TNot many people in this world can literally create rivers of shit and then be hailed as a genius, but Matthew Barney is one such man: the 57-year-old American artist whose radical works often feature sex, violence, testicles and feces. In 1999, The New York Times called the sculptor, filmmaker and performer “the most important artist of his generation.” Jonathan Jones of The Guardian called Barney's best-known work, the Cremaster Cycle, one of the “splendid achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema.” More recently, Kanye West called Barney “Jesus.”
When I arrived at Bernie's New York studio on an overcast spring day, the first thing I saw wasn't a god's son, but a snake. Or rather, a snake's skin. The snake itself was hiding in a fish tank. Bernie says the snake was named Hardeen, after Harry Houdini's brother. It's not a pet. The snake appeared in Bernie's 2014 film River of Fundament, a six-hour opera loosely based on Norman Mailer's rewriting of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in which Mailer's ghost travels in various incarnations across a river of sewage. “Hardeen's a retired actor,” Bernie jokes.
Clad in a black hoodie and baseball cap, Bernie is not a solitary artist working in silence. His work is always a production, with large casts including big names like Maggie Gyllenhaal, Salman Rushdie and Paul Giamatti. His latest film, Secondary, has over 100 actors in the credits, a mesmerizing five-channel video installation that recreates a famous US football accident. Today, nearly two dozen people are busy working in his Long Island City studio, the place buzzing with the finishing touches being put into a sculpture to accompany Secondary. We pass sandbags, Olympic weights and what appear to be barbells – symbols of strength, all made from brittle terracotta.
“Working with ceramics is new to me,” Bernie explains, lingering over a weightlifting rack dotted with welds, “but working with fragile materials is not new. For example, I've made large pieces out of Vaseline, but they couldn't stand up on their own. [a quality] I've been interested in it for a long time, and I think ceramics has a way of connecting with a very ancient tradition of expressing the stresses and failures that are specific to the material.”
After the studio tour, my relationship with Bernie gradually became strained and cracked. The quiet artist loved to talk about his craft. But as we sat upstairs (he chose a seat quite a distance from me) he grew uncomfortable when I gently broached the conversation about the broader cultural themes of his work. Bernie doesn't seem to like being in the spotlight, even though he chose to act in films, often appearing nude, and began his career as a model. After completing his pre-med course at Yale (he originally wanted to be a plastic surgeon), he briefly supported his artistic career by posing in preppy shirts and tennis clothes and doing work for catalogues such as J. Crew.
“I learned a lot about image-making,” Barney recalls. “But also how malleable your identity can be within that image. In a way, it was a training ground for the video work that I did. I also don't think I could have done it much longer. It drained something from me, and I started to feel like I represented values that I didn't necessarily believe in.” What exactly did he not believe in? Tennis? Chinos? J.Crew American masculinity? Barney shrugs. “Whatever it was.”
On the surface, Bernie seems to fit the mold: Born in the Midwest, he was a high school quarterback, went on to an Ivy League school and quickly found success in the New York art world. But his work often deals with eccentrics and filth. Does he see himself as an insider or an outsider?
“What's unusual about my work is that it's very global in the way it's made,” Bernie replies in his characteristically evasive manner. “The way it brings together communities who often come from places that are not really connected to the cultural world. I'm thinking about making work in environments like the Salt Flats in Utah or industrial areas in Detroit. I also get professionals involved who don't have any art background at all. I'm interested in the risk of taking work to places that aren't necessarily safe.”
Filmed a few blocks away at Barney's former studio, “Secondary” was shot in the decidedly dangerous space of a fictional football stadium. The 60-minute film recreates the exact moment in 1978 when Oakland Raiders' Jack Tatum crashed into New England Patriots' Darryl Stingley, leaving Stingley paralyzed. The violent collision was broadcast countless times on television, and left an indelible impression on 11-year-old Barney, who had just started playing football. Far from giving up on the sport, he was drawn to its violence.
Tatum and Stingley were young adults in 1978. Barney, who plays Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, cast men in their 50s and 60s in his secondary. He points out that the fragility of the ceramic sculptures that accompany the video installation intertwines the way age and memory work in the film. “This is an event that I have special memories of,” Barney explains. “And I think there's a collective memory of that event, at least among certain groups of people. Given that there's a mythical aspect to some of it, it was easy to translate that to performers with older bodies and to treat memory as an aspect of the work.”
Secondary mythology dates back to America's creation story. “I was thinking about how painting functioned in the frontier,” Barney explains. “The grand paintings of the American West were used as a tool to get people to move west. In caricatures of 'cowboys' and 'Indians,' the subjects get closer and closer, and at some point they're in the front, coming straight at you. And the paintings of the American West, Remington's head-on paintings of charging horses, activated an American mythology that carried over into the violence of games like football.”
Violence is intrinsically linked to masculinity, a theme that runs through Barney's work: the sports fields, the athleticism, the elaborate rituals of football. Secondary seems to boil down traditional notions of American masculinity to their sweaty essence, yet the aged bodies seem to suggest that perhaps that model of masculinity has passed its sell-by date.
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Bernie doesn't seem convinced. “Well, masculinity has certainly been a rich theme for me,” he says. “For example, in a work like River of Fundament, I address a particular cross-section of masculinity. The Norman Mailer character is a pretty pure version of that. By putting very strong archetypes in the work, I was able to create different contrasts for me. But I think in today's culture, it's still easy to find masculine archetypes. Yes, things have changed, and as the culture has become more complex, there are a lot more archetypes. So I feel like my tastes have grown in that sense.” So you wouldn't say there's a crisis of masculinity? Yes, he says, laughing. “There's a crisis of almost everything.”
Bernie doesn't like to talk about politics, but it's no secret that he's no fan of the former president. After Donald Trump's inauguration, Bernie collaborated on an art installation, installing the same countdown clock featured in the secondary over New York's East River, ticking away the minutes until the end of Trump's term. Is Bernie worried about what's going to happen in November?
“I'm certainly concerned,” he responded. “I grew up in Idaho, where there was already extreme political division. So in that sense, this is not a new situation. I think it can be traced back to some of the more isolated communities in the United States. So, I'm not surprised by this, but at the same time, I'm scared. I don't want to see it get any worse.”
Still, he seems to have accepted some degree of inevitability in decline. We're surrounded by storyboards for the secondary, named after American football's last line of defense, and Bernie gestures over my shoulder. “I mean, there's a reason there's an image of the Roman Colosseum on the panel behind you. I guess it remains to be seen what the decline of the American version looks like, but I think we're in the middle of it.”
While the American myth is unravelling, Bernie carefully guards his own arcane personal mythology. Has he ever wanted to make his art more accessible? His movies aren't easy to watch; you wait until they screen at a film festival, or maybe you know someone who'd shell out $100,000 for a limited edition DVD. Will he ever put his work on a streaming platform?
He resents it. “I feel like my work is a lot more accessible than a lot of other artists who work through video,” he says. As for streaming, he experimented with it during the pandemic, but that's where the experiment ended: “I don't find it particularly satisfying to imagine someone watching it on their laptop.”
As I left the studio, I stopped to look for the elusive Hardeen, but he was still hiding; all I could see was his discarded skin.
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Matthew Barney: Secondaries will be on view at Gladstone Gallery in New York until July 26th, at Sadie Coles in London from May 24th to July 27th, at Regen Projects in Los Angeles from June 1st to August 17th, at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris from June 7th to July 25th, and at the Fondation Cartier in Paris from June 8th to September 8th.
