#MATTHEW BARNEY NYC MOVIE#

It looked like a liquid metal explosion frozen in mid-bang, which is pretty much what it is. “I’ve always had an interest in colliding the natural and artificial, but I think what makes this work different from what I’ve done before is that the natural is foregrounded.”Īcross the way sat a piece bound for Los Angeles that illustrated the point. Barney said one damp summer morning in his studio, wearing heavy black boots, Dickies work pants and a pristine Detroit Tigers cap. “In many ways, the real leads the artificial in ‘River of Fundament,’ ” Mr. His last major piece was “Drawing Restraint 9,” a Japanese-influenced story about characters aboard a whaling ship, made in collaboration with Björk, his romantic partner for many years (from whom he had a highly public split in 2013 her newest album “Vulnicura,” which she calls a “complete heartbreak album,” is about the breakup.)īut the book, set at a time when Egyptians were making great advances in metal working, casting and the development of alloys, gave him a way to begin thinking about materials and the history of sculpture in ways he hadn’t previously - in effect, to think about a project in which sculpture would drive filmmaking more than it had in the past.

Barney, 48, said that for several years he felt he had worked himself into a conceptual corner making sculpture tied closely to the narrative of his films and that he couldn’t see a compelling way to continue. In two extensive interviews, one at his studio and another at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s sprawling Geffen Contemporary space in Little Tokyo just after installation was completed, Mr. Barney has made before - almost primordial, as if some of it were cast up by the earth itself.

#MATTHEW BARNEY NYC MOVIE#

In much the same way that the movie is about human life in its most elemental and sometimes violent states, the sculpture that grew out of the movie seems - more than anything Mr. 13 and is to be the only American stop for the work, shown first in Munich and Hobart, Tasmania. That body, about 85 works and more than seven years in the making, is on display for the first time in the United States, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. As with those films and much of his work since the early days of his career, the new film functions on its own but also as a dynamo for spawning, shaping and superimposing meaning onto a body of sculpture. Barney since the “Cremaster” cycle, the symbol-saturated films made beginning in the mid-1990s that established him as one of the most important artists of his generation. The tableaux were created for “River of Fundament,” a movie almost six hours long that is the most ambitious undertaking by Mr. “That water was really pretty nasty by the end,” Mr. And the eviscerated cow carcass, lying in a shallow pool. There were, for example, the dead pigs being devoured by maggots. Barney, who has a stomach for such things, approached his limits. But at various times over the last several years, the studio was transformed into a version of a netherworld so hellish that even Mr. The studio of the artist Matthew Barney in Long Island City, Queens, sits amid a collection of cookie-cutter warehouses where the most infernal sight is usually a chained guard dog, no Cerberus he.

Matthew barney nyc