The Occidental Tourist: Matthew Barney in Foreign Territory

Words: Glen Helfand

Photo: Chris Winget

Since the beginning of his career, Matthew Barney has been caught in a provocative zone between his own serious artistic intentions and popular recognition. What has the public found in the curious swirl of ingredients he offers -- the rugged good looks, the sports metaphors, the nudity, the feature film format, the recurrent use of petroleum jelly as a material -- to latch on to? Is Barney such a looming art world figure because of his success, or in spite of it?

These questions are difficult to answer since the artist as much a paradox as his work. In person, Barney is a soft-spoken and awkwardly likeable guy. When I interviewed him this spring about his new feature film, Drawing Restraint 9, as well as the major exhibition Drawing Restraint that opens in June at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he sported beard stubble and casually unkempt hair. I arrived early and noticed him chatting on his cell phone (to his cameraman, I later learned). He seemed less the art star than an ordinary, albeit very busy, Joe. His manner is quiet and thoughtful, attributes that seem the opposite of a careerist, yet he's been extremely successful at leveraging funds for his grand, expensive, highly personal visions.

I had those same impressions 15 years ago, when I interviewed Barney on the occasion of his first museum exhibition at SFMOMA. While his work wasn't as expensive then as it is today, his audacity was already evident in Transexualis, a 1991 piece that included a working walk-in refrigerator containing a weight-lifting decline press formed with solidified petroleum jelly. There was already persistent buzz around his use of unusual lubricated materials, sports references and body metaphors (critics were also overly fond of noting that he funded his art working as a catalog model). I had seen his 1991 show at Stuart Regan Gallery in Los Angeles -- his first solo appearance in a commercial gallery -- which immediately demonstrated his highly original vision. In that earlier conversation, I found many of his statements -- such as, "There's a proposed organism in my work that at certain points has a gender, and it's not necessarily a human gender" -- to be irritating head-scratchers. Years later, such comments still seem outlandish, but they also make almost perfect sense in the context of his five Cremaster films and other subsequent work.

Barney is famously reticent to discuss his methods. In our recent conversation, he told me that the scale of his projects, and his entry into conventional film distribution channels, makes it necessary for him to give interviews. And although it's apparent that it's not his favorite activity -- he often ponders questions a few awkward extra beats before answering -- he's become far more skilled and comfortable in offering comprehensible entry points to his particular internal logic. For instance, when discussing a 2005 Drawing Restraint sculpture, Cetacea, based on a key, large-scale element in the film, he explains: "When you're standing in front of that much petroleum jelly, it has the kind of quality that a glacier has. You feel like it might be moving, but you can't see it. You look at it in relationship to a crack in the floor and the movement is very slow. Seeing it cast in thermal plastic is very much not like that. It feels like a frozen moment."

Regardless of what you might think of his work, you have to admire his pluck in creating uncompromisingly epic art, and with it, an intricate narrative cosmology inspired by obscure muscles in the human body. Throughout his career, Barney has produced images that are simply too quirky, too poetic, too vividly gooey to forget. Since that first museum show, he's completed the massive five-film-and-multiple-sculpture sequence, The Cremaster Cycle (luring iconic personalities such as '60s pin-up Ursula Andress, guy lit legend Norman Mailer and sculpture kingpin Richard Serra to make cameo appearances); taken part in Documenta XI, the Whitney Biennial (twice in a row) and the Venice Biennale; commanded the entire Guggenheim Museum in 2003 with an audacious installation; and produced a telephone book-sized catalog that explicates in intricate detail his Wagnerian cycle.

There's nothing like fame to crystallize opinions, positive or negative, particularly in the case of an artist whose work and ambitions are so grand in scale, and Barney's ceaseless activity has brought a tsunami of critical attention. Prior to the Guggenheim exhibition, The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman famously declared Barney "the most important American artist of his generation," while fellow critic Jerry Saltz proudly admitted he had viewed Cremaster 4 75 times and wrote a 1996 piece for Art in America declaring it "a masterpiece of 1990s art." Barney has also had his detractors, like San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker, who opined, "Expression turns to bombast in his hands. A little of his work... well, it never comes little."

Meanwhile, Barney's romantic ties to Björk recall the iconic power couple status of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with the genders reversed. The merger of high art and pop culture is often fraught with dilemmas, not least how serious artwork can transcend the flash of fame. Turning their personal partnership into an artistic one, the couple collaborated on the 135-minute Drawing Restraint 9, an ambitious installation and film project set on a Japanese whaling ship. Bj¨rk appears in the film and wrote the music. A recent New York Times feature focused on their opposed artistic personalities -- he's analytical, she's emotional -- and fittingly, when Barney tells me about their appearance together in DR9's romantic center -- as the Occidental Guests, two ill-at-ease strangers who perform a series of rituals together, dressed in unwieldy, traditional Japanese costumes -- he speaks detachedly. "I thought of the tea ceremony as a way to bring two people together and be enabled by a host," he says. "Here you have these two Western characters coming into a situation that's foreign to them. I knew I wanted them to have a magnetism that was pulling them together. I started thinking of the way they'd be pulled magnetically together, and as they were moving, they'd be learning." Perhaps not surprisingly, their sequences together don't exactly suggest romantic chemistry -- the context is simply too formal and too esoteric to elicit heart-tugging warm fuzzies.

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