‘Stress and failure’: Matthew Barney on his film about the sports accident that traumatised America

here aren’t many people in the world who could produce a literal river of excrement and be hailed as a genius. But Matthew Barney, the 57-year-old US artist whose maximalist work often features sex, violence, testicles and shit, is one of them. The New York Times, backhas described The Cremaster Cycle, Barney’s most famous work, as one of the most “brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema”.

After the studio tour, my rapport with Barney gradually develops its own stress fractures. The softly-spoken artist is in his element discussing craftmanship. But when we sit upstairs – he chooses a seat quite a distance from me – and I nudge the conversation towards the broader cultural themes in his work, he becomes uncomfortable. Barney doesn’t seem to like being under a spotlight, despite choosing to perform in his films, often in the nude, and despite an early career as a model.

Tatum and Stingley were young men in 1978. In Secondary, Barney, who plays the role of Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, casts men in their 50s and 60s. The fragility of the ceramic sculptures accompanying the video installation, he notes, intertwine with the way age and memory function in the film. “It’s an event I have a very particular memory of,” Barney explains. “And I think there’s a collective memory of that event, at least within a certain group of people.

That violence is inherently linked to masculinity: a constant theme in Barney’s work. The sports field, the athleticism, the elaborate rituals of football: Secondary seems to boil traditional notions of American masculinity down to their sweaty essence. And yet the older bodies seem to suggest that perhaps that model of masculinity has reached its expiry date.Barney doesn’t seem convinced. “Well, masculinity has certainly been a fertile subject for me,” he says.

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

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