theartblog » matthew barney

Moving images–Dance and repetition make your eye and heart sing, a book review

roberta — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:25:11 +0000

Since the King of Pop died, I’ve been catching up on my Michael Jackson video watching. The ones that really grab me are Thriller and Beat It which aspire to be short movies and pretty much are. Jackon’s dancing is remarkable to watch of course. But his dance moves take on even greater visual energy and emotion when he’s backed up by a dance troupe mimicking him and amplifying the movements. It’s then that the quick-stepping, twitching, pirouetting and hip popping becomes one big satisfying wave of movement.

Michael Jackson, group dance in Beat It, very reminiscent of the Jets and Sharks in West Side Story

Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History by historian William H. McNeill talks about the physical and emotional underpinnings of dance and drill and other human synchronous movement. We all love to dance and we fall easily into step with each other when walking; even aerobics classes are satisfying whereas doing aerobics by yourself is odious. Why is that? McNeill says there’s something in the human bones and psyche that compels us to move together — and then rewards us for doing so. We feel good when moving together with others. There’s a spirit of group cohesion and shared emotion that happens, some pack animal body-and-mind-happiness that occurs.

Marching band stepping together.

Our ancestors learned this, and dancing allowed them to bond. Dancing may even have helped foster language development (chanting being a natural partner with dance). Moving together rhythmically helped Homo Sapiens evolve and dominate the landscape over non-dancing and non-marching species. Governments have corraled group movement for use in the army — Hitler of course abused this human love of mass physical movement with his goose-stepping soldiers and Heil Hitlering citizens.

University of Michigan graduation. Football crowds often do the human wave, another way to move together in time.

In very early times, organized religions allowed group dancing as a way to commune with god. (One of the byproducts of the rhythmic dancing for some people is the onset of a trance state, seen as a direct communication with god.) The Quakers and the Shakers got their names from the group movements associated with their religions according to McNeil.

Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street New Orleans, crowd in unison hoping to get some beads. Far from a mystical religious experience...or who knows, maybe for some it is.

Visual representations of dance, drill and other synchronous movement

Image of a battle in the War of 1812. By Oleg Parhaiev, Russia

McNeill’s book got me thinking about visual representations of dance and drill and about visual repetition motifs in general. And here’s what I think: That even if you’re not physically moving but are observing dance or drill — or are looking at a visual representation in 2-D of dance or drill — the visual image triggers a similar pack-response as your eyes move around the image and pick up the the rhythmic movements and register them on you.

Fra Angelico. Early religious paintings often repeated motifs like halos and body stances to achieve visual harmony

And while there’s less of a physical response when looking at a 2-D image than there is to looking at a video (after all, there’s no music to enhance the effects), there is still something immediately satisfying when you look at a work with a repeat motif of bodies moving together.

Busby Berkeley movies in the 1930s specialized in images of group motion. This is a still from Footlight Parade.

Popular culture and art both love these movement spectacles. Think of Busby Berkeley (watch video) and the Rockettes; the human wave at college football games; and the standing and singing of national anthems everywhere. Think the Olympic parade and church rituals (Catholic ritual when I grew up was all about standing sitting and kneeling en masse triggered by some unseen signal–all while chanting unknowable Latin words in haunting melodies). In choreographed dance for the stage, especially in musical theatre, often it’s the group numbers that bring the house down.

Breughel's Wedding Dance in a Barn shows a whole town dancing it up.

Certainly artists have always loved making images of synchronous bodies in motion. McNeill’s book has pictures of a Minoan Crete harvester vase from 1500 BC that shows people dancing and singing in time: Medievalists painted legions of angels (and legions of praying sinners) in synchronous harmony; Breughel painted peasants dancing at a wedding; and many artists working for governments have drawn, painted and photographed army battalions in formation.

Sandra Scolnik, painting from the New York art fairs in 2007.

In our day Matthew Barney, one of our age’s great visual image-makers, has a scene of a chorus of dancing girls ala Busby Berkeley in one of his Cremaster films.

Matthew Barney, from the Cremaster series.

Visual representations of repeat patterns

Bruce Pollock, a Philadelphia artist, makes mandala-like paintings.

Mandalas and other abstract art designs with intricate repeat patterns have a similar bodily appeal. Mandalas are used for meditation and can produce calm or trance; Op Art is about provoking a bodily/retinal response of a different kind. Standing in front of a Bridget Riley painting triggers my flight response. (For more about Op Art check out this website.)

Edna Andrade was a Philadelphia practitioner of op art.

Jackson Pollock’s works are like melted mandalas.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

One reason that works of abstract repeat patterns like those of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden are popular and have helped spawn an entire universe of artists working in similar fashion is that the works are satisfying to look at and make.

Brice Marden, Marden, Brice, Chinese Dancing, Oil on canvas, 60 x 108 inches, from the UBS collection

I’m not sure why all this fascinates but it seems that there’s a human need for perfection expressed in the desire to move together and make images of repetitive movements. We know we’re not perfect and maybe this is all a way of saying even though perfection is not possible we can get pretty close with these bodily and emotionally satisfying movements and representations.

How much does arts funding matter?

max mulhern — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Max Mulhern, whom I told you about here, wrote an interesting response to some of the comments on that piece. The comments focused on one thing mentioned in a much longer article– funding for artists. But an inflammatory topic will out, and one of the commenters wanted to know “What does Max Mulhern believe?” (about whether trust funded artists are the only ones who can afford to make art these days). Here’s his response:

Post by Max Mulhern

Dear Roberta,
> I didn’t want to make a half baked reply on the blog concerning the question about trust fund artists. I was slightly disappointed that that was the subject most focused upon. But Arts Funding and funding one’s work is vital and always creeps into art conversations. It is an important subject, and art and money do mix well when and if they meet at all. When we meet again I’ll tell you about the Matthew Barney show that I saw here in London called “Drawing Restraint”.

In it were many videos of Barney trying to draw by (to name a few):

Hanging over the side of a boat and placing the paper against the hull
Using a trampoline to jump high enough to draw on a ceiling
Drawing in the engine room of a boat while wearing ear protection
Drawing while suspended from pipes in a room with mountain climbing gear etc.

Plus an installation in the gallery where he climbed up a wall using climbing wall outcrops and a rope to get up to the ceiling of the gallery to draw on it.

Image from the Drawing Restraint website, including (presumably) the tools used to make the drawing and the drawing.

It was interesting to see how an artist funded to the amplitude of a multinational company needed to create barriers, restraints and constraints for himself in order to do his work. If it was a metaphor for how difficult it is to make art then it was wonderful. The problem was that he made it too hard to draw and the drawings suffered for that. Did that mean that when the going gets too rough art just cannot be made?

> On the other hand, if it weren’t a metaphor then as a “struggling” artist myself it was confounding to see an artist who can do whatever he wants actually fetter (and tether) his execution of work.

> This kind of tool can be rewarding. My professor at art school often had us adapt uncomfortable positions while drawing nudes, for example. Physical discomfort and visual impairment (ie too close to the subject to see it) made for great things. Besides what’s a shaman if not someone finding a way to reach into the beyond and bring it back to us? Pain and privation are often employed in this pursuit. Artists are entitled to the same methods as they are shamanic themselves. Ritual and practice are an integral part of work in general and the creative process in particular. But one can get lost in the doing and forget the product. And does the public need to know how a piece of art was done?

> Like in most things moderation is an asset. Too much money is probably just as bad as none at all. No pain, no gain/too much pain, death. Despite dwindling arts funding there has been an explosion in the quantity of visual art being produced. Given the economic situation of our country I can’t see Congress earmarking more monies for art. But art will get done anyway.

If art is anything then it is a testament to individual perseverence and the immortality of art itself.

Matthew Barney performing one of his Drawing Restraint drawing actions.

> In Barney’s drawings the resulting drawings made it clear that self-inflicted constraint can be an impediment to making a successful work. Were the works supposed to embody restraint like a portrait embodies an individual? The resulting drawings were retarded or suffering from their maker’s need to always be worrying about too many other things in order to get a line drawn, and therefore vital connections were missed. Maybe the fragmented drawings revealed that he was very close to where he wanted to be but not close enough to establish a concrete outpost? Maybe someone else has to go out there and connect the dots? Perhaps we were supposed to marvel at how difficult an artist can make things for himself?

He is definitely a fit artist.

He’s an athlete like myself; When physically active there is a heightened sense of “alive-ness.” Does that rub off on the art or does it just make for action art?

I like to do what I am depicting as having done. It’s fatiguing. Other artists laugh at me and point out how I can make it seem like what I am depicting was actually done. I am uncomfortable with artifice and yet it can be an artists best friend. Extreme physical exertion to make a work doesn’t make it more real (I’ve learned the hard way). With Barney we see that the method, production, and means are the subject and not the resulting work. I tend to tally the costs of his shows, in addition to looking at them, of course. He’s lost in the doing and the funding and so are we.
Max

The ugliness factor

roberta — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 01:45:00 +0000

Matthew Barney
Originally uploaded by sokref1.

Even before I knew it was Matthew Barney I knew it might be. Who else? An installation in a Chelsea gallery that snakes through four rooms and the entryway with huge objects made out of what appears to be fat or wax or some other dense repulsive material. This installation at Gladstone Gallery” has something to do with the artist’s new movie, made with his wife Bjork. I’m not sure the sculptures were used in the movie but they probably were. That’s the Barney m.o.

Steve said “Yuck.” And that pretty much summed it up. The motif was nautical, the color was white or the off white lard color. There were ropes covered with white wax that connected things together from room to room, and basically it didn’t cohere except as some Moby Dick-ish visual diary of a mad man.

I don’t know but I wish we could get over this guy. Or more than that I wish Barney could get real and give us something meaningful that looks away from his navel and into the sight lines of the real world where people actually do work and worry about the rent money and have sons and fathers that go off to war and don’t come back. Enough already.

Moving Pictures, Part 1

roberta — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 12:21:00 +0000

Barney putting a hat on Bjork in the symbol- and ritual-rich movie.

Randy Kennedy‘s backgrounder in yesterday’s NY Times on the new Matthew Barney/Bjork collaboration, “Drawing Restraint 9,” is excellent. The new Barney, in case you haven’t heard, is a full length feature film that’s out now in New York. Barney’s left the world of Cremaster behind but this movie, in which he and his partner Bjork are the main characters sounds equally costume-heavy and ritual-driven.

By the way, skip the NY Times’ multimedia trailer feature which subjects you to a trailer-length commercial before letting you see the trailer. Go to Apple instead and see a real nice quicktime trailer, no commercials.

Bjork’s sculptural hair. Vaseline, one of Barney’s fave materials, apparently makes a big showing in this movie.

You are wondering how the two artists — Barney, the icy, symbol-driven sci-fi autobiographical movie maker and Bjork, the romantic writer/singer of haunting pop music about love worked their collaboration? My favorite quote from Bjork in the article sums up some initial problems:

Describing their first conversations about the project (Drawing Restraint 9) two years ago, Bjork said: “I wanted to know the structure of the movie, the emotional structure. ‘Where are the emotional peaks? Where are the emotional bottoms?’ And he’d just look at me, like, ‘What?’ “

Apparently enough monosyllables were coughed up to give the musician clues on how to compose music for the piece.

Wedding knives

Here’s Stephen Holden‘s review of the movie in which the characters played by Bjork and Barney get married in a Shinto-type ceremony on a whaling ship, then make love by fileting themselves in a ritual involving knives.

Your Barney screed

libby — Mon, 21 Apr 2003 21:39:00 +0000

Hey, Roberta, that was a nice piece your wrote in the Weekly on Matthew Barney. I get the feeling you could have written pages more.

Jerry Saltz loves Matthew Barney

roberta — Mon, 14 Apr 2003 20:05:52 +0000

My introduction to Matthew Barney’s art came in Jerry Saltz’s Art in America cover story (Oct. 1996). Saltz’s critical gush about Barney’s sexually weird universe (goat-eared fairies, Goodyear blimp phalluses, new types of genitalia!!) was enough to get your curiosity up – if not your dander. (As for Saltz, he’s still gushing! ) What’s the big deal about dressing up in a white suit, donning white pancake makeup, goat ears and cloven lip and dancing around with other guys and women dressed (or undressed). Oh, well maybe it was a big deal. But I’ve seen one of the Cremaster’s (Cremaster 1 at the PMA, Aug. 2001) and lost in the big art production values is its human heart.

What’s the story, Barney?

roberta — Mon, 14 Apr 2003 19:51:00 +0000

Yes. I think Barney–and David Salle is another example (see image)– is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the art world at its worst. What’s the point of being this inaccessible and self-absorbed, other than to flummox THE CRITICS (and some very important ones at that, Michael Kimmelman) into believing there’s something there, there? It’s the emperor’s-new-clothes approach to making it in the art world. I’m not saying the imagery isn’t arresting, both for its looks and its creepiness. But the story that would elevate it and justify it so that the viewer is led by the artist into his weird world just isn’t there.–Libby