Matthew Barney

To follow up on Ron Mueck and continue to have a discussion on artists that use imaginative culture and special affects influences in their work; an influence on my mind as early as I can remember, I find it fitting to write about the work of Matthew Barney. Although the use of many of the materials and processes used by Matthew Barney have not shown up in my work, I believe similar processes and ideals are there and will begin to surface as I continue the investigation of the meanings of my work.

Certainly, Barney is one of the few artists in America who can generate such deeply divided opinions about his work. At once gorgeous and gross, fascinating to some and impenetrable to many, his art incorporates such unconventional materials as petroleum jelly and almost always involves the transformation of one body into another, often of an uncertain species or gender. Commenting on this writer Flood says, “There was not only a fascination but an awareness that he was liberating materials no one had ever seen in art before.” “There were ten different layers of new.”

“I’m attracted to things that embrace mystery,” he says. I think that the obscure use of material is initially what draws me in to Barney’s work. It is always a challenge to use “non-traditional” materials in creating work. I have attempted pieces that used Vaseline, a direct influence from Barney, to portray a living membrane on the surface of organic forms. There is much to be learned from Barney’s perfection of material use and there is much to be studied concerning the way in which he works. The mentioning of the word “mystery” has often come up in my readings of Barney and other artists and I think it ties in to my thoughts mentioned in earlier posts concerning imagination and the need for it in my work.

Influenced by the task-oriented performance work of Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, and Bruce Nauman, and by the site-specific sculptural interventions of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, Barney took the exercise mats, barbells, and Vaseline of his athletic training into his studio and made them the focus of his art. Unlike most artists, Barney was able to obtain a cult following very early in his career; I have a lot of respect for his dedication and his motivation. Having investigated many of the artists mentioned above, I can see a relationship being set up historically in his work, though this is something I don’t necessarily dwell on in my own work, I think it is of great importance and like Barney I’m certain there will be influential artists such as himself that begin to show in my work.

Barney’s esthetic vision has always been rooted in the biology of reproductive function, as the delicate drawings using graphite, petroleum jelly, and iodine. In looking at these works it is noticed right away that Barney is letting the concepts drive the piece, and he uses the materials necessary to best portray the idea; something I am continually working on and learning within my own bodies of work.

Henry Jenkins writes about Matthew Barney in regard to the “horror esthetic,” though this is not an esthetic of my choice, I have great appreciation in regards to the films/directors that influence the work and appreciate that Barney not only borrows from Art History in his works, but also looks to pop/cult culture to fuel the works. The works that most of the public are familiar with and have been written a great deal about is the Cremaster Cycle. This body of work is overwhelming in-terms of material and content. In relation to the horror Genre and the Cremaster Cycle, Jenkins comments: In regards to Cremaster 3 - - Barney explained that the “dryness” of the classic zombie figure had always “repulsed” him, whereas “the creatures that attract me are wet, sensual, and more unseen” than the undead on view in most contemporary horror films. In the sequence described above, Barney focuses on the sensuality of the zombie figure, the wet earth that clings to her nakedness, the ways that decay re sculpts her body, the stiffened grace of her movements, and the saturated colors of her thinning hair and decaying flesh. In this, he would seem to be drawing inspiration from other horror filmmakers–Mario Bava and Dario Argento come most immediately to mind–who wanted us to celebrate the transformations that the human body undergoes after death as a thing of intense, otherworldly beauty; they wanted to blur eros and thanatos so that we could confront the natural human fascination with death not as morbidity but as desire.

The popular aesthetics’ demand for affective intensity and novelty requires that popular artists constantly renew their formal vocabulary. Representing the monstrous gives popular artists a chance to move beyond conventional modes of representation, to imagine alternative forms of sensuality and perception, and to invert or transform dominant ideological assumptions.

The most hardcore segments of the horror audience are, in effect, avant-garde in their tastes, with fanzine critics functioning as the low-culture counterpart of arts journals in identifying and interpreting what is distinctive about emerging figures within the genre. Documenting how fanzines helped to promote the “art horror” of Lynch, Craven, and Cronenberg, David Sanjek writes, “This devotion to uniqueness of vision has led the fanzines to value most works which bear the mark of an uninhibited visionary sensibility, one which pushes the boundaries of social, sexual, and aesthetic assumptions.”

This is where yet again I have found a source for the ideas of the human body or figure, in a contemporary light. Most specifically the idea of the “posthuman” and the identity that artists are portraying humans to have in regards to responses to the abundant usage of new technologies and current research in biology. Cronenberg has summed up these new attitudes toward the body: “We are physically different from our forefathers, partly because of what we take into our bodies and partly because of things like glasses and surgery. But there is a further step that could happen, which would be that you could grow another arm, that you could actually physically change the way you look–mutate. Human beings could swap sexual organs, or do without sexual organs as sexual organs per se, for pro creation…Artists, both high and low, have been tempted to explore the further implications of these changes, to imagine radically different ways of living within our bodies.

Critics have labeled the popular representations of these “posthuman” identities as “body horror,” pointing to a new degree of explicitness in the depiction of the body and its processes, a new anxiety about bodily invasion or transformation, a new fascination with images of mutation and plague, and a new openness about the intersection of horror and sexuality, pleasure and pain. These themes have both fueled and exploited significant improvements in special effects and make-up technologies that enable filmmakers to morph and mutate the human body beyond recognition.

Barney, Matthew, Nancy Spector, and Neville Wakefield. Matthew Barney: the Cremaster Cycle. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2002. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. "Monstrous Beauty and Mutant Aesthetics." The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture. New York: New York UP, 2007. Print.

Yablonsky, Linda. "A Satyr Wrapped In an Enigma." ARTnews June 2006: 131-33. Web.

Ron Mueck

My initial interest in Ron Mueck, as I’m sure is most individuals, is the awe-inspiring craft and attention to detail. I have a tremendous amount of respect for artists that perfect their craft and materials and Mueck reins supreme in this category. However it is not only aesthetic reasons that I appreciate his work. His work is a great lesson for me in Scale and how you can evoke the viewer with both a large and small-scale work. Experimenting with the scale of the human figure does not allow to much rein for imaginative feats, but for the artists who make miniature cities and dioramas, there is greater scope for visionary or disturbing narrative content, plus varying amounts of social comment within Ron Mueck’s work.

In studying the figure, it is not this level of hyperrealism that I am interested in per-say, but I am interest in the concepts behind his work and his journey through informal training that has gained him much success into the contemporary art world.

With no formal art training, he perfected his skills in the commercial world of special effects, model making, and animatronics. In 1996, he presciently created for his mother-in-law, well-known British painter Paula Rego, a figure of Pinocchio, the quintessential embodiment of truth and lies. Saatchi saw this sculpture, and smitten, began acquiring Mueck’s work.

Sarah Tanguy, a writer for Sculpture Magazine says that: a certain freshness and sincerity of vision distinguish him from the blasé irony of many of his contemporaries who also explore strategies of realism. I feel that this “sincerity of vision,” is something that is tremendously lacking in my work and it is through looking at the works of artists such as Ron Mueck and other contemporaries that I am hoping to expose myself to strategies for obtaining a better understanding of the ideals that I am working with and be able to hone them down into a solid ideal that could capture a viewer if only for a moment in order to gain some contemplation about the work. In relation to this Jan Garden Castro makes a good point concerning the viewers of Mueck’s works, It is not that we identify with the figures; rather, we wonder who they are and how they are going to resolve whatever dilemmas they seem to face. We empathize. Since scale and size vary throughout Mueck’s work, viewers have odd subconscious relations to the spatial displacements between the sculptures.

Though the creature effects and model making field that Mueck was a part of he was able to hone skills that he has now been able to transfer into a contemporary light via the personal, and social concepts involved. I find it inspiring to know that growing up watching films that he as worked on that evoked my imagination, has now transcended the film and become an art piece that is taken seriously by the public eye. I do feel that imagination is extremely important and I think that I am constantly borrowing from my imagination when I create work. I think Jan Garden Castro sums up Ron Mueck’s work best:

“Through mastery of his materials in a seamless, seemingly effortless way, he awakens our willingness to believe in images that our imagination keeps alive.”

-Jan Garden Castro

Castro, Jan G. "Reviews." Sculpture July-Aug. 2007: 64. Web.

Collins, Judith. "Size & Scale." Sculpture Today. London: Phaidon, 2007. 394. Print.

Tanguy, Sarah. "The Progress of BIG MAN A Conversation with Ron Mueck." Sculpture July-Aug. 2003: 29-33. Web.

Steinunn Thorarinsdottir

In continuing my research with the figure and its place within the contemporary art world I stumbled upon Steinunn Thorarinsdottir’s work while browsing artists involved with ISC. It is quite hard to obtain sources for Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, whom lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland, although has been working professionally for 30 years and has exhibited widely in Europe, Japan, USA and Australia. The aesthetic of Thorarinsdottir’s work is astonishing to me and holds a close similarity to the work of Antony Gormley. A connection is made and discussed by Jonathan Goodman about the two artists works; whom are laid out as an example of two figurative artists that have a desire to portray reality realistically – as opposed to abstractly or conceptually, yet are amongst the strongest of our contemporary sculptors.

With Antony Gormley we have his concerns with spirituality and the human form. The consequences of his work are immensely exciting, because they imply that new art can continue to hold representation as a means and measure of the imaginative impulse. Goodman explains that the work offers the pleasures of recognition-of ourselves and of the history we have created.

Thorarinsdottir however rejects any notion of the figure as a purely historicist vehicle…Instead her figures denote the lyric isolation that all of us bear in both art and life. What better way is there than figurative realism to express the innate awkwardness of people, their preference for folly and self-deception? At the same time, however by asserting the essential dignity of the human form, Throarinsdottir conveys a deep concern for human nature, no matter how troubled its energies may be in contemporary life.

Although these themes are not completely related to the thoughts I have about the human and its quest toward the post-human, I am concerned about what relationships can be conveyed to the viewer through a contemporary figurative approach with the integration of some of the tools and technology that these artists would most-likely choose to not be included in their repertoire.

As important to Steinunn’s work as the objects themselves, are the spaces that they occupy. This too is a concern of mine. I have always created an object and placed it on a pedestal or on the floor or on the wall, using the all-powerful “white cube” to do its magic and give some sort of important presence to the piece. I’m giving more and more thought to this and how I cannot rely on these parameters but set up my own to both invite the viewer and help convey the concept of the work. I am very moved by Laura Peturson’s words in the catalog of Steinunn’s work entitled Inner Light, within the introduction she writes: Thorarinsdottir’s sculptures invite us to walk amongst them, as both active participants and reflective observers. Their quiet mysticism has the power to move us, while their raw physicality has the ability to inspire awe.

"About the Artist." Web. 11 Apr. 2011. .

Goodman, Jonathan. "A Lyric Isolation." Sculpture Jan.-Feb. 2009: 49-53. Web.

Steinunn, Þórarinsdóttir, Odon Wagner, Laura Peturson, and Rafael Wagner. Steinunn Thórarinsdottir: Inner Light. Toronto: Odon Wagner Gallery, 2006. Print.