Matthew Barney Imported From Detroit By Jerry Saltz
A lot of people recently suffered for Matthew Barneys art
. Alas, I was not one of them, although I was supposed to be. A year ago
October 1, my flight was canceled, so I missed KHU, a sprawling, multisited, outdoor, all-day performance Barney staged in Detroit at
who knows what astronomical cost for a hand-picked audience of around 200. Detroit was the perfect setting for this tale of woe and
reincarnation, an economic and spiritual city of the dead and would-be rebirth.
It also rained apocalyptically that day, and Barneys performance included a freezing barge ride down the Detroit River, where the
audience witnessed, among other things, a crane dredging up a 1967 Chrysler Imperial.
There was also actress-athlete Aimee Mullins as Egyptian goddess Isis, seated semi-naked on an engine block filled with live,
writhing snakes. In the spectacular finale, five enormous customized furnaces poured molten metal, including parts of the Imperial,
into a fiery casting pit that drained into a mold of a massive Egyptian Djed, an ancient symbol associated with Osiris, whose own
body was cut up into pieces before it was retrieved and reassembled. But I missed all of this. Arriving in Detroit the next day to
deliver an unrelated lecture, I was regaled with tales of the harrowing extravaganza, including the assurances of two women that
Barneys performance was more intense than childbirth.
After a five year hiatus from the gallery scene here in New York, Barney is back, with, among other things, a huge sculpture that is
the result of the Detroit spectacle. The sight is typically visionary, Boschian and ambitious. Yet unlike his previous outings, there
are no live animals in the gallery, no long, elliptical videos with scenes featuring aquatic Asian sprites or the artist as a satyr
with seven Jacobean doves lifting his scrotum heavenward. There are no phantasmagorical sculptural objects made of bizarre materials
like white tapioca or self-lubricating plastic.
This is Barney basic, the artist he really is and, I think, has been beneath the trappings all along. What we see at Gladstone arent
leftovers and docu-fragments from Detroit; we see enormous sculptures that show Barney thinking and, as it were, drawing and dreaming
in bronze, iron and lead. As he recently told filmmaker David Cronenberg, My interest is the process of making something. Barney is
first and last a sculptor, a maker, who uses narrative, myth, architecture, biology, pageantry, history, geography, geology, music,
mayhem and video to create a palpable sculptural universe.
The largest of the three sculptures on view at Gladstone is DJED, a three-part, floor-bound cast-iron ensemble generated by the
iron-pouring Detroit finale. Weighing around 47,000 pounds, it includes a long ovular black pond or ossified swamp with two rivulets
extending from it. This is the solid lake formed by the Detroit pouring of molten iron with mixed-in parts of the Chrysler. The two
channels lead to a stem shape with four cross members. This is the eponymous Djed. The size of an automobile, it actually contains
the cast remains of a car. It is immense wreckage, industrial mummy, afterbirth; imposing, engulfing, strange. Nearby is what
Wallace Stevens may have meant when he wrote of a gigantic, solitary urn, a trash can at the end of the world, where the dead give
up dead things. A hillock or burial mound of black cast bronze, Canopic Chest is named after vessels for storing the bodys internal
organs used in Egyptian mummification. Discernible in this mass are the front end of a car, a casket with four rough-hewn jars and,
on top, a was, the ancient Egyptian symbol of power: a deitys scepter. It looks like a polished bronze crowbar.
by: aarenbrowns
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