If Matthew Barney cared about not making it Political, why did he then paint Wolves in a bad light from Idaho??? Sounds like hes merely adding fuel to the fire of myth! We call B.S. 😉
eep into Redoubt—Matthew Barney’s new film about animals, alchemy, and the astronomical alignment of earthly bodies and heavenly stars—a pack of wolves wanders into a house and tears it to shreds. A lot of enigmatic action leads up to the disembowelment, much of it quiet and subdued. The mostly wordless movie is set in central Idaho, in remote hinterlands marked by mountains and trees that seem to stand in wait of whatever ghastly or graceful happening might transpire in the wild. Barney stars as one of the main characters, a U.S. Forest Service worker who boasts a burly beard and takes up landscape drawing by unconventional means. Choreography figures in the storyline, first through movement barely discernible as dance and later in forms that turn more conspicuous.
Other characters at the film’s core are Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, and two nymphs (identified as “Calling Virgin” and “Tracking Virgin”) who accompany her in the matter of translating animalistic endeavors into cosmic terms. And then there is a figure known as the Electroplater, who transforms Barney’s landscape drawings into emanations in metal by way of a process involving voltage shot through a cathode sunk in a chemical bath.
All together, the component parts make for a mesmerizing movie and a premise for making related artworks—large-scale sculptures and processed copper plates hung on walls—for the sake of consideration in the waking world. Both feature in “Matthew Barney: Redoubt,” an exhibition opening Saturday at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
“I’ve tried to avoid doing retrospective exhibitions and instead have made project shows, which always feel like new territory for me—how the dots can be connected within a body of work, how relationships between narrative and objects can be explored,” Barney said while installing the exhibition last week. “It’s hard to do retrospectives without feeling like you’re trying to sum up or reduce, whereas project exhibitions feel more expansive. I always learn how a body of work could grow, where there’s room to explore more.”
The new work connects in certain ways to the sprawling mix of cinema and sculpture that figured in Barney’s River of Fundament, a nearly six-hour film (premiered in 2014) and many-parted series of artworks that accompany it. But it marks a divergence as well. Where River of Fundament tended toward enormous performative spectacles and epic gestures, with otherworldly visions in the service of summoning ancient Egyptian gods and specters from a novel by Norman Mailer (Ancient Evenings), Redoubt is more measured and contemplative, grounded over its two-hour run time in a way that channels its strangenesses into subtlety.
After opening with a long, slow zoom on a carcass of some kind rotting in snow, the film pans back to survey barren landscapes that stoke a sense of rapture as well as fear. As the small cast of characters enters, they do so as creatures overwhelmed by the landscapes around them, never less than wholly subsumed. And the landscapes reveal themselves as the true star on screen, as Barney’s character—named the Engraver—takes up a practice of drawing their likeness onto metal plates that reveal hints of gleaming copper beneath.
In a process that proves increasingly integral as the film goes on, the Engraver takes his drawings—etched onto surfaces coated with black asphaltum that gets removed with each and every mark—to the house of the Electroplater, where they get dipped into pools of chemicals and transformed into a state hovering somewhere between drawing and sculpture, with lines that intensify and surfaces that come alive.
“I started electroplating during River of Fundament,” Barney said while up at Yale. “For those works it was more to do with the idea of having a thin gold layer over top a base metal—I was interested in the aspect of veneer that electroplating could provide, a veneer of gold over something much more crude.” But while playing around with a process that was new to him at the time, “I started seeing some anomalies if the plating carried on for too long,” he said. “Nodules would form along the edges. I started asking the plating company how to harvest those anomalies. They worked with us a bit, but I realized I needed to set up a plating facility in my studio to really explore.”
And explore he did, with amenities at his home base in Long Island City, New York, suited for a process that involves tubs filled with sulfuric acid, copper sulfate, and other additives (brighteners, levelers) as well as variables owing to temperature and time. “It’s not an incredibly precise art. In fact it’s really hard to get the same thing to happen twice,” Barney said. “It’s usually used for making a micron-thin coating over something, where you calibrate your tank and put it in for a minute. But mine are in the tank for hours or days. The copper starts to erode and go into the solution, and then is attracted to the exposed lines on the plate. It’ll keep building up and up that way. If you move the anode, the block of copper, closer to the cathode, it’ll burn the surface—an electrical burn.”
The practice evoked other artistic processes in a sort of inverse form. “In the beginning the proposal felt like printmaking, but almost the opposite of what a print is, in creating a positive growth out of a line,” Barney said. “But it has evolved and become much more layered and physical than the first iterations. There’s also a relationship to photography, in terms of chemistry and unrepeatability.”
The politics of the situation interested him less than the mythic undercurrents of it all. “It took some years to figure out how to work in and around a political debate without making a political work,” Barney said. But he found ways to channel the dynamic through different dimensions. The strains of dance that recur throughout Redoubt, choreographed by Eleanor Bauer (who also plays the “Calling Virgin” character), were inspired by the landscape and lives lived there. “We spoke about the static nature of hunting, of posting up somewhere and sitting, waiting, listening, looking,” Barney said of conversations about the kind of movement that would suit the film. “The movement of the Virgins early in the film wanted to address the notion of looking and listening, to try to think about the way sound travels in that landscape. You might have something miles away that you hear—it sounds quite clear, though you understand it’s a long way away. That kind of dynamic we talked about a lot.”