You know that anyone who makes an epic six-hour film about a river of shit doesn’t give much of a crap about making things easy for the viewer. But Matthew Barney has never been a particularly compromising artist. From the grandiose ‘Cremaster’ cycle through to this year’s overwhelming shit-flick ‘River of Fundament’, the American artist has created a wonderfully complex, beautiful body of work that has seen him become one of the biggest deals in contemporary art. It’s ‘River of Fundament’ that serves as the basis for the five sculptures and seven engravings in this exhibition.
The engravings depict characters from the film – Egyptian gods carved into zinc, rays of light exploding from their butts – but they’re not particularly good images. They look like the doodlings of a bored teenager, carved into a school desk.
The sculptures, though, are a class apart – quiet and subtle, yet powerful and imposing. Barney is all about Big Symbolism, capital B, capital S, which means that you don’t need to have seen ‘River of Fundament’ to understand the grand themes at play here.
The huge chassis of an American car, cast in zinc and placed on four wooden blocks, ‘Crown Victoria’ is the most striking work. It’s a hulking, charred, grey mass, flanked either side by two smaller but equally grey chunks of coral-like metal. The grille of that same car lies in another room, its front plated in gold while a final sculpture features a long metal tool resting on a cone of crystallised sulphur.
The works are imposing and bold. They consider death, rebirth and regeneration. By transforming symbols of the dead American car industry into stark, beautiful cultural artefacts, Barney is depicting beauty born from destruction. Of course the symbolism is more complicated than that, but this is what Barney excels at – making art that feels bigger than you.
Eddy Frankel