Friday, October 08, 2004
so here's a double reason for envy. i was embarking on a story about candomble when i decided to do a web search and i found this about matthew barney. i can't help but feel he's encroaching on my territory and he's doing it better than me. but fuck, i don't own brazil, i'll just have to come to terms with that. but here's the other thing, i doubt i could get away with an article like this for the ap. and i didn't even know that film was being shown at the biennal and probably wouldn't have been able to see it any way.
Artist Barney looks to Brazilian godsFri 8 October, 2004 15:18
By Fernanda Ezabella
SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Matthew Barney has choreographed dancing girls, filmed a demolition derby inside the Chrysler Building and dressed up like Harry Houdini all in the name of art.
In his latest work, the acclaimed U.S. artist, whose work melds scultpural installations with performance and video, is delving into the heart of Afro-Brazilian culture to expound on his vision of the creative process, the destruction of nature and cycle of life.
The 60-minute art film "De Lama Lamina" ("Of Mud a Blade") had its world premiere in Sao Paulo last month, when hundreds of art aficionados descended on the city to attend the opening of the Sao Paulo Bienniale, one of the world's largest international exhibits of contemporary art.
Part documentary, part fiction, "De Lama Lamina" captures a float built by Barney for the pre-Lenten Carnival celebrations in Salvador, Bahia, the cultural heart of Brazil's African, slave-descended culture.
The float consists of a gigantic, muddied forest tractor carrying an uprooted tree in front of it. Two actors -- one on the tree and another in the tractor -- play deities in the polytheistic Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble.
Like his most famous work, a cycle of five films known as the "Cremaster" series, "De Lama Lamina" is a meditation on the creative process, Barney told Reuters in an e-mail interview.
"Candomble ... became a catalyst for finding a way to express a faith in the balances in nature ... and through this faith being able to look at the world today without feeling hopeless," he said.
Although largely unknown to most people, Barney has received a lot of attention over the last years in art circles for "Cremaster." New York's Guggenheim Museum gave him a retrospective last year and the five "Cremaster" films have been shown around the world.
Even before then, though, Barney was making a splash. In 1999, The New York Times called Barney "the most important American artist of his generation."
Most recently, the handsome 37-year-old has been in the spotlight for his romantic relationship with Icelandic pop artist Bjork, with whom he has a child.
STRANGE BUT EXHILARATING
After his parents divorced, Barney spent his youth playing high school football in his native Idaho and visiting his mother in New York City, where he was introduced to the world of art. He graduated from Yale University, where he he created some of his early works.
Since then, Barney's artk -- part performance, part sculpture and part video -- continues to have very physical, athletic and sexual elements.
Indeed, the "Cremaster" films are named after a muscle that raises and lowers testicles depending on temperature, fear or external stimulation.
Strange, complex but visually exhilarating, the five films feature Barney in different roles. Together they weave history, autobiography and mythology into a dream-like reflection on gender, ritual, power, creation, and a myriad of other grand themes, according to art critics.
Two years after the completion of the "Cremaster" series, Barney unveiled "De Lama Lamina."
"Since he announced the end of the Cremaster cycle, I think a lot of people were waiting to see what he would do next," said Sergio Romagnolo, an artist and Barney fan.
The new film depicts the clash between nature and technology through two "orixas," or deities, in Candomble.
Barney's idea for "De Lama Lamina" began six years ago when the artist attended Carnival and decided he wanted to film something with a live audience, in contrast to the meticulously planned "Cremaster" movies, which took 10 years to make.
Atop Barney's 20-foot (6-m) tree a woman represents both Ossain, a Candomble orixa tied to plants and medicine, and Julia Butterfly Hill, an activist who lived two years on top of a California Redwood tree to stop it from being cut down.
Down in the tractor's machinery, Ogun, the deity of iron, engages in a Vaseline-greased ritual with machines that was not visible to Carnival onlookers but captured in the film. At one point he looks like he is trying to copulate with the tractor.
"Ossain is in contact with the forest, and Ogun is who takes the forest away on the way to create civilization," Barney said. "The contract between them has the same kind of duality that any orixa has, to destroy and create."
The tractor pulled a wagon of dirt atop which a musical band led by experimental musician Arto Lindsay played music. The whole endeavor is a twist on the typical "trio electricos," or moving sound stages, that snake down Salvador's winding streets during Carnival.
Ivo Mesquita, the exhibit's curator, said the film marked a new step for Barney.
"He's fusing documentary-style language, which he used in his first performances, with the fictional kind we've seen in films like Cremaster," Mesquita said. "It is very exciting to be able to see this work."
