![]() If Barney disapproves of such posturing he doesn’t make this obviously apparent. Her weaponry looks frightful guns are fetishised here in a manner that would make Travis Bickle blush. Don Paterson’s “plain sense” is somewhat missing here.īarney’s use of Wachter appears respectful, admiring even, and certainly not overtly critical on the evidence of this film. As of April 30th in 2021 there have been 178 mass shootings in the USA with 206 deaths and 693 injured. Wachter is involved in politics and is currently “fighting for our Second Amendment Rights.” Elsewhere in America gun crime and mass shootings are rampant. She can’t express how much she loves “being involved in the gun industry and culture”. She trains kids in the use of firearms making sure they “learn to respect” them. The likes of Guns and Lace and NRA Women interview her. Wachter can hit bullseyes at 1,000 yards with a. Wachter is a serious shooter in real life, a big NRA nut. The Actaeon figure is played by Barney himself the Diana by Anette Wachter. Oh, not forgetting extremist right wing groups and their guns. The exhibition guide tells us the following is referenced: the myth of the American West, Diana and Actaeon, camouflage, wolves, lodgepole pines, metallurgy, contact improvisation in modern dance, and constellations. Drone tracking shots recall the opening sequence from Kubrick’s The Shining and other winter rural frontier imagery is not dissimilar to that seen in revisionist Westerns like Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight or Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. We are in the Sawtooth mountain region of Idaho, a land of forest and snow, on a wolf hunt. Given Barney’s reputation for perfectionism no one should be surprised that the cinematography (by Peter Strietmann) is exquisite. The central piece, Redoubt (2018), is the aforementioned film. Warhol and Barney: pish and shit merchants. Electroplated copper plates with “vinegar patina” such as the sample shown here are not a million miles away from Warhol’s oxidation series. While we might admire the revival of the technique, its fancy and fussy use of tanks of sulphuric acid and electric current, Barney’s skills as a draughtsman are clearly not those of a Rembrandt. ![]() In the accompanying film we see Barney at work on the metallic surface using a burin and drypoint needles. Next up are some pretty copper engravings that please the eye predictably because copper is a beautiful shiny material with a fantastically warm sheen. This is a cast of a burned lodgepole tree wedged into a base that resembles a WW1 artillery battery – imagine Big Bertha crossed with a Big Willy. Outside there’s another stawner of a construction called Sawtooth Battery (2019), a ten metre-tall totem made of copper and bronze. And if you worked that out without consulting the guide then mister you’re a better man than I. All this and some military hardware is meant to conjure “connections between Earth and the cosmos” – that and the mythology around the naming of constellations. Seven stars are attached by rods and there’s texturing to suggest wolf fur. The first work we see is a priapic sculpture called Cosmic Hunt (2020), a gigantic stainless steel cast of a tree trunk. Man up.Īs with Barney’s earlier testotoxic fantasies there’s an immediate phallocentric component. You can imagine the artist squaring up to you threateningly: if you don’t get it that’s just tough. The obfuscation at play in much of Barney’s filmmaking can easily tip into a sneering contempt for patience, never mind plain thinking. ![]() Like The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) Barney’s previous gesamtkunstwerk or the scatological excess of the six-hour Norman Mailer tribute ‘opera’ River of Fundament (2014) there’s no fear of overreach, no compromise with any risk of incomprehension. Is there a great deal of plain sense here? Are the key works useful to us? Is it easy to interpret what’s going on? He notes the “necessary oracularity” of poetry there’s a similar enigmatic charge to much contemporary art.Īnd that brings us to the esoteric world of Matthew Barney and his new blockbuster. Here’s the poet Don Paterson talking about Rilke’s Orpheus sequence of Sonnets (1922): “For all their occasional obscurity also make a great deal of plain sense.” Paterson goes on to say “this sense has to be placed at the heart of any discussion if the poems are actually to be useful to us”. Installation view of Matthew Barney_ Redoubt at Hayward Gallery, 2021 © Matthew Barney, 2021.
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