Matthew Barney in Manchester

In April 2003 I was approached by a friend of mine who is now on the editorial board of The Herald of Europe (“Вестник Европы”), to do a few translations for their forthcoming first English issue, from Russian into English. I translated a lot of texts, but then it took them a year and a half to actually publish the journal. By September 2004 the majority of texts became outdated, except one, and that was a review of Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle by Alexander Parschikov (it is now available online at The Herald‘s website, slightly edited for publication and, alas, uncredited, like all translations). It was a very deep review, as you would consider any review that references Samuel Beckett in the very first paragraph. Back then it was the first time ever that I read the name of Barney, and my natural curiosity was helped by detailed descriptions of all five films.

This, for instance, is what you could see in The Cremaster 1:

One of the protagonists finds herself under a table that is covered with a white cloth. She wears a skimpy light silk dress and dances slowly around the hollow table-leg, lying on her back. Then she makes a hole in the tablecloth with her hairpin, and surreptitiously steals some grapes, which magically roll through her body and pour onto the floor through a hole in the high heel of her mule. When they reach the floor, the grapes link together like necklaces and form regular, symmetrical, mirror-image patterns. The figures they form look like female genitalia, and replicating this, the chains of girls in the football stadium arrange themselves into identical biomorphic shapes. The film has no beginning and no resolution: the balloons will never land, the protagonist will go on building new figures out of the grapes, stretching slowly like a mollusc as she looks for a lipstick; the air hostesses will not break their silence, and the smiles of the girls in the stadium are frozen for eternity. Perhaps, the protagonist, hidden from these sculpture-like air hostesses, expresses their subconscious desires, their biological rhythms and their suppressed eroticism.

The reviewer concluded that

…Barney takes his characters from the Pantheon of digital images that represent nothing but their own electronic essence. In his works we find an epic uniformity, a never-ending movement towards some objective. Nothing is clearly defined or attainable; rather there are opal lights reflecting on surfaces, high-molecular materials, and artificial or natural extensions of the human body. This leaves only one question. Where do these extensions take us?

The Manchester audience, especially that part of it which is better versed in Barney’s art than either me or Richard Fair, probably already knows a very detailed and long-winded answer because Matthew Barney’s genius has now marked Manchester with its presence. All in all, Manchester has done incredibly well for its first International Festival. We had Chopin’s music at the Museum of Science and Industry; Carlos Acosta is performing both classical and modern ballet numbers at The Lowry; jazz musicians entertained everyone who would drop in to the Festival Pavilion; we had a maverick Peter Sellars uttering age-old paradigms at the Guardian Debate; and eventually we had Guardian of the Veil, complete with urinating women and an impotent bull. And all this is against the backdrop of Barbra Streisand at the M.E.N. Arena on Tuesday and the forthcoming final performance of The Tempest at the Royal Exchange Theatre.

On Thursday night Deansgate was swarming with people in all sorts of evening frocks going to see Il Tempo del Postino. I haven’t been to the performance, but the headline “What if an exhibition was not about occupying space but about occupying time? Can contemporary art be interpreted outside of a traditional gallery environment?” doesn’t strike me as novel. André Malraux famously called on creating a “museum without walls”, which in simple terms means a museum in your head where you can wander at your leisure. Which means, in turn, that you’re occupying time while contemplating and interpreting art outside any kind of physical space.

And yet it looks like the show has gone the extra mile because Richard Fair says in his review:

I knew before the piece – Guardian of the Veil by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler – that I was in for something different. Something challenging. Apart from what was going on stage, all around the auditorium were actors dressed in IRA-type uniform brandishing ukuleles. Let me tell you, if that was the chosen weapon of the paramilitary group in the seventies the troubles would have ended a long time ago.

Back to the question then: do art and politics mix? Should art and politics mix? Or should we simply wander from an excited bull to a guy with a dog strapped to his head, simply recognising that their nature as images and wandering off, without ever finding an idea behind an image?

Sometimes I feel that contemporary art is a mere, yet constant, wandering-off.

Read more:

Richard Fair, Manchester International Festival: Day 16 (BBC Manchester Blog).
Manchester International Festival: Il Tempo del Postino (Mancubist.co.uk).