This was an academic exercise, focused on principles of layout, proficiency with graphic software, and art research/survey. Images and texts were copied and altered, submitted for a grade.
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REFERENCES:
Drawing Restraint
www.drawingrestraint.net/main.htm
Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint Vol.1 (ohiolink - paperback)
www.drawingrestraint.net/main.htm > DR VOL I ... colophon
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The Cremaster Cycle (online)
www.cremaster.net
Cremaster 3 (ohiolink - hardcover)
www.cremaster.net/books.htm > Cremaster 3 ... colophon
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Travels in Hypertrophia (interview)
ArtForum, May, 1995 by Thyrza Nicholas Goodeve
also: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n9_v33/ai_16967995/pg_2/
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
SFMOMA interactive - online, multimedia
http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/230
http://www.sfmoma.org/press/pressroom.asp?arch=y&id=257&do=events
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Exhibit Press Release, 2005 (PDF)
MATTHEW BARNEY: DRAWING RESTRAINT
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (PDF)
http://www.kanazawa21.jp/en/12press/pdf/barney_press_e.pdf
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"Matthew Barney and a Klein Bottle of Vaseline" Brad Borevitz, essay
http://onetwothree.net/files/writing/borevitz_mbarney.pdf
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Exhibit Press Release, 2003 (PDF)
Wexner Center Presents Image Stream
Matthew Barney's DR7
www.wexarts.org/info/press/db/139_nr-Image%20Stream_elec.pdf
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Drawing Restraint 7 (softcover)
Edited by Cristina Bechtler, texts by Klaus Kertess
http://www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00010792
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Guggenheim Collection Online | Matthew Barney
personal biography
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/bio/?artist_name=Matthew%20Barney&page=1&f=Name&cr=3
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"A Dialogue on Blood & Iron - Matthew Barney and Arthur C. Danto on Joseph Bueys"
in contemporary painters
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R. Storr, ON THE EDGE: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE WERNER AND ELAINE DANNHEISER COLLECTION, NEW YORK,1997/1998, p. 24l
http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/939372
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TEXT:
MATTHEW BARNEY
“the most important American artist of his generation” - The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman
1967 - Birth, San Francisco, CA
1989 - Senior Thesis “Field Dressing” @ Yale
1991 - First Solo Gallery Show @ SFMOMA
1993 - “Drawing Restraint 7”
1993 - Europa 2000 prize @ ‘93 Aperto
1994 - Release of “Cremaster 4”
1996 - First Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize for excellence
2002 - Release of “Cremaster 3” @ Guggenheim
Mathew Barney considers himself primarily a sculptor, however his innovative use of materials and experimental attitude regarding expression enables him to create in an array of media. His art takes the form of sculpture, narrative film, drawing and photography and is experienced through multimedia installation and performance. His work involves a richly metaphored vision of creative potential, self-perpetuation, physiology and sexual differentiation.
Mathew Barney was born in San Francisco, 1969. In 1975, his family relocated to Idaho and when his parents separated six years later, Barney continued to live in Boise with his father. He did however visit his mother in New York frequently where they would attend contemporary art museums and galleries. It was here that Barney was exposed to culture and the arts. At home in Idaho, Barney would quarterback on his championship-winning high school football team. Equipped with an outstanding academic record and adequate funds via modeling, Barney enrolled in pre-med at Yale.
Although Barney gained substantial knowledge of physiology and human anatomy during his first semesters, he soon relocated to the graduate art department as an undergrad. During his years of artistic experimentation at school, he began to develop an allegoric aesthetic system and unique media processes through which he paralleled the nature of the creative process with that of athletic training. The idea that the development of muscles requires restraint and tissue destruction carried psychological implications when applied to the nature of creative expression. These themes and visual motifs inform his subsequent work and have provided a basis on which he still expands in current work.
After graduating in 1989, Mathew Barney moved to New York and entered the art world with almost immediate recognition and controversy. In 1991, Barbara Gladstone of Gladstone Galleries, discovered Barney and was responsible for his first and second solo shows. Soon after, he was offered exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Documenta IX, the Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale where he won the prestigious Europa 2000 prize. In 1994, at age twenty-six, he released the first episode of his best-known work the Cremaster Cycle and was awarded the Guggenheim Museum’s first Hugo Boss Award for excellence in contemporary art. Before the age of thirty, Mathew Barney has received all of this and praise labeling him as “the most important artist of his generation” by The New York Times. He is now married to alternative pop star Björk and is currently orchestrating a socio-political performance to be included in a large Brazilian parade.
DRAWING RESTRAINT 7
“Form cannot materialize or mutate unless it strugles against resistance in the process."
- Matthew Barney
In 1987, while studying art at Yale, Mathew Barney looked back to his athletic experience to develop an understanding of the creative process. His time spent training his body, hypertrophying muscular tissue in effort to produce a more efficient and perfect form led him to the assertion that “form cannot materialize or mutate unless it struggles against resistance in the process.” It provided a unique model for artistic creation.
In his studio in 1987, he began Drawing Restraint by constructing drawing situations in which his mobility and coordination were physically impeded by attached restraints and external obstacles. The visual traces of the action and restraint effects are the only product of the otherwise ephemeral action. They are intended to be reflected on collectively in exhibitions alongside the film documentation. He started in 1987 and a new piece is enacted/created by performance with every exhibition.
Drawing Restraint 7 (DR7), 1993, is pivotal within the series in that it takes the essential idea of the previous six, all self-performed, and expands dramatically. It introduces a script, characters, and is narrative intended for an audience. It also begins to communicate the more complex concepts underscoring Barney’s artistic vision.
As a site-specific installation, DR7 is comprised of drawings, photography, film props, fluorescent light fixtures, internally lubricated plastic, enamel on steel and a three-channel video display; all born of the short art film which loops on these monitors in the center.
In the film, a white stretch limousine perpetually circulates in and out of Manhattan via bridges and tunnels. The chauffeur is a young, hairless satyr who chases his tale. In the back are two physically-developed yet sexually ambiguous satyrs; one part-ram, the other part goat. They wrestle raucously against one another in a struggle to create form by drawing a likeness of their horns in the condensation of the moon roof. In the end, the goat satyr successfully renders a ram horn on the ceiling and both characters are punished by flaying for an act of hubris. With DR7, restraint has taken the form of two opposing characters, and embodies a psychological state, or source of conflict, rather than a literal bodily impediment.
CREATIVE POTENTIAL
“the most important American artist of his generation” - The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman
The Path, or Field Emblem is a diagram that visually represents Barney’s theorized cycle of energy present in artistic creation. The oval is the open portal and the rectangle is the element of restraint. Often the shape is used by itself, acting as an emblem identifying the artist. It also manifests within his more interactive pieces, notifying that a significant element of the piece is associated with the creative process; it could be a film character’s path of movement or the mold for a large vat of petroleum jelly being poured on a Japanese whaling ship.
Underneath the allegory, Mathew Barney explores the state of potential before the act of creation. He traces the path of this creative energy from a raw undifferentiated state, through focus and ultimately to the output of a product. Often he closes the system, linking output back to input, in an attempt to create a self-perpetuating cycle. As a sculptor, his productions are hypothetical situations intended to generate sculpture in the process.
A well-read and well-rounded individual, Barney is hard to pin down in terms of consistent style or subject matter. However, there are definitive Barney attributes. His experience with football, physical training and pre-med studies would explain the recurrence of anatomical allusions and biological processes as metaphor. The purported success he has achieved in association with athletics, modeling, and the arts has itself become a jumping point from which Barney investigates society’s collective subconscious attitude toward sports, idolization, exhibition, sexuality and the masculine identity. These themes, in addition to a substantial knowledge of psychology both ancient and contemporary, inform the Cremaster Cycle. This is Barney’s largest and most well-known work, comprised of 5 films totaling 7 hours, sculpture, photography, drawings and eight years in the making in five different countries.
The entities populating and interacting within his art are often so disparate you can’t imagine any conceivable relation or even context in which they could meaningfully exist together. But his clever affinity for metaphor and jack-of-all-trades curiosity has him up to speed on a wealth of subjects with which he can provide a vehicle for his narrative.
Barney now travels extensively, and often appropriates the geography, traditions and mythology of the particular culture as a vehicle for his artist vision and narrative. In DR7, Barney looked to Greek mythology. His interest in the satyr derives partly from the fact that ‘Pan’ is the root of ‘panic’. Because Pan leads to Bacchus, he gives the moment of unease before one let themselves go, the rapid breakdown of inhibition. Satyriasis, or uncontrollable lust is the condition of a body given over entirely to a drive. Restraint no longer takes the form of a physical device; it is now force against force, acting and reacting in perpetual motion; satyr contra satyr in the limo ride that never ends. Ultimately, for the vain attempt to recreate a likeness of themselves, both are punished by the gods.
Art critics often liken his gesamtkunstwerk approach to that of the German artist Joseph Beuys, or the late 19th Century opera composer Richard Wagner who insisted that successful expression depended on every theatrical sense being evoked. In addition, Barney’s affinity for the body and performance is similar to artists of the 60’s and 70’s.