Matthew Barney's Indifferences

Matthew Barney

Creating the Cremaster films, Matthew Barney shows athleticism, sexuality, and an appreciation of the human form, which might be disturbing to most that watch his films.  His films gained attention to his artistic career through the beauty and horror involving surreal scenes and symbolism.  The films are a “physical state,” which he blurs the line of genders through objects and subject matter.  However, videos are not the only thing he creates.  His line of work also consists of sculpture, performance, drawings, and installation pieces where he develops these ideas out of his Long Island City, Queens studio.  With the use of sounds, shapes, and places, he is influenced by Process Art, which can be seen in Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson, and Joseph Beuys work.  Barney says, “My work is not for everyone,” but can be subjective to the viewers that appreciate the diverse indifference of Barney’s creativity.

The Loughton Candidate, Cremaster 4

In Cremaster 4, the first part of the five-cycle series starting in 1994, he depicts and plays The Loughton Candidate, which portrays a cusp undergoing the stages of maturity.  Barney uses horns to symbolize growth of sexual maturity as male/female figure.  Another form of symbolism, a “Field Emblem” outlined like a football stadium, is presented throughout all the films.  Furthermore, the performance of dancing and sounds give the film a theatrical setting; however the scenes are shot for eight hours in length and in real time.  In addition to the performance, the famous Greek pose, contrapposto, shows power by deferring action.  All of these films seem hard to understand and/or follow, but the spectator can interpret the meaning from their own imaginations, any other artwork we see in society.

Drawing Restraint 9 Movie Poster

Since Barney collaborates with other artist, musician Bjork composed a musical element to his Drawing Restraint series.  An example, Drawing Restraint 9, Barney creates a full-feature film and scenes include a tea ceremony, whaling ship, sex and the making of sculpture.  He’s a mythical character with multiple personalities and his love interest with Bjork.  In the poster, it shows a Japanese theme representing flip sides (moods) of the characters, showing Bjork’s head turned away and the sculpture of Barney.  The story takes many turns, and the destination is to set south to Antarctica, and oddly enough, Bjork and Barney morph into whales and swim off to the oceans they sail.  Furthermore, Japanese workers pump out of liquid petroleum jelly from a truck, resulting into a whaling ship that originally came from his “Field logo.”

Bjork in Drawing Restraint 9

Recently, River of Fundament is Barney’s inspiration from the novel, Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, which the subject matter includes American Cars focus is based on a 1967 Chrysler Imperial.  The film is five hours in length and contains lots of hot polluted liquids from New York and Detroit rivers.  River of Fundament is about Egyptian myth and modern America portraying the death of reincarnation of the novelist and sex.  Since the production of this project as taken seven years to develop, Barney says, “We couldn’t really afford to rehearse,” due to the subjective nature of the location settings.

Chiho Aoshima's Surreal Dreams

Chiho Aoshima

"My work feels like strands of my thoughts that have flown around the universe before coming back to materialize," Chiho Aoshima said to explain her artwork.  Aoshima is a Japanese graphic pop artist, classified as Superflat, a term to describe postmodern art movement started by Takashi Murakami.  In Aoshima's artwork, she creates dreamscapes and surreal scenes with wild landscapes and mostly a young woman, where she uses demons, ghosts, and nature.  The mediums used to create her work is large scale printing from her images she produces, in addition to plastics and leather to give the images more depth.  Aoshima's art is exhibited all over the world, including New York City and London subway stations, which her largest works of art spans 4.8 meters high and 32.5 meters long.

Magma Spirit Explodes: Tsunami is Dreadful, Chiho Aoshima

In Aoshima's Magma Spirit Explodes: Tsunami is Dreadful (2004), she exhibits and grabs our attention by showing chaos in an urban society where anything could happen within anyone's imagination.  Since this imagery is portrayed in modern society, it shows us life struggles as apart of contemporary culture.  In addition, it also represents the death of civilization, which the subject of the young woman burning in the flames of her own surroundings.

City Glow: Mountain Whisper, Chiho Aoshima

Further into her large-scale digital scroll prints, the City Glow series consists of solo projects she was commissioned by London and later animation clips of her artwork representing the urban underground.  Mountain Whisper, a 17 panel separations, are located under brick arches in a subway station in London, while train passengers can view the alien-like children heads that sit on top of city skyscrapers.  As these panels morph into wildlife landscapes, the alien heads continue to sit on top of the mountains.  With the utopian and apolitical visions of earth, City Glow separates the past and present with the human faces breathing into man-made and/or industrial materials.  Later on, these images became animations, which shows more detail from the original prints.

The Divine Gas, Chiho Aoshima

Aoshima renders another large-scale print, The Divine Gas, a young girl lays in the grass done for The Institute of Contemporary Art – Boston.  This artwork was drawn on a Mac G4 computer and printed on vinyl to capture the details in the graphics and vibrant colors.  The spectator is again taken away by daydreams and opposite forces of good and evil among the beauty and darkness shown in the image.  Since all of these elements seem deep-rooted, she creates humor out of the clouds coming from her bottom.  Some suggest this image comes from Bosch's the mysterious tale, Garden of Earthly Delights.

Sally Mann's Nostalgic Vision

Sally Mann

Depicting dismal family portraits and eerie landscapes from the Deep South, Sally Mann, an American photographer, shows dynamic imagery of black and white among the subjects in her work.  Creating these images, she shows concepts of death, sexuality, and sensuality to society, mainly in the U.S., capturing the fights during the Culture Wars and the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) supporting to her photography.  In Mann’s work, she takes pictures of her family and landscapes in a non-traditional format, which gives a scratched and unfinished feel, with damaged cameras and lenses to create nostalgia in her photography.  Among her fellow peers, photographers Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit controversy in their styles of sexuality and death with the support of the NEA.  Since these artist are trying to draw societies attention to freedom of speech, many critics and spectators aren’t comfortable with the subjects portrayed in these images because they don’t understand its purpose.

New Mothers, Sally Mann

In the Immediate Family (1992), the book and later exhibit, her third collection and most notable achievement of Mann’s.  New Mothers, which was shown as part of the Immediate Family series, sparked disturbing imagery of three children in Spring 1992 when the first exhibit was critiqued at the Houk Friedman Gallery in New York.  In New Mothers, Mann is depicting her children, Emmett, 12, Jessie, 10, and Virginia, 7, acting as adults at their adolescence.  Since she puts her children in this theme of adulthood, Mann views her children as if they were living their adulthood in society.  She admires her children by dressing them up as adults and took the picture as her children posed naturally in a family setting, but portrays the imagery in death and perceptions of sexuality.

The Rehearsal Place, Sally Mann

After Immediate Family, she was already a well known photographer to admirers of her black and white line of work.  Other books were focused on the decomposing bodies and portraits in What Remains (2003) and landscapes in Deep South (2005).  In her fifth book, What Remains, divided into five parts, which depicts dead, decay, and studies of children portraits.  An example of these studies, The Rehearsal Place exhibits a child immersed just showing her hair spread among the water.  In other sections of the book, images show off gruesome imagery of decay in the process and bones.

Deep South Series, Sally Mann

In Deep South, the book reveals quite the opposite of What Remains and captures the landmarks of where she made a 65 black-and-white landscapes taken from 1992 to 2004.  The images were constructed by 8x10 film and wet plate collodion.  With the carefully selected pictures, she assembles a collage of her best compositions into one collection of imagery.  Some examples of her landscape photography show off some haunting scenes of battlefields during the Civil War.

Lewis Law Portfolio, Sally Mann