The next sex - video art, Matthew Barney, various venues, various locations - includes related article on his work 'Cremaster 1' - Cover Story

In which the author, a veteran of more than 75 viewings of the video "Cremaster 4" examines the characters, the themes and the representatives of Matthew Barney's complex allegory of sexual differentiation.

Matthew Barney is single of the most interesting artists to rise in the 1990s, and hands-down he is the greatest in quantity interesting when it comes to the way he works with video. In Cremaster 4 (1994) and Cremaster 1 (1995) Barney has made sum of two units highly elaborate and ambitious videos. (Cremaster 4 and Cremaster 1 have been shielded in a number of film festivals. They were broadcast upon Dutch television, and had limited move swiftlys at New York's Film Forum in July; they can also be seen by dint of appointment, at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in fresh York or Regen Projects in sees Angeles.) He plans a total of five "Cremaster" works (Cremaster 5 is now in progress) The series is epic and continuous, on the other hand each linked piece is also a work perfect unto itself. Think of these videos as Matthew Barney's Ring Cycle

I came of artistic age in the early 1970 when video equipment became more portable and les expensive, and artists began to open this new medium in the "space of art." I sat in a doom of grungy little rooms and watched a allotment of really long black-and-white videos of family pointing their cameras at their buildings, their loft their bodies, their dogs, plus heavens fields of grain, water, grainy wood-land you name it. Most of it was moderately beautiful boring but video was as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of a cause, then, as it was a medium. Later, when painting picked up in the 1980 video faded away. Now, it is back with a vengeance, functioning as a primary constituent in the work of a number of younger artists.

The first time I saw individual of Matthew Barney's pieces was in September 1990 in a large assemblage show at the now departed Althea Viafora Gallery. At first, Field Dressing (orifill), 1989 as it was called, appeared familiar: a lone guy doing uneven stuff in a studio. It was deliberate and hermetic, but it was also completely original, plane thrilling. The multipart work consisted of sum of two units video monitors mounted to the wall, along with a small in number related sculptural objects. It was what I saw upon the monitors that caught me completely not on guard. They showed the artist, naked leave out for a full body harness, in private (but for the camera), climbing up and down a extremity and some ropes and intermittently applying dollops of rather colded Vaseline into all the orifices of his material part (hence the invented term "orifill" in the title). I contemplation of Joseph Beuys's fat as well as Chris Burden's death-defying endurance art. I was also reminded of the early video performance pieces of Bruce Nauman, who neared tapes of himself walking around his studio in a stylized, plane ludicrous manner, tracing its perimeter in stiff-legged and contorted postures; and because of the extraordinary physical predicament not absented in Barney's piece, I recalled Nauman's later, more dogged, relentles works like churl Torture or Learned Helplessness in Rats.

Barney's first solo present to view in New York, at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in October 1991 was a fusion of statuary and psycho-sexual performance art upon video. The objects, made of strange materials like internally lubricated plastic, cast cane-sugar thermal gel packs and seneca oil jelly, tended towards the visceral by dint of way of medicine or sports. In fact Barney was one time a pre-med student and an athlete, which may help to explain for what cause [i]or[/i] reason the sometimes arcane paraphernalia of hospitals and of sports play a crucial part in his imagery. Among the various! items at Gladstone were a golden wrestling mat, a dumbbell made of cast tapioca, chaps guards, an N.F.L. jersey, a Vaseline-covered declining weight bench, sternal retractors and a mirror Four video monitors were mountained in different parts of the gallery playing four different tapes.

In the Jim Otto Suite, Barney, naked save for a prosthetic device which hides his genitals, plays the part of Harry Houdini (an important touchstone in a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Barney's art), who is punched in the solar plexus by dint of another actor playing the part of retired football legend Jim Otto. Another monitor showed an 87-minute tape entitled Blind Perineum (the perineum is the tissue between the anus and the genitals). Here, Barney, naked again, inches his way across the gallery ceiling and down a wall, suspended through carabiners and titanium ice-screws that he inserts into the ceiling and wall individual after the other, until he reaches a walk-in refrigerator within which is the Vaseline-covered exercise bench. A third tape, Radial Drill, features Barney, this time wearing high heels, an elegant black evening gown and drawn out gloves, pushing a white Teflon football blocking-sled; later Barney appears naked with a tapioca dumbbell emerging from between his leg Vito Acconci's brief, isolated, gender-bending video performances repercussion of sounded in Barney's work; so did the static, theatrical, ritualistic video performances of Joan Jonas. I also reflection of Robert Mapplethorpe's graphically beautiful, explicitly sexual work and then remembered Laurie Anderson's early performance in which she wore ice-skates and played a violin while standing upon blocks of ice. But Barney's work appeared to reach a whole of recent origin visual and imaginative level.