Matthew Barney: ‘I’m not interested in participating in consensus culture’ | Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney is likely to be The Most Fascinating Man within the World. He performed on the soccer and wrestling groups in highschool, nursed ambitions to be a plastic surgeon, modelled for J Crew, grew to become a number one avant-garde artist, spent greater than a decade in a relationship with the Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk and arrange an enormous clock exterior his studio to depend down the primary Donald Trump US presidency.Nobody explores the violence in America’s supply code fairly like Barney, who for the reason that Nineties has mounted a collection of epic initiatives exploring the topic by way of references to classical mythology, trendy historical past, sport, human anatomy and standard tradition.On 30 July he’s headlining the Aspen Artwork Museum’s inaugural Air 2025 competition in Colorado with TACTICAL parallax, a reside efficiency in a using area repurposed from the previous drill corridor of the tenth Mountain Division infantry.Barney describes it as his western. The web site of the competition warns patrons: “The Efficiency will contain using animals and loud sounds and will contain, however is just not restricted to vibrant lights, sudden visuals and occurrences. The Efficiency might embody the taking pictures of blanks from a firearm.”Barney is greatest identified for The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), a collection of 5 feature-length movies and associated sculptures and drawings that mix references to the human reproductive cycle with mythology and surrealism.Extra not too long ago, in 2018, he delivered Redoubt, a two-hour, dialogue-free movie set in Idaho’s rugged Sawtooth Mountains that loosely adapts the parable of Diana, goddess of the hunt, and her ritualistic pursuit of a wolf.His 2023 work Secondary is a five-channel video set up that explores the spectacle of violence in American soccer, centring on a traumatic 1978 NFL preseason sport incident wherein the Oakland Raiders defensive again Jack Tatum’s hit left the New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley paralysed for all times. The collision was replayed continuously on TV, impressing itself on the then 11-year-old Barney.“Redoubt is extra to do with the so-called wilderness in America and the violence that lives within the panorama and the way that performs out in wildlife and panorama administration, particularly within the mountain states,” Barney, 58, says in a telephone interview from central Idaho. “Secondary is extra about structural violence inside American soccer and the pageantry of violence in American contact sports activities.”Rehearsal at McCabe Ranch for TACTICAL parallax by Matthew Barney. {Photograph}: Photograph: Maria Baranova-Suzuki. Courtesy the artist and the Aspen Artwork MuseumBoth movies have been rooted in Barney’s biography. He spent his adolescence in Idaho, a conservative state of rugged landscapes within the north-western US, and regards it as an vital affect on his artwork. “The reintroduction of wolves in central America occurred all through my adolescence. It was a political drama that performed out in Idaho and Wyoming throughout these years.“It’s one thing that I carried with me for numerous years and needed to method in an paintings in a extra private means. They’re each very private narratives they usually’re histories which have performed out publicly with various media protection.”No much less vital was Barney’s time as a younger participant of American soccer, absorbing the ethos of the nation’s hottest sport, a symphony of helmets-and-pads and high-impact collisions that can lead to head trauma and spinal accidents.“A whole lot of the artwork that I’ve made has been influenced by my experiences as an athlete and significantly within the blood sports activities,” he displays. “My alternative of the historical past of Jack Tatum and Darryl Stingley in Secondary was each about taking a look at a really particular reminiscence that I had as a baby, taking part in and seeing that occasion happen, and to expertise the aftermath of that within the American media. However there’s additionally a means wherein I needed to take a look at my very own legacy by way of a special lens.”In TACTICAL parallax Barney combines Redoubt and Secondary in new and tantalising methods, mixing characters, tales, motion and music from the 2 movies or operating them facet by facet. Gamers, referees, hunters and hunted are thrown collectively to attract a line between American soccer and western expansionism.He explains: “TACTICAL parallax, by combining these two narratives, may be very a lot about making an attempt to find methods wherein that violence is baked into the nationwide identification, which I believe has to do with the preliminary settling of the US.“In that sense TACTICAL parallax is a western and, although it’s combining these vocabularies of American soccer and up to date looking, it’s also in regards to the histories of westward growth and the settling of America and the violence that lives within the panorama from that.”He provides: “Soccer is a reification of warfare. It structurally is sort of a medieval warfare and it’s fetishised in that means within the tradition. The American mythologies of warfare embody that preliminary colonising of the west.”The piece might be carried out in a historic drill corridor that was initially a part of Camp Hale, a second world warfare navy coaching facility at 9,000ft elevation the place troopers skilled in deep snow. The drill corridor was later disassembled and moved to its present location as a barn on a working cattle ranch.Rehearsal at McCabe Ranch for TACTICAL parallax by Matthew Barney. {Photograph}: Photograph: Maria Baranova-Suzuki. Courtesy the artist and the Aspen Artwork Museum“It was a place to begin for the event of TACTICAL parallax: the historical past of the construction inside the alpine panorama and the best way that it’s each an athletic facility and a navy facility began the event of the work of mixing the vocabularies from Secondary and Redoubt.“One of many issues that’s distinctive about this venture is its specificity to its surroundings, the best way that it’s located inside this historic construction and the Rocky Mountain panorama. It has the chance to have a extra visceral relationship to its content material than the movies have had. Past the eccentric mixture of visible vocabulary, the location specificity is sort of particular.”Barney’s father labored in catering at Boise State College and his mom, an summary painter, launched him to up to date artwork throughout visits to New York after their divorce when he was 12. He attended Yale College on a soccer scholarship, initially finding out pre-med earlier than switching to artwork and graduating in 1989.He displays: “While you develop up round artwork, it normalises it. Notably in America, artwork isn’t a part of regular tradition the best way that it may be in different elements of the world the place it’s been a part of the cultural dialogue for a for much longer time. I positively really feel like I benefited from having it normalised in my life at an early age.”As a multidisciplinary artist, Barney blurs the strains between sculpture, set up, movie, efficiency and drawing. The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones described the Cremaster Cycle as “some of the imaginative and good achievements within the historical past of avant-garde cinema”. Others discover his work more durable to digest.“There’s positively been quite a lot of division within the reception and that all the time appears proper to me. There are deliberate provocations within the work and the work isn’t being made as a type of leisure. I’m not keen on taking part in consensus tradition. The best way I perceive artwork to perform and the perform that it carries out in tradition is about upsetting one thing that’s more durable to know.”Would he describe his work as political? “All artwork has a politic and generally it’s extra legible and generally it’s much less legible. I’ve made work that has a extra legible politic after which I’ve made work that that’s way more about an inner set of dynamics. I’m keen on each of these approaches.“It in all probability means it has a smaller ‘p’ for me; it’s extra intrinsic within the work and fewer express. However that mentioned, these final two initiatives, Readout and Secondary, do hook up with a extra legible politic and they’re additionally very a lot about my very own private expertise with these set of histories and occasions.”Matthew Barney in 2006. {Photograph}: The Weinstein Firm/Sportsphoto/AllstarOne of Barney’s extra legible acts was to put an enormous digital clock above New York’s East River that counted down the times and hours till the tip of Trump’s first time period within the White Home. The clock was then reprogrammed to develop into a part of Secondary as a stadium clock ticking off the minutes of the quarter and remaining seconds of the sport.“That was my studio and that’s the place Secondary was filmed and exhibited for the primary time. It was proper on the East River, straight reverse the United Nations. In Trump’s first time period – nevertheless I felt myself – it felt like a civic service that wanted to be carried out, given the placement of the studio and the best way that town felt.”Is Barney now counting down the times and hours till the tip of Trump’s second time period? “Mentally, sure,” he replies, leaving it at that.Trump 2.0 is completely different in some ways from the primary model. Certainly one of them is a late life blossoming of curiosity in arts and tradition. He fired the bosses of the John F Kennedy Middle for the Performing Arts, putting in himself as chairman and a loyalist as president, then took in a efficiency of the musical Les Miserables. He ordered the Smithsonian Establishment to purge “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its museums and compelled out the director of the Nationwide Portrait Gallery.Robert De Niro, Pedro Pascal and Bruce Springsteen have been outspoken of their opposition to Trump, although Hollywood awards ceremonies have been notably low on political content material this yr. Barney believes that artists ought to take a stand. “Which means one thing completely different to each artist however, sure, for no matter which means to them, sure,” he says. “We should always all be doing that. I actually don’t have any solutions for a way that is going to play out within the subsequent couple of years. It’s a scary time.”