©MATTHEW BARNEY/COURTESY GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS 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. As the small cast of characters enters, they do so as creatures overwhelmed by the landscapes around them, never less than wholly subsumed. 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.Īfter 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. 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. I always learn how a body of work could grow, where there’s room to explore more.” “It’s hard to do retrospectives without feeling like you’re trying to sum up or reduce, whereas project exhibitions feel more expansive. “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. Trailer for the feature film Redoubt: ©MATTHEW BARNEY Both feature in “Matthew Barney: Redoubt,” an exhibition opening Saturday at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. 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.Īll 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. 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. Choreography figures in the storyline, first through movement barely discernible as dance and later in forms that turn more conspicuous. Forest Service worker who boasts a burly beard and takes up landscape drawing by unconventional means. Barney stars as one of the main characters, a U.S. 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. A lot of enigmatic action leads up to the disembowelment, much of it quiet and subdued. HUGO GLENDINNING/©MATTHEW BARNEY/COURTESY GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS, AND SADIE COLES HQ, LONDONĭeep 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.
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