MATHEW BARNEY

I love Matthew Barney's work, the cremaster series (1994 - 2002)  in particular. The colour pallet, the high level of production. The way his concerntration of sculpture is accentuated by use of video.

Barney uses video to perfect his sculpture by 'evaluating positioning, lighting, size and shape, using video as a means to his end product of sculpture'
What strikes me most about  matthew Barney and what I love most about him, is the freedom he has to walk between the worlds of the absolute bazaar and the sane. the scale in which he works on and with such conviction.
I watched his cremaster series on DVD some months ago and was struck by his world of aestheic.
I  later read an artical in which Nancy Spector the curator of the Guggenheim curator described  Cremaster cycle as "a self- enclosed aesthetic system."

Cremaster cyle is filled with 'anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation'.

 "The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown"  To Matthew Barney, these moments represent a condition of 'pure potentiality'.  The cycle evolved over eight years. Barneyexplored the creation of form through narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology and geology.


The cremaster films almost always  feature Barney in 'myriad role's, including characters such as a satyr, a magician, a ram, Harry Houdini, and  the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore. The title of the films refers to the muscle that raises and lowers the male reproductive system according to temperature, external stimulation, or fear. The filmsare a  mixture of history, autobiography, and mythology, an "intensely private universe in which symbols and images are densely layered and interconnected".