors enticed by the buzz (and in this it
must be mentioned, his partner Björk). For all the opacity of the work and
the halting stutter of his crystalline-gnomic utterances, Barney is at heart a
populist. I use the word in its essential political sense: as in demagoguery, as
in the lowest common denominator of communicative appeal, as in kitsch.
The show is structured around three large sculptural pieces executed
to varying degrees in thermoplastic, self-lubricating plastic and petroleum
jelly. The most impressive of these is Ambergris (2005), a 1:1 rendering of
indigestible material emitted by a whale and once highly valued as a fixative
in the perfume industry. Barney would have us understand his practice
as akin to a metabolic process, his work following a bodily path through if any, to the large sculptures like Occidental Restraint (2005) or Holographic
situation, or the ingestion of material raw or refined, culturally processed Entry Point (2005) remains sealed inside Barney’s head. The drawings
or natural; condition, the phase where the material is worked and forced made not under restraint or during performances, but with a steady hand
against some resistance to take on a nascent form; and production, or the – the artist/athlete left to be a masochist at the margins – owe nothing to
anal output. The wildcard here is unit Bolus – a double-headed dumbbell the chosen heroes Barney namedrops materially and conceptually in his
that has the ability and option to close off the three-phase path and join the work – Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman and even Carolee
mouth of situation to the anus of production. Schneeman – but more to those of Hans Bellmer and Salvador Dalí. Barney
Restraint and resistance is of fundamental import to Barney’s has borrowed the scale of these works from the massive magnificence of
conception of his practice, and it is here where both his sculptural works the whale. Installed, they feel more like a Disney rendering of themepark
and that of his drawings should open up onto a fuller appreciation of his verity. The hint of sociopolitical content deployed by Barney in the allegory
art. Drawings often act as an X-ray of an artist’s practice in their ability of the whale and its oil is as simplistically handled as his excursions into
to produce insight and also reveal complexity. Like video, or instant Japanese thought and culture. Barney knows that ‘form cannot materialise
photography, drawings give immediate feedback to their maker and or mutate unless it struggles against resistance in the process’. This showing
leave more than a little behind for others to devour. The drawings Barney of Drawing Restraint is unproductively formless and deserved better. There
produced under restraint are soulless and hollow when left to stand alone is too much self-lubricating thought, hollow soulless plastic and none of the
outside the live performance or the shelter of the video document, which gravitas, joy or belief evinced by his chosen precursors. And finally, no sand
at least retains the action. Whatever role and relation those drawings have, in the Vaseline. John Slyce
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