Matthew barney björk
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Can you talk about what it takes to work at the various scales you’ve operated in? How do you think about the sculptural process, and how do you think about film? And their intersection?
MB
Sculpture has always been the priority for me. In that sense, the video work has been a means toward a sculptural end. My use of video started as a documentary tool with the Drawing Restraints, and grew slowly into a more narrative tool.The narratives were always in service of the object, though the location of the intersection has changed. The Jim Otto installations in the early ’90s had a more 1:1 relationship, where the video and the object were installed in proximity and the relationship between the action and object were more explicit. The Cremaster Cycle expanded those relationships and created more space and complexity between the object and narrative. The relationships were less direct and more of a network. I started showing the films in cinemas and installing the sculpture without the presence of the film as a way of creating more space. As the projects continued to
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Matthew Barney
American contemporary artist
For the boxer, see Matthew Barney (boxer).
Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967) is an American contemporary artist and film director who works in the fields of sculpture, film, photography and drawing. His works explore connections among geography, biology, geology and mythology as well as notable themes of sex, intercourse, and conflict. His early pieces were sculptural installations combined with performance and video. Between 1994 and 2002, he created The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema."[2] He is also known for his projects Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), River of Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018).
Life and career
Matthew Barney was born March 25, 1967,[3] as the younger of two children in San Francisco, California, where he lived until he was 7.[4] He lived in Boise, Idaho from 1973 to 1985, where his father got a job administering
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MATTHEW BARNEY: THE AMERICAN ARTIST IS READY TO FLEX AGAIN
Matthew Barney photographed by Ari Marcopoulos for PIN–UP.
Artist Matthew Barney describes his ongoing series Drawing Restraint, which he began as studio experiments in 1987, as “an endless loop between desire and discipline.” In the piece, which brings together performance, film, and sculpture, he created serpentine obstacles for himself — impeded by obstacles, harnesses, and ramps, he struggled to put a pencil to paper. It’s an embodied performance that draws on Barney’s youth spent competing as an athlete, rooted in a fundamental truth of sports training: (muscle) growth only comes from subjecting yourself to forces of restraint. In a similar manner, the body is a recurring element in Barney’s elaborate aesthetic systems. In another early work, Blind Perineum (1991), he scaled the walls of New York’s Gladstone Gallery using ice picks, dressed in a blue swimming cap and almost nothing else, before inserting a screw into his rectum. In the film River of Fundament (2014), he represented the
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