Barney and Beuys

Allied Worlds

To better understand the characteristic of twentieth-century art it is necessary to know the semantics of materials that convey the meaning of a work or its creator. In our case, the two authors build a mythology around the materials that they use, effectively making themselves protagonists


By SALVATORE CUTAIA
from Palermo, ITALY


In the infinite multiplicity of contemporary arts, it is useful to find threads linking great individuals, from the concepts underlying their respective artistic paths, to the materials used in their works. Even more interesting, however, is locating lines of imagination that connect artists from different geographical regions; in this case, the United States and Europe.

Matthew Barney has never denied the huge influence that Joseph Beuys has played in the formation of his work. Even if they belong to two separate eras, with Beuys living in the age of conceptual art, and Barney in the postmodern, both these artists/sculptors/performers, their respective works are extraordinarily similar; the shared conception of art as a biographical mirror, the concepts that give shape to inspiration, the materials they both use, as well as the mutual love for the museum space (in itself a catchment of stories), point to a mysterious linkage that spans two continents and two centuries.

Barney's famed video opera series, Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), is a deforming and reflective system where essential autobiographical elements and personal cultural imagery regress into a non-chronological dialectic (the chapters are not produced sequentially). Barney, ex-athlete and expert on the potentiality of the body, creates a cross-breeding, fluctuating hymn, provoked by trial, conflict, and tension in Cremaster. His opera is situated between the Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty and David Cronenberg's futuristic transformations.

In the Cremaster, when viewed from the anatomical perspective, the muscle that controls the descent and the rise of testicles represents the transformation mechanism, from low to high, from shapeless to multiform life, being the only muscle that an athlete cannot control. Barney is obsessed by the control of his own body, as well as the processes of combustion and fusion occurring within the body that produce energy.

He transforms the impotence over the control of this muscle into a symbol of infinite power and creativity. Cremaster encompasses all the entirety of the visual and manufactured arts, as well as the body arts, insofar as the literary imagery of cosmetic surgery and bulimia set the author in the contemporary.

One of the aspects the make Barney's work unique is that it is simultaneously ancient, modern and postmodern, going back and forth over these three ages: ancient, because the distance of his vision encompasses visuals elements that reference pagan mythological iconography (like the infinite representations of the anthropomorphic, bisexual satyr); modern in his metamorphic mission; and postmodern in the impossibility of finding satisfaction or a solution, building a spiral of returns.

Joseph Beuys utilizes biography as a continuous source of inspiration. As a fighter pilot, his plane was shot down in 1943 while in flight over the Crimea; he nearly froze to death before being found by Tartar tribesmen that saved him by using by using animal fat and felt, to warm and mend his injured body. This dramatic experience stayed rooted in Beuys' approach to art, elevating its function to one of regeneration and renewal; not only for the individual body, but involving politics and the community, where the most important underlying theme is transformation.

Thus basic materials in his sculptures/installations, the very materials that saved him from death, become a metaphor of transformative energy, for substance and matter. This concept pushes the creative process to the forefront, being more important in itself that the end product. Art for Beuys was therapeutic, and thus it was accessible to everyone.

In this way, Beuys took on an almost shamanic role. He is the one who challenged and crossed the thresholds of death; he is the one who grants absolute knowledge. For Beuys, theory and practice are inseparable-thematic consciousness transforms itself into actions resulting in sociopolitical revolution, a metamorphosis realized in the form of the opera.

Another important element in Beuys' art that links past and present, myth and truth is alchemy; that when mixed with art, brings about the incarnation of change. Alchemy here is a spiritual and thaumaturgic technique with ancestral overviews, such as in Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare; 1965). In this opera Beuys, with his head covered with honey and iron, and the soles of his feet in felt, is in an enclosed space; he is looked upon by spectators in a mirror. Here the hare represents the element that burrows into the ground and forces in matter, penetrates borders, refines itself and becomes revolutionary. The relation between the hare and the honey mirrors that of the raw matter and honey. The hare purifying herself represents the attempt to attain the perfection of godhood.

To better understand the characteristic of twentieth-century art it is necessary to know the semantics of materials that convey the meaning of a work or its creator. In our case, the two authors build a mythology around the materials that they use, effectively making themselves protagonists. Barney identifies Vaseline as his favorite material, because of its structurelessness and formlessness, which can be molded into any shape of his liking. When heated, it liquefies, and when cooled it becomes crystallized. The malleable Vaseline represents soft matter that after undergoing tension can be controlled to shape unpredictable forms.

From a physical point of view, the typical Beuys materials, the felt and the fat, exemplify a thermodynamic flux without resistance, that transforms materials and forms in a continuous becoming.

The happening is an instrument of communication and a vehicle of meaning for both artists. In fact, Beuys and Barney are linked by the study of medicine and anatomy (Beuys studied medicine during the military draft; Barney wanted to study medicine at Yale, and was an athlete), besides both occupying the shared roles of shaman, healer, and re-editor of mass culture.

For Beuys, since his participation in the Fluxus group, the performance is an event that takes place in front of spectators that occurs in space and time; two decades on, Barney's performance is made and seen through a monitor and video (Field Dressing 1989-1990). The public enjoys the remoteness of the performative body behind the screen. In a renouncement of the possibility of bringing about radical change in the world, Barney eclipses himself behind a complicated symbolic reconstruction in his Cremaster.

Beuys, on the other hand, is very much present in the flesh, modifying for hours an established space to which the public has access, such as in Haupstrom (1967).Beuys is an artist working in a real space with a real public. The thread of action and tension between the two artists moves from the real and tangible to the constructed, that signifies the gap between both eras.

In short, Beuys is the refined and modern radical European intellectual escaping from a cumbersome past, for whom art carries a therapeutic function and creativity is the arrival point at which divinity is present. Barney believes instead that the dream is dead; the Dionysian and omnivorous universe he creates is a reaction to the debris of the contemporary, occidental, American and postmodern worlds. His universe is a passage between reality and imagination, where man the artist has lost his place, for whom a life of stimuli, articulations, and uncontrollable muscle movements render a definitive collocation or a complete union with the sum of our origins is impossible. To Barney, perfect balance is found in the articulation, not the solution; an continual and infinite search without resolution, otherwise art and ultimately life would have to end.

Despite the distance in time and place of origin of Barney and Beuys, they both nevertheless share several affinities. The language and communication systems used by both in their artistic paths are marked by commonalities: the power of symbolic imagination, conceptual themes, biographic and cultural references, and even the carefully chosen materials used by both the artists demonstrate this synonymy. This enables us to draw an imaginary line of meaning that connects two continents and ages.


Nancy Spector, Mark C.Taylor, Christian Scheidemann, Nat Trotman [2007] "All in the present must be transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys", The Solomon R. Giggenheim Foundation, New York;
Dorfles. G., Vettese A.[2006] "Arti Visive-Il Novecento"; Atlas, Bergamo, Italy;
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/barney/


(Published: 20.08.2009.)