Divine Fun: Matthew Barney at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

In Drawing Restraint 14, 2006, Matthew Barney hilariously parodies all pomposity and arrogance and particularly that of certain tendencies of the current art scene. From the moment you see ‘self lubricating plastic’ as one of the components of the piece, the joke deepens. (It begins with ‘climbing equipment’ as the second component.) The artist’s use of various sorts of lubricants as stated ingredients in his pieces suggesting not only the masturbatory aspects of art creation, but the predatory aspects of art marketing, continues to be surprisingly light and to amuse.

As with many of the best parodies this work succeeds by being the apotheosis of what it parodies. At least three different unfortunate tendencies in the arts now are epitomized. This is of course in addition to the broad parody of the artist as hero and god or at least channeler of the divine. (The General Douglas MacArthur impression and pseudo documentary are the meat and the heart of the work.) These tendencies, all sent up simultaneously, are the tendency of the concept of a conceptual work to be far more interesting than the completed work, of the performance of the creation of the work more interesting than the finished work, and of a sculpture or installation to be far less interesting then where it is installed. The artist hero, complete in MacArthurian uniform and sun shades filmed as the real Douglas MacArthur would have appreciated/loved, produces, after substantial dangerous contortions high above the museum’s atrium, some graphite or pencil squiggles, neither looping nor biting, intentionally lacking shape or form without being empty or minimal, carefully eschewing accidental elegance. To produce something so lacking in inherent interest could not have been easy.

This work raises the question: if the concept is interesting enough in the work process it creates does the viewer really care about the ostensible final permanent product? Several people are often watching the film component of Drawing Restraint14. Even with the climbing bolts, ropes and hand holds left. most visitors barely glance into the part of the spectacular atrium occupied by the ostensible finished work. Instead the people looking into the atrium focus on views from the skybridge and curving stairways, on the cut outs/windows and resulting bold light and shadows, as the architect intended. The artist as arrogant hero artist is parodied by this epitomization of the artist who insists on putting his craftless work in the middle of someone else’s structure, a structure admitted to be a masterwork by almost everyone and which the majority of appreciators/users want to keep that way. These palatially (usually metaphorically but sometimes actually) sited works, in traditional terms add little, if any interest. Almost all interest is generated not from the interaction between the architecture and the work, but from the architecture, the presence of the building itself. Notice that most of Climbing Restraint 14 occupies a gallery not the atrium.

All together the pieces selected do not fully represent the range of his protean work, a probably impossible task without taking over more of the museum, but all are fun and provoke thought.