The marble-like folds of the woman’s shroud in Hans Baldung Grien’s Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden, c.1540) mirror the white thermoplastic currents in the Cetacea installation nearby. Still, at times the dialogue comes astonishingly alive. Thus the lack of connection to the plaintive Christ figures – wracked vessels of our shared failings. Despite the trials he sets himself, it is strength that Barney puts on display: from the recurring cast barbells to the dominating figures – satyr, General MacArthur, rock climber, artist – that he inhabits. Yet ‘vulnerability’ is the most striking element lacking in Barney’s vast arsenal of tools. ‘Barney offers the spectacle of the imperilled body struggling compulsively with its own vulnerability,’ notes the curator, likening him to the Saviour. But this is not the only reason that Wakefield’s Christ/Barney juxtaposition does not quite succeed. If Barney’s videos and films are impressive, and his corpus of large installations stunning, his scratchy, provisional drawings and stolid cast objects cannot quite compete with the dexterous, dazzling works by Urs Garf and Hans Holbein the Younger. Nearby, Martin Schongauer’s engravings of a thin, pacific Christ share space with Barney’s drawings in their waxy, self-lubricating frames and a spate of small, hovering monitors playing videos of the artist variously scaling museum walls, drawing with fish blood on a turbulent boat deck or cavorting as a satyr in a limousine. Thus Albrecht Dürer’s 16th-century woodcuts detailing the Passion, and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s illumined oil paintings of a dusky Christ crowned with thorns, his eyes cerulean and searching, and the marble-like volumes of Lucretia wielding a knife, attend Barney’s dissembling petroleum sculptures. While the below-ground-level galleries contain the pale, mammoth and carcass-like thermoplastic contours of Cetacea (2005) and Torii (2006), a few sobering medieval works, and the wood-and-soil remnants from Drawing Restraint 17 (2010), the floor above, a multi-room basilica, features the larger archive. Describing his motives in the catalogue, Wakefield writes: ‘n much the same way as the art of the Middle Ages drew a landscape of spiritual inference from the body of the Saviour, so Barney has used his own body to draw out a secular theology of artistic creation.’įollowing this grandiose parallel, the show’s installation evokes the many-chambered, symbolically charged environments of Barney’s films, acting as both church and crypt. Perhaps inspired by the treasure trove of northern Switzerland’s medieval Christian art, guest curator Neville Wakefield chose to place the ‘Drawing Restraint’ series – with its myriad videos, drawings, objects, vitrines and installations – in conversation with works of Christian iconography. Here the body takes centre stage, yet the body is not only Barney’s but that of Christ as well. Nevertheless, it is difficult to digest the curatorial conceit girding ‘Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail’, which surveys the ‘Drawing Restraint’ archive. Barney’s use of jock-ish metaphors can get overplayed, but such tropes point to the fact that the body and its tribulations are central to his practice – and that his thoroughly Postmodern work furthers one of the oldest art-historical traditions: figuration. In a 1990 text titled ‘Notes on Athleticism’, the artist describes this hypertrophic process, concluding: ‘THE ATHLETE IS THE ARTIST’. Barney often likens his actions to those of a competitor who uses resistance training in order to build up muscle groups. With 17 subsequent videos delineating evermore elaborate contests of physical strength and psychological willpower against resistance at turns physical, sexual, architectural, cultural, oceanic or spiritual, the series resembles the endless tragicomic trials of a Greek demigod, or its most contemporary incarnation, the athlete. Barney’s early works functioned as systems designed to ‘defeat’ the challenges of drawing: thus the restrictive harnesses and ramps of Drawing Restraint 1 (1987), which left the artist stretching or groping to set pencil to paper. Matthew Barney’s ‘Drawing Restraint’ series (1987–ongoing) may be best understood as ‘an endless loop between desire and discipline’, a characterization that comes from the artist himself. Courtesy: the artist, photograph: Michael Rees. Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 2, 1988.
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