<nettime-ann> [event] [It's LIQUID News] Matthew Barney - The Occidental Guest

["IT'S LIQUID" <itsliquid@domeus.it>]

.

Untitled Document

     Matthew Barney
      The Occidental Guest


      Dates: April 7 - May 13, 2006

      Location: Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24 Street New York, NY 10011
(Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 - 6)

      Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work
by
 Matthew Barney. An acclaimed artist whose conceptual program spans film,
sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance, Barney's pairing of
meticulously developed metaphor with seductive visual rigor has resulted
in visionary masterworks in all media since the early nineties.
    
      This exhibition will consist of sculptures and drawings related to
hi
s recent project DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 and a new action DRAWING RESTRAINT
13.
 DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 is the most complex installment in an ongoing series
begun in 1987. Barney's motivation for the series is to explore
"resistanceas a pre-requisite for development and a vehicle for
creativity," drawing parallels between the biological system of
situation/condition/production and the artistic manifestations of
psychosexual drives. The feature film DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 features Barney
and musician Bjork, who also scored the film, as Occidental Guests aboard
a whaling vessel in the Sea of Japan whose seemingly predestined meeting
results in an unconventional romance. Throughout the work, Barney
addresses various themes surrounding the history andculture of Japan
including the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling,
and the supplantation of blubber with refined petroleum foroil.

      The drawings and sculptures featured in this exhibition focus on
therelationship between the Japanese Hosts and the titular Occidental
Guests,the male and female protagonists whose subsequent transformation
powers the film's action. From the guests' partaking in a tea ceremony to
the historical backdrop of General MacArthur's lifting of the whaling
moratorium, Barney figures the social, historical, and formal aspects of
the host/guest dynamic as a method of physical and psychological
restraint. To this effect, Barney creates sculptures recalling the
architecture of the vessel and the physical transformations that take
place. Large-scale thermoplastic sculptures echo the host/guest
relationship, while functioning as a facility for unrestrained organic
overflow. Relating this discourse in a series of graphite and mixed media
drawings, Barney captures the film's symbology in eroticized images that
chart the effects of physical limitation and libidinal release. The
site-specific performance DRAWING RESTRAINT 13 acts as a formal and
thematic coda for the exhibition.

      Matthew Barney was born in 1967 and studied art at Yale University.
He has received numerous awards including the Aperto prize at the 1993
Venice Biennale and the 1996 Hugo Boss Award. He has been included in
group exhibitions worldwide such as Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany; the
Whitney Biennials of 1993 and 1995; and the groundbreaking "Post-Human"
exhibition in 1992. His solo exhibition "The Cremaster Cycle," organized
by the Solomon R.
 Guggenheim Museum, New York, traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and
the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The large-scale exhibition
of the entire "Drawing Restraint" series will be on view at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art from June 23-September 19, 2006, after
touring to the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and
the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, in 2005. The Museum of
Modern Art and the Japan Society will premiere DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 on
March 28th followed by a
 theatrical run at New York City's IFC Theatre beginning March 29th. The
storyboards for DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 will be on view at John McWhinnie @
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York City. A two-part artist's book will
be available.


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