In which the author.

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

Matthew Barney is single of the most interesting artists to come forth in the 1990s, and hands-down he is the mostly 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 disguiseed in a number of film festivals. They were broadcast onward Dutch television, and had limited move swiftlys at New York's Film Forum in July; they can also be seen from appointment, at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in recent York or Regen Projects in looks Angeles.) He plans a total of five "Cremaster" works (Cremaster 5 is now in progress) The series is epic and continuous, on the contrary each linked piece is also a work total 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 display this new medium in the "space of art." I sat in a accident of grungy little rooms and watched a destiny 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 grove you name it. Most of it was elegant without grandeur boring but video was as earnestly 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 composing in the work of a number of younger artists.

The first time I saw united of Matthew Barney's pieces was in September 1990 in a large dispose show at the now departed Althea Viafora Gallery. At first, Field Dressing (orifill), 1989 as it was called, looked familiar: a lone guy doing single stuff in a studio. It was dull and hermetic, but it was also completely original, calm thrilling. The multipart work consisted of sum of two units video monitors mounted to the wall, along with a not many related sculptural objects. It was what I saw onward the monitors that caught me completely not upon guard. They showed the artist, naked leave out for a full body harness, in private (but for the camera), climbing up and down a staff and some ropes and intermittently applying dollops of composeded Vaseline into all the orifices of his dead body (hence the invented term "orifill" in the title). I deliberation 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 currented tapes of himself walking around his studio in a stylized, calm 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 lout Torture or Learned Helplessness in Rats.

Barney's first solo indicate in New York, at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in October 1991 was a fusion of carve and psycho-sexual performance art forward video. The objects, made of strange materials like internally lubricated plastic, cast cane-sugar thermal gel packs and stone oil jelly, tended towards the visceral by way of way of medicine or sports. In fact Barney was formerly a pre-med student and an athlete, which may help to explain with what intent the sometimes arcane paraphernalia of hospitals and of sports play a crucial part in his imagery. Among the various! items at Gladstone were a fulvid wrestling mat, a dumbbell made of cast tapioca, aperture guards, an N.F.L. jersey, a Vaseline-covered declining weight bench, sternal retractors and a reflector Four video monitors were ascended 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 abundant of Barney's art), who is punched in the solar plexus according to another actor playing the character 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 by dint of carabiners and titanium ice-screws that he inserts into the ceiling and wall common 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 lengthy 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 slavish imitationed 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 forward blocks of ice. But Barney's work be seened to reach a whole recent visual and imaginative level.