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

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Jerry Saltz

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

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

I came of artistic age in the early 1970s, when video equipment became more portable and less expensive, and artists began to deploy this new medium in the "space of art." I sat in a lot of grungy little rooms and watched a lot of really long black-and-white videos of people pointing their cameras at their buildings, their lofts, their bodies, their dogs, plus sky, fields of grain, water, grainy wood, you name it. Most of it was pretty boring but video was as much a cause, then, as it was a medium. Later, when painting picked up in the 1980s, video faded away. Now, it is back with a vengeance, functioning as a primary component in the work of a number of younger artists.

The first time I saw one of Matthew Barney's pieces was in September 1990 in a large group show at the now defunct Althea Viafora Gallery. At first, Field Dressing (orifill), 1989, as it was called, seemed familiar: a lone guy doing odd stuff in a studio. It was slow and hermetic, but it was also completely original, even thrilling. The multipart work consisted of two video monitors mounted to the wall, along with a few related sculptural objects. It was what I saw on the monitors that caught me completely off guard. They showed the artist, naked except for a full body harness, in private (but for the camera), climbing up and down a pole and some ropes and intermittently applying dollops of cooled Vaseline into all the orifices of his body (hence the invented term "orifill" in the title). I thought 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 presented tapes of himself walking around his studio in a stylized, even ludicrous manner, tracing its perimeter in stiff-legged and contorted postures; and because of the extraordinary physical predicament presented in Barney's piece, I recalled Nauman's later, more dogged, relentless works like Clown Torture or Learned Helplessness in Rats.

Barney's first solo show in New York, at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in October 1991, was a fusion of sculpture and psycho-sexual performance art on video. The objects, made of strange materials like internally lubricated plastic, cast sucrose, thermal gel packs and petroleum jelly, tended towards the visceral by way of medicine or sports. In fact Barney was once a pre-med student and an athlete, which may help to explain why the sometimes arcane paraphernalia of hospitals and of sports play a crucial part in his imagery. Among the various! items at Gladstone were a yellow wrestling mat, a dumbbell made of cast tapioca, mouth guards, an N.F.L. jersey, a Vaseline-covered declining weight bench, sternal retractors and a speculum. Four video monitors were mounted 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 much of Barney's art), who is punched in the solar plexus by another actor playing the role 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 carabiners and titanium ice-screws that he inserts into the ceiling and wall one 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 long gloves, pushing a white Teflon football blocking-sled; later Barney appears naked with a tapioca dumbbell emerging from between his legs. Vito Acconci's brief, isolated, gender-bending video performances echoed in Barney's work; so did the static, theatrical, ritualistic video performances of Joan Jonas. I also thought 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 on blocks of ice. But Barney's work seemed to reach a whole new visual and imaginative level.