Barry X Ball at Mario Diacono at Ars Libri

(Matthew Barney), 2000-03, an installation shown in isolation, is the latest example of Barry X Bali's evolving series of sculptural portrait heads, which so far are drawn primarily from the art world. Here he literally skewers Matthew Barney's stone likeness on a golden spike.

For each of his personally selected (noncommissioned) subjects, Ball starts with a plaster life cast. In an artist's statement, he says that Barney "generously agreed to pose for me in early 2000.... Since that time, I have had no contact with Matthew." In a months-long process, Ball manipulated the resulting plaster mold into his most elaborate portrait head to date an elongated image strange enough to have come from Bareey's own chimerical cast of characters, but rendered in materials as exquisitely polished and finished as a fine decorative object.

Through subtractions from and additions to the original likeness, followed by prolonged tinkering via three-dimensional digital laser scanning and painstakingly slow computer-controlled milling and carving machines, the head took form in a veined and pitted translucent piece of white Mexican onyx. In this figurative object, the stone's natural oxblood-colored markings are transformed into wounds and slashes that call to mind Barney's own invasive performance-based body transformations. Ball added a swag of draping, flayed skin for Barney's neck and modeled a ballistic-like eruption at the top of the head for the spike. The spike, 69 inches long, was similarly computer-designed and -machined, in stainless steel plated with 24-karat gold.

Above this beautifully crafted but grotesquely impaled figure was more decorative excess. The sculpture was suspended, via thin stainless-steel cables fastened with custom-fabricated turnbuckles, from a radiating circle of 25 cast-polyurethane decorative ceiling medallions--the kind that restorers of elegant 19th-century homes use to replace missing plaster embellishments. The central disk, the largest, features cherubs that look down upon Barney's head. Graduated smaller disks form eight spokes that surround the cherubs, creating a little plastic cloud of manufactured heaven.

It's hard to say whether Ball is "sending up" Barney to some kind of just reward or paying elaborate homage to him. Either way, Bali's fetishistic portrait is more theatrical and compelling than the stage-prop-like character of much of Barney's own sculpture. [The installation is on view at P.S. 1 in New York through May.]

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