Review: Who wants to join the cult of video artist Matthew Barney?
Matthew Barney,"Redoubt," 2018. By Sebastian Smee Sebastian Smee Art critic Email Bio Follow Art critic March 8 at 12:37 PM NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Video is the medium in which the most ambitious, aesthetically successful and popular art of our time is being made. Painting, sculpture and photography are all doing fine, folks, so don’t panic. But it’s video — the medium that once meant unendurably long, grainy films with flimsy conceptual underpinnings — that is setting the agenda.
If you weren’t paying attention to contemporary art in 2002, you may struggle to understand the buzz that surrounded his “Cremaster Cycle” when it opened at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The cycle, described by the show’s curator, Nancy Spector, as nothing less than a “self-enclosed aesthetic system,” came in the form of five films totaling about seven hours, as well as an elaborate sequence of drawings, photographs and sculptures made from Vaseline, plastic and metal.
Barney followed the “Cremaster Cycle” with “Drawing Restraint 9,” a feature-length collaboration with the singer Björk, his partner for 13 years, set aboard a Japanese whaling vessel, and then with “River of Fundament,” a 5 1/2- hour film in the form of a three-act opera, with a score by Barney’s longtime collaborator, Jonathan Bepler.
He has the charisma and quiet intensity of a cult leader. He is a sincere truth-seeker and a quick study. His art weaves narratives, allegories, images and symbols that roll over the viewer in waves. Mesmerized, pummeled, you are forced either to take the plunge — to believe — or to keep your head above water. If you believe, it’s like baptism: You are absorbed into an intellectually stimulating subculture where everything makes more and more sense the deeper you delve.
The word “redoubt” denotes a defensive military fortification or a grittily defended political or social position. For Barney, who was born in San Francisco but moved to Boise, Idaho, when he was 6, it carries a more personal sense of isolation or withdrawal. Each time Barney’s character creates an image, he is punished for his voyeurism . The two virgins, meanwhile, seem to echo these events in slow, inventively choreographed, mutually supportive movements that take place in a hammock, around a campfire, in deep snow and up a tree.
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