ART CITIES:London Matthew Barney-Crown Zinc
The narrative language of Matthew Barney is changeable. Sculptor, painter, photographer, filmmaker, model, but famous in international artistic circle as a leading conceptual artist who works exceeds any contractual limits and attempts to give the art a more active social role. In Greece, we had the opportunity to see his collaboration for first time, with Elizabeth Peyton at slaughterhouses of Hydra in 2010, in the exhibition “Blood of Two”.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sadie Coles Gallery Archive
In this solo exhibition, Matthew Barney presents a series of new sculptures. They have their origins in his 2014 film River of Fundament, a six-hour tour de force which premiered at the English National Opera 29/6/14 to wide acclaim. Each work condenses the film’s dominant themes – death, rebirth, and the twilight era of modern America – into totemic sculptural form, while invoking the complex personal iconography of Barney. River of Fundament transports the myth-laden narrative of Norman Mailer’s novel “Ancient Evenings” (1983) – itself based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead – into a contemporary American setting. The transmigration of the human soul (principally Mailer’s own) is symbolised by three iconic American cars: a 1967 Chrysler Imperial, a 1979 Pontiac Firebird, and a 2001Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. Each vehicle formed the centrepiece of an epic outdoor performance – staged between 2008-013 in Los Angeles, Detroit and New York respectively, in which it underwent deconstruction and transformation echoing the distribution of Osiris’s body parts in Egyptian mythology. Barney’s sculptures translate motifs from River of Fundament into autonomous works of art, bearing witness to these set-piece performances while recasting their themes of decay, regeneration and alchemical metamorphosis. Crown Victoria is a zinc cast of the third vehicle’s undercarriage, the prototype. Sprawling and skeletal, it emanates the melancholic grandeur of an abandoned ruin or sarcophagus. Loops of corrugated tubing, arrayed like ribs along the chassis, evoke mummified remains; a large coiling pump speaks simultaneously of biological systems and insensate machinery. In Crown Zinc, a smaller fragment of the same vehicle has been cast in zinc and plated with gold. It is modelled on the grill from the Crown Victoria – an object that travels and transfigures over the course of River of Fundament. After being removed from the police car, the Egyptian deities Set and Horus ritualistically compete for the crown. Combining ancient methods of casting and gilding with emblematic materials – zinc, gold, crystals, silver, sulphur – Barney’s latest works reach into the murky recesses of ancient history and the human psyche.
Info: Sadie Coles Gallery, 62 Kingly Street, London, Duration: 10/10-13/12/14, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com
