Why We’re All Living in Matthew Barney’s Sticky, Slimy World

In Could and June, Matthew Barney, the visionary artist behind the epic “Cremaster Cycle” movie collection (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014), can be exhibiting his latest physique of labor, “Secondary,” at 4 galleries: Gladstone Gallery in New York; Sadie Coles HQ in London; Regen Projects in Los Angeles; and Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris.

1. Viscous Goo

In his first New York solo present in 1991, a 23-year-old Barney offered a video of himself climbing the partitions and ceiling of Gladstone Gallery (left), bare in a harness. The video was displayed alongside a walk-in cooler that featured an train bench solid in petroleum jelly. Ever since, his work has dripped with translucent fluid. Goo permeates luxurious trend in the present day, from Balenciaga’s so-called slime printed hoodies (proper) to the ooze that trickled from the ceiling at two Prada exhibits final 12 months (heart).

Lengthy earlier than Cillian Murphy in “Oppenheimer” (2023) (left), or any variety of status TV dramas, Barney was fearlessly — some may say gratuitously — breaking one in all up to date tradition’s final taboos (proper).

3. Bodily Secretions

Barney is probably the best dwelling artist of corporeal fluids, whether or not urine, feces, semen, blood or breast milk. His 311-minute movie “River of Fundament” (left), a very unfastened adaptation of Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel, “Historical Evenings,” opens with Barney rising from a river of excrement, getting into Mailer’s house, eradicating human waste from a bathroom, wrapping it in gold leaf and inserting it again whence it got here, thus conjuring the spirit of a pharaoh who sodomizes him. Barney’s anatomical provocations closely influenced a youthful era of artists, together with Dash Snow (who masturbated onto a few of his work) (heart) and presaged the river of sewage in Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 movie, “Parasite” (proper), and the consumption of ejaculate-laden bathwater in 2023’s “Saltburn.”

4. Artwork About Artist {Couples}

Not solely did the singer Björk (heart) write the soundtrack for Barney’s movie “Drawing Restraint 9” (2005) — through which the 2 conduct a Japanese tea ceremony aboard a whaling vessel that floods with molten petroleum jelly — however her lyrics additionally chronicle their decade-plus relationship, from its completely happy beginnings (“Who would have identified / {That a} boy like him / Possessed of magical /Sensitivity?” on 2001’s “Vespertine”) to 2015’s “Vulnicura,” through which she declares, “I’m bored of your apocalyptic obsessions.” Years earlier than Beyoncé’s 2016 “Lemonade” (proper) or Taylor Swift’s (left) breakup ballads, Björk and Barney had expanded the methods through which public figures might make their private lives into artwork.

Keen on elaborate costumes that query conventional gender roles (flamboyant Freemason, tap-dancing satyr), Barney has worn skirts and night robes — in his artwork and outdoors of it, wish to the opening of the Whitney Biennial in 1993 (left). Barney walked in order that Harry Types and Timothée Chalamet (proper) might run.