Matthew Barney is a sculptor, performer and filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 1990s and 2000s. Barney is also one of the few artists who managed to transcend the hyper-individualistic and fragmented artistic climate of postmodernism’s heyday. He achieved this by redefining the medium of sculpture. For Barney, sculpture is a combination of places, performances, photos, drawings, films and objects, which he knits into a comprehensive whole as both director and protagonist.
Barney studied at Yale University in Connecticut, where he switched from medicine to the arts. A significant factor in the development of Barney’s art was his long-standing membership of the university rugby team. This is borne out in his student work, in which he was already using the physical rigours and erotic undertones of elite sport to explore physical limits and (gender) sexuality. He not only reflected on himself as an athlete, therefore, but also consciously signed up to the 70s tradition of performance art and body art. He deeply admired the pioneers in these fields, such as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden.
Many of the hallmarks of Barney’s visual language were already present in his earliest videos/performances/installations. The early works are generally ritualistic in nature, include materials with metaphorical qualities, such as wax, Vaseline and talcum powder, and tend to play out in hybrid spaces reminiscent of gymnasiums or medical laboratories. Barney saw the athletic principle that it takes self-control and physical restraint to become physically stronger as a love triangle between desire, discipline and productivity. This underpinned his ideas about sexual and gender-based differentiation. He introduced metaphorical symbols for this, such as the oblong, which alludes to the shape of a rugby stadium. For Barney, it symbolises the body opening and closing, and the body as a self-contained system.
Barney began the ‘Cremaster’ cycle in 1994, a series of five films that definitively cemented his international fame as an artist. Barney directed and starred in each one, sometimes assuming more than one role. He also created an arsenal of sculptures, drawings and photos for each film which, when taken together, form a single all-encompassing universe. The name of the cycle is borrowed from the cremaster muscle, which controls the contractions of the testicles when they are exposed to physical and psychological stimuli such as cold or fear. Barney regarded this muscle as an anatomical metaphor for the existence of gender difference in the embryonic phase. The ‘Cremaster’ cycle depicts various stages of human sexual development in which the gendered ‘end result’ is still hybrid and therefore, according to Barney, in a permanent state of potential (strength) and potentiality (possibility).
The ‘Cremaster’ cycle can be seen as a contemporary equivalent to the Wagnerian ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’: Barney created a personal but layered universe in which he interwove aspects of biology, alchemy, mythology, autobiography and (art) history in an all-encompassing way. Since the early 2000s, the artist has explored and developed various motifs from the cycle, in which he examines and depicts the human body and its biological reactions in different conditions.
