12/16/2023 0 Comments Matthew barney bjork isadora![]() When I ask him why he penetrates, transforms and pushes his body to the limits, he lapses into one of his long silences, then finally says: 'I find meaning for myself in surrender. For someone whose art often tends towards the baroquely outrageous (at the Manchester arts festival his performance piece featured a live bull and two women who urinated onto the stage from trapezes), Barney comes across in person as a shy, even vulnerable, individual. I am unsure whether this inarticulacy is a device to deter critical intrusion, but the silences that punctuate our occasionally illuminating conversation echo like vast oceans of emptiness on my tape recorder while he stares off into the middle distance, lost in thought. It is not that he is obstructive or uncooperative, more that he seems all at sea when he has to turn his thoughts into words. ![]() You could interview Barney until the cows come home and never really get to the bottom (sorry) of this particular performance, a video of which subsequently became part of the exhibition. Nearby stood a weightlifting bench cast in hardened Vaseline and a set of weights made from congealed tapioca. Then, having inserted two Vaselined ice screws into his bum, he lowered himself back down again, ending up on the shoulders of an assistant dressed in an American football strip. Having locked himself into the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, he took off his clothes and scaled the walls and ceiling using ropes, a harness and some large titanium ice climbing screws which he embedded in the brickwork. ![]() The night before his first New York exhibition in 1991, Matthew Barney performed what he calls an 'action'. ![]()
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