Dec 12, 2011 Comments Off
Barney Live
The Egyptian legend of Isis and Osiris, a Norman Mailer novel, archetypal American automobiles, Harry Houdini and a giant salt deposit below Detroit are just a few of the concepts that inspire Ancient Evenings, Matthew Barney’s latest opus created in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler. Barney’s formal interests seem to be edging closer to live performance then ever before. Rather than creating performances exclusively for the camera, as he did in The Cremaster Cycle, in Ancient Evenings a small audience of critics, collectors and art world aficionados were invited to witness three extravagantly constructed site-specific acts, during which sculptures were forged and opulence reigned. KHU (2010), for example, a seven hour long act that involved a detective plot, a chorus of opera singers and a women with prosthetic legs fornicating with live snakes, took spectators on a tour of derelict Detroit and onto a barge where they watched five giant silos release molten lead that formed into the sculpture DJED which is currently on view at Gladstone gallery.
The notion that this event could be entombed in the sculptures themselves haunts the gallery like a strange aftershock. Heavy metals like iron, lead, bronze, and copper litter the gallery floor in the transient shapes they were cast in. Han Solo could be hibernating in any of these – a Chrysler’s underside made entirely of lead and graphite, a block of plastic in the midst of an alchemical change to zinc, or a heaping mound of rusty bronze topped with a perfectly polished Was (Egyptian power scepter). In addition to this, twelve cryptic drawings that could have been torn from a William Blake sketchbook hang on the walls in red frames and provide insight into Barney’s mise-en-scène. These conceptual concerns are by no means strange to the second half of the twentieth century, or Barney’s other work for that matter. Artists have long pioneered methods of capturing the precious live act – whether it be Yves Klein’s Le Saut dans le Vide, Piero Manzoni’s Magic Base or any performance artist who has documented their work in video, film, or photography. Barney makes live performance implicit to his sculptures by creating such a specific and grandiose setting to craft them. The sculptures, though they are packed full of mythology both modern and ancient, left me wanting to know more about where they came from. Not even the comprehensive brochure/playbill that accompanies the exhibition can compensate for what it might have been like to be at one of these performances. I hope for this reason that the forthcoming acts to be performed in New York City will be accessible to a larger audience.
































