Matthew Barney

Double Zero: The Implied Body, 1995

Programming Note: This was one of the first longer-form pieces I ever wrote, produced during my second year at Kingston University and written during my time on the ERASMUS program in Milan. I’d long been an admirer of Barney’s work, and continue to be influenced by his aesthetic, approach, creativity and overall visual dynamic. This was also one of the first times that I’d started to package my work into a more meaningful, cohesive presentation, framing the work as an early publication, a forerunner of how I’d make physical objects and books with my writing a year later. The original images used to illustrate my writing are included here.

Preface

In choosing to begin with the notion of the implied body, I feel that it is perhaps most important to begin with some form of questioning as to what this theme actually is. What do we mean by the term 'the implied body'? There is a plethora of ways in which artists have elected to imply their bodies through their work, and it is perhaps one of 'the' prevalent themes of twentieth century practice. Implications of the body are often made through some form of trace, mark, or leaving of signifying debris. They can be made through presenting fragmented parts of the body, hinting at a larger whole, or they could be made through aesthetic parallels with the figure, leading to some sort of assumption as to a human 'presence'. It is this very sense of a 'presence' which I wish to question and analyze.

It is perhaps true to speculate that all objects placed within an artistic context, in some way imply the body, as they exist within a human inhabited world, and by our very interaction with them, take on human connotations. Yet when an object is subjected to the decisions and actions of the artist, he or she can often imply their presence mentally, emotionally or spiritually. My parallel to this would be a visit to one of the concentration camps still in existence in Germany today. The Jewish bodies are implied, they have a presence (in their absence), through our knowledge of some sort of past event.

To explain this somewhat ambiguous quality of how 'presence' is achieved, I intend to look at the examples of two artists noted for their use of 'the presence', and their pioneering of the body as valid art material - Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni.

Both of these artists imply their own bodies in certain works by primarily psychological or conceptual means. The audience is required to believe in the methodology of what they see (or don't see). Manzoni's pedestal piece entitled 'Magic Base' (1961), of which there are two versions, demonstrates how, by producing and utilizing an object, which could easily be stood upon (indeed, it is Manzoni himself who is implied standing upon it, although the idea was that anyone standing on the plinth became a work of art), even though the body is absent, the viewer is able to mentally picture some form of presence. Through the knowledge that he did once stand upon the piece, the viewer is subjected to a mental 'fragment' of the past whole. A signifier as to a greater metaphoric whole. There is a psychological projection onto the static object which in turn then takes on human connotations. Klein's conceptual performance 'Removing paintings from a gallery to make a void' of January 26th, 1962, works in much the same way. In this piece, the artist mentally painted the walls of the gallery, producing what he termed to be 'stabilized pictorial sensibility' or 'a palpable pictorial state' (1). An absence of any pictorial state here still implies that there has been a human action to make that environment, and therefore we tend to contemplate the action rather than the result. In a sense, he had instilled the room with his presence. He had been there. The audience then interacts with the work on a purely psychological plane, thus removing any kind of autonomy from what could be termed 'the art object'. It requires mental engagement from the audience for it to function, and perhaps here that engagement takes on human form.

In this sense, any depiction of the body becomes a non-essential aesthetic device, absence still producing presence. The audience's mental perception is drawn upon as an integral part of the work. One such practitioner noted for leaving his 'presence' in his work, yet almost severing any relationship with his audience, is the American artist Matthew Barney. His works often take on a cold, sterile feel, akin to the scene of a crime, or as if something has definitely happened within that space (note the comparisons between this description and my points about the concentration camps today). There are the obvious traces of footprints, sculptural debris and actual video records of the particular performance (the action made to produce the installation). The viewer is neither privy to 'the action of creation' nor they themselves a non-passive element within it. They are forced to become voyeurs to the secret events through watching the video record of it placed high within the debris of the performance. It is the action on these monitors on which the installations hinge.

The work is very heavily structured around the physicality of the body, Barney (himself a former athlete) often pushing, testing and restraining the limits of his own internal physical processes through fanatical athletic ritual. This has led to critical comparisons with such 'performance' artists as Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman. Indeed, a memorable example of the notion of the implied artist's body was demonstrated by Acconci in 'Seed Bed', performed at the Sonnabend gallery, New York, in 1971. It featured a ramp, built for the gallery, over which visitors were invited to walk. Under it, Acconci was said to be masturbating. The body is unseen but implied through a supposed knowledge of what we can't see. Acconci is keen to exploit this 'power field' of his, creating spaces which suggested his personal presence. Skeptically, Acconci could have been there, but just as easily could not.

The comparisons which I have chosen to analyze within the course of this discussion are not those confined to those performance artists, but to those with which Barney is eager to acknowledge as conscious influences upon him and his work. These influences are Harry Houdini and Jim Otto. Also great exponents of the 'implied body', they bear strong relation to Barney's practice, both aesthetic and conceptual. I intend to explore the deeper significance of these two pivotal characters in relation to specific works by Barney, and to try to question their use of the implied body through the use of the male psyche. An exploration of work of this nature and its relation to the viewer is also important, and I feel that to question 'presence through absence' is of great significance in analyzing specifically non-figurative works which follow in the twentieth century tradition of the reconsideration of the role of the artist.

Chapter Two: The Assumptions of The Viewer

The notion of the escapologist Harry Houdini's overt influence upon the practice of Matthew Barney, and the subsequent use by them of the implied body, is perhaps most accurately demonstrated by their conscious use of what is generally termed the audience, and its integral part of their work. Aside from obvious aesthetic correlations, their play on the role of the spectator is of primary importance to the success or failure of the work.

Houdini's 'Water Can Escape' (1908) demonstrates how, through exploiting the tensions, expectations and mental assumptions of the viewer, the artist can often seem to perform the physically impossible. The act involved a milk-can shaped galvanized iron container, locked with six padlocks, which, after Houdini had squeezed himself into, was then topped up with water (or sometimes other fluids such as milk, once even with beer). The curtains of the theatre were subsequently drawn, and the audience were invited to hold their breath as if they themselves were locked in the can. Having remained for over three minutes in the can (supposedly), Houdini then stepped back from the curtain, dripping wet, yet with the can still locked. Near the end of this act members of the audience were seen to be becoming tense and nervous, as if fearing for Houdini's life.

For the next part of the act, he then announced that he was to perform the escape again, yet this time handcuffed. The audience, already having the knowledge of the first escape, were unsurprised when he didn't emerge after two minutes, yet when three minutes had passed and he still hadn't escaped, the tension of the audience was heightened to such a point that they demanded he be let out. Thirty seconds later, he emerged, exactly the same as before.

Having built upon learning to hold his breath for long periods of time, and also having physically and mentally trained himself to escape from such extreme situations, he was then able to exploit the viewer's perception of his act. Of course, the galvanized iron can had been doctored (with simple push-up rivets), yet through our perception of what we know, or what we think we know about both both object and human being (one can't escape from the other, especially with the added danger of water), a feeling of extreme tension and a certain fear of the unknown can be induced.

As the audience are not privy to the action, a mystique is retained which can then induce this state of mild hysteria. It is therefore this use of the implied body, a definite 'presence through absence' and play upon our assumed perceptions which leads to the success of the act. Yet it is only through fanatical, ritualistic training in order to reach this state of physicality that it can be achieved, and it is this mystique of not being party to the event which provides the conscious influential theme on which Matthew Barney plays.

**Matthew Barney** Transexualis (Decline) 1994 / Interior with Otto Dolly, 1991

'Repressia (Decline)' (1991), an installation shown at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, has many of the same elements as Houdini's escape act. The audience again are an integral part of the work, and are also not privy to the performance, yet through being able to pick through its debris, they are then able to piece together some form of interpretation. The installation is the record of a three hour trek across the gallery's ceilings. The viewer is told this through the video monitors which have recorded the action, and are then placed high within the sculptural arrangements. Entitled 'Blind Perineum' or 'Mile High Threshold : Flight with the Anal Sadistic Warrior' (1991), the videos become the key to interpreting and making sense of the work.

In this piece, they record or stand testament to, a naked Matthew Barney, freeclimbing the gallery ceilings by placing titanium ice screws in the plaster of the building. He then lowers himself into a walk-in cooler (also present as part of the sculptural debris), where a single titanium ice screw is then inserted into his rectum. Following Barney on his journey, and recording the climb on video is the somewhat spectral figure of Jim Otto, another pivotal influence upon Barney, who will be discussed late on. The action contained on the videos becomes heavy going, due to them being silent, thus the audience's relation to the work's documentation is remote (as any aural commentary is removed) even though, paradoxically, they are in the physical space of the artistic sculptural debris which remains from the event. The videos therefore deprive the space and its objects of their autonomy. They cannot exist as self-contained objects (concerned only with their own form and content), as their roles in the videos lead to a form of perceptual organization and categorization on the part of the viewer. Also, by their formal make-up, the materials they are made of (including cast petroleum jelly, tapioca, internally lubricated plastics etc.) in relation to the action, the scene becomes one of subliminal sexual desire, yet surprisingly (as also with the naked Barney), devoid of great sexuality. The sexuality as with the body, is implied as some sort of past event.

“It’s rock and roll out of the intimate journals of Freud.”
Michael Rees (2)

Thus, the audience is confronted with a space where they are mentally and physically 'aware' that something has happened. Through the video documentation and the display of the objects which feature in them, Barney implies his body through a perverse display of ritual and sublimated sexuality and also by making the viewer party to only a small part of the action, thus retaining a 'mystique', which leads to the work's close relation with the escapology of Harry Houdini.

Chapter Two: Superimposed Cybernetic Aerobics

“I came of age on the football field. That’s where I started to construct meaning in my life, as an athlete. I think athletes are people who understand things through their bodies.”
Matthew Barney (3)

The other conscious, and perhaps more obviously aesthetic influence upon Barney's work is that of Jim Otto, an infamous American football player of the sixties and seventies. Widely renowned for having played the majority of his career with a prosthetic right knee, he was regarded as being one of the toughest and most physical individuals ever to play the game. It is this very notion of heavy physicality and an altering of historical testimony to Otto (aside from the notions of athletic ritual and aesthetic reference) which Barney appears to play upon.

**Matthew Barney** Hypothermal Penetrator, 1991

Perhaps the most important issue to begin with here, in terms of the implied body of Otto and its reference to Barney's practice is that of the significance of Otto's surname. Seen by Barney as a metaphor for sex and gender discussion, the surname, it is proposed, relates the Ts to the goal-like bars seen in American football. These objects in themselves have a subliminal sexuality, seen as targeted orifices, the focal point of the game, into which the object of play (in this case the ball) is penetrated. The bars (or 'goals' in the British sense) of any sport therefore become sexual metaphors, signifying penetration of one team or person by another. These bars, in Otto's name, are then also surrounded by the two Os (and significantly for Barney this was also Otto's jersey number), which are of obvious anatomical significance when discussing the notion of orifices. Barney therefore suggests that the autographic double zero acts as a dual rectum or a form of 'roving orifice' (4), which patrols the field of play through the use of a perverse sexual and athletic vocabulary.

“In the end, Jim Otto isn’t Jim Otto. He’s just a form.”
Matthew Barney (5)

The implied link between sexuality and sports is therefore made apparent, yet not immediately obvious. Barney's sexual lexicon is that of the locker room - monosexual and en masse (although rarely do many characters actually appear all at the same time in his videos). The bars and orifices of Jim Otto's name also produce, when joined together (split through the middle into two parts), two female symbols, suggesting subconscious links between lesbianism or homosexuality in general with what is generally seen as a very male, heterosexual practice.

This suggestion that deep psychological fantasies of confused sexual pleasure and power reside in the most commonplace of social environments is also dealt with by such artists as Charles Ray and Robert Gober. The archetypal American male (the sports star with Barney, the one in the street with Ray and Gober) is channelled, through the use of sexual energy, into a subversion of what we believe 'maleness' to be. It is shown that even in the most heterosexual of activities, there is a strong undercurrent of homosexuality, which is repressed, perhaps because it is either viewed or participated in en masse. Barney has therefore come under attack for trespassing upon debates generally regarded as specifically for the gay community alone. Yet I feel as though it is as much concerned with the questioning and subversion of socio-sexuality in general than with particular sex and gender debates.

Barney therefore suggests that within the archetypal male character of the heroic football star, lies the notion of concealed or disguised homosexuality and confusion, anatomical perversity and ultimately, impotence.

Yet how is Otto's body actually implied in Barney's work? The reference begins with this concept, as Barney says, of Jim Otto as a 'form', which is then used aesthetically to make sense and provide a framework for the other elements within the work. The 'Ottodrone' (1992) series of works, installed as part of Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany, can be seen as an example of how this form is exploited.

Set in an underground car park, the 'Ottoshaft' (1992) video record combines the Otto manifestation with that of its aesthetic corollary, the Scottish Black Watch bagpipers. Both come from the similar enclaves of prevalent group masculinity and its subsequent repression of homosexuality (sports and the military), as discussed before. Otto is used as a ghostly figure through whose presence is suggested this notion of confused perverse sexuality. His body is 'present' through the superimposition of the autographic double zero of his jersey onto various parts of the film as a strong signifier of his human presence (just as 'Number 10' would signify the British Prime Minister). This reduction of the powerful athlete down to a deviant dual rectum presents the viewer with a debate through which to consider all forms of sport in this way via the wider socio-sexual context.

**Matthew Barney** Ottoshaft: Fascia, 1992

Therefore, the use of Jim Otto's implied body provides Barney with a historical sexual debate around preconceptions of masculine enclaves. Whilst both Otto and Houdini play to their great physical strengths in order to perform before the 'audience' (removed or not), Houdini plays far more within the theatrical arena of trickery, whereas in the sports stadium, Otto becomes in a sense impotent (despite his strength), unable to escape at all.

The use of these particular two characters, through Barney's work, brings together these themes of the implied body, and also how that implication is mediated to the audience.

Chapter Three: Mediation and Conclusion

“Process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will.”
Walter Benjamin (6)

In discussing the work of Matthew Barney, and how he chooses to imply his body through the hybrid-like, 'Post Human' marriage of Houdini and Otto, I intend to focus upon Walter Benjamin's essay 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', as a way in which to propose exactly how this implication is mediated.

Benjamin suggests that the authentic art object (or in this case, the performance) exists outside of the realm of technical reproducibility. To reproduce it would be to remove it from its contextual place in time and space. Instead of one unique object existing in the world, there can be many, the historical testimony of the action having therefore been altered. This follows the basic premise of the photographic recording's attempt to bring the original object somehow paradoxically closer to the viewer. In this sense, the reproduction removes the original object from its context, thus removing what Benjamin terms its 'aura'. Barney implies that his body has been active within that space (the aura has been present) through the photographic mediation of video. I feel that because the viewer believes this notion of photographic reproduction to be 'authentic', then there is a belief of an implied presence (the mediation in Paul McCarthy's 'Bossy Burger' (1991) performance being very similar to this). It is the video record which primarily mediates the knowledge of Barney's performance to the audience. Without this recording, the sculptural debris would exist with greater autonomy, and therefore have more in common with Manzoni's previously mentioned 'Magic Base' (1961). The videos contain specific knowledge of the work in a far more accessible, aesthetic way, as opposed to conceptually.

The artistic 'corpus' left behind in Barney's events therefore become a collection of objects subjected to mental projection, which is then perhaps confirmed through the evolving video action. The static objects slowly loose their autonomy through greater knowledge of this past event. However, in relation back to Houdini's escapology, the documentation of these events still remains remote. There is a conceptual 'distancing' or detachment between viewer and object. As I have already explained, the body is implied through what the viewer sees or does not see on the video monitors, yet it is the perverse content of the action which I feel provides this 'specific distancing of the viewer.' Notions of uncovering grand narratives in Barney's work are often very difficult because of this distancing, his seductive imagery paradoxically enticing the viewer, yet repelling them through silent, seemingly confusing 'cropped' action, which enforces Benjamin's notion of the free will of the adjustable lens.

**Matthew Barney** Drawing Restraint 7, 1993

Faced with this curious paradox, Barney is also keen to produce extra, integral documentation for his works, his so-called 'Production Stills'. These are, as with any other film-maker's project, stylized, overtly constructed images produced during the course of the filming which allude to the events therein. It is also through using these images that the viewer is then able to perhaps further understand Barney's work, yet in Benjamin's terms it is again one stage further removed from the authenticity of the original art object, and almost severing its links with its original context, thus producing almost autonomous images. These production stills are highly seductive, and provide focus for the work. For example, the 'Drawing Restraint 7' (1993) series of works depicted cavorting satyrs in the back of a limousine, cruising around night time Manhattan (bearing strong relation to J.G. Ballard's 'Crash'). They are attempting to make marks on the car's interior ceiling with their horns, which leads to one of the most basic premises of the 'Restraint' works, to make a mark on a given surface against perverse physical situations. The production stills are perhaps clearer in content than the videos, and help to focus specific attention within the film, yet still provide little sense of any constructed meaning other than through its aesthetic value. Removed from the context of the video (as is often the case with still photography in general), they become enticingly seductive images which then act as blinkers, through which we are able to see the rest of the project.

Returning to the mediation of the implied body, I feel that, as the documentation of the event is remote, Barney can therefore retain a certain mystique about his creative process. Akin to Acconci's 'Power Field' theory, this proliferates the stereotypical mythology of the artist as someone with 'divine talent'. Indeed, Barney's installations do have an element of escapism within them. The audience engages with the work, conceptually completing the work for Barney by providing links between the elements, Barney consciously pointing to replica, history, memory and technology through his use of seemingly perverse and bizarre imagery.

In conclusion, Matthew Barney implies his body (and that of his counterpart influences - Harry Houdini and Jim Otto) through photographic mediation of a past event, onto an audience who then become a consciously integral part of the work. Even though the active, physical body is absent from the space, a 'Power Field' is established through the display of 'used' objects, which then slowly loose their autonomy through watching the unfolding video action. Barney's socio-sexual subject matter in implying his body is often perverse, hinting at themes from physical endurance to metabolism to the subversion of mythology, yet it is this reconsideration of the heroic 'everyday America' which prevails, and through the subliminal presence of his own body within this context, the voyeuristic audience become confronted with the dangerous, the erotic, and fundamentally, the secretive.

Footnotes

Klein, Yves Quoted by Rose Lee Goldberg in Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (Thames and Hudson 1988)
Rees, Michael Yale Sculpture, Flash Art No.170 May / June 1993
Barney, Matthew Quoted by Mary Haus in Matthew Barney, Art News November 1993
Barney, Matthew Quoted by Gordon Burn in 'Barney is their darling', The Observer 12/9/1993
Ref. 4
Benjamin, Walter The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Modern Art and Modernism, Open University 1982