Isla Harvey ventures into the strange multi-million dollar world of artist and film maker Matthew Barney, whose exhibition is showing at London's Serpentine Gallery until November 11 2007.
Why not make a drawing while hanging off the side of a moving whaling boat? Art for Matthew Barney is a self-inflicted struggle. But, as an exceedingly fit forty-year-old he’s physically equipped for the challenge.
The chiselled ‘boyfriend of Björk’ has an unusual past for an artist - namely sport, modelling and medicine. In fact he’s the only major artist (so far) to have also been an American football player. But apparently sport hasn’t stupefied this jock whose work has achieved cult appreciation both here and across the Atlantic.
The New York Times named him “the most important American artist of his generation” while some British national papers have applauded him almost unremittingly. This protean conceptualist works with themes that are multinational and transgender but the product is unmistakably American-male.
Barney is at the centre of his work, ruggedly engaged in physically ambitious and large-scale performance, film and sculpture. It’s big, it’s brazen and it’s big-bucks budgets.
Barney studied medicine at Yale before swapping to an art course when he discovered the vibrant NY art scene in the 1980s. He then made a name for himself with meticulously executed feature-length films - most famous of these being the Cremaster cycle (1995-2002) a series of David Lynch-like films named after the male cremaster muscle, which controls testicular contractions.
His latest exhibition, at the Serpentine until November 11 2007, is the first opportunity to see his work in London. The show comprises photographs, sketches, video and sculpture of large-proportions – all based around his ongoing project Drawing Restraint.
The sequence began in 1987 with Barney testing his strength and stamina by scaling the walls of a gallery to draw on the ceiling. The Drawing Restraint series is now at number sixteen with the artist setting increasingly gruelling and laborious tasks for himself.
For the Serpentine show he climbed a vertical dumbbell pole over seven metres high to make a mark on the ceiling before gouging out great handfuls of congealed petroleum jelly from vats in the centre. Petroleum jelly, as with all the materials used, holds specific relevance for the meaning of the piece.
Barney believes that the ‘making of form’ comes in stages: the ‘situation’ where raw energy is unchecked (symbolised by the petroleum jelly), the ‘condition’ where discipline, restraint and structure then leads to the growth of the ‘production’ where form begins to emerge.
The process of hypertrophy is central to this development. Hypertrophy is the process whereby muscle size is increased by inflicting resistance (as with body building). In Drawing Restraint, Barney is meeting harsh resistance in order to grow.
But it all feels a little self-absorbed. In Drawing Resistance 15, a bare-chested Barney is in the engine room of a ship. Sweating profusely he attempts to carve an intricate design into a piece of whalebone. The room is shaking and evidently deafening from the noise of the engines, but Barney perches deftly on the apparatus, bracing his body against the vibrations with dogged focus on the task.
The pièce de résistance is No Resistance, a £6m film epic in which he and Björk hold starring roles. Filmed on Japanese whaling boat the Nissin Maru, the narrative is a bizarre love story of two characters who (eventually) transform into whales and dive off into the ocean.
In the climactic scene Barney and Bjork grow blowholes at the back of their necks which they take it in turns to suck and kiss. They then calve up each other’s legs, creating the impression of aquatic tail fins.
The Icelandic techno-pop queen is responsible for the music with Alison Chernick as director. At two and a half hours the film is visually impressive but may prove an oppressive struggle for some viewers. But in Barney’s world meeting resistance is the name of the game - so struggle on we must.
