Matthew Barney je americký umelec, ktorý pracuje v oblasti sochárstva, fotografie, kresby a filmu. Jeho rané diela boli sochárske inštalácie kombinované s performanciou a videom. V rokoch 1994 až 2002 vytvoril "Cremaster Cycle", sériu piatich celovečerných filmov, ktoré boli označené za "jeden z najimaginatívnejších a najbrilantnejších počinov v histórii avantgardnej kinematografie".
Tracing artists' increasing use of their bodies as subject and actual material of their artworks, this title charts the rise of new forms of expression such as Body Art, Happenings, Performance and Live Art.
On the occasion of a major exhibition, performance, and film premiere, this book considers Matthew Barney's epic seven-year project, an odyssey of death and its mythologies. This long-awaited volume documents the full breadth of this ambitious new project, the first major series by the artist since the legendary Cremaster cycle. River of Fundament is directly inspired by Norman Mailer's Egyptian novel [book:Ancient Evenings|840250, his infamous classic that chronicled the passage of a narrator through the stations of death and reincarnation. In a sequence of unique live performances, a series of massive sculptures, and, finally, a marathon-length opera in cinematic form, made with the artist's longtime collaborator, the composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney has elaborated a richly perverse and complex universe in which mythology, iconography, narrative, sex, and death are inextricably entwined.Organized according to the narrative structure of the film, the book features sculptures (made from elemental materials such as iron, sulfur, bronze, lead, salt, and copper), drawings, film and live performance stills, storyboards, and original scores by Bepler. A comprehensive essay on the exhibition and film project by Okwui Enwezor provides an overview of the entire project. The book also includes contributions by literary theorist Homi K. Bhabha and critic Hilton Als, as well as facsimiles of the playbills produced for the related live performances.
A Living Museum Space - The Vienna State Opera Safety Curtain
This volume documents the long-term initiative 'Safety Curtain' of Museum in progress, a project that is unique in the world. The exhibition series in the Vienna State Opera has represented a symbolic interface between performance and visual arts since 1998. It also creates a link between thorny historical questions and contemporary ways to address them. Beyond the actual curtain images that have originated over the years an associative and sensuous view to further related works of the participating artists in several different media forms is presented. The art project 'Safety Curtain', because of its exceptional quality, its year-long existence and its unusual dimension of 175 m² is singular and enables a distinctive perspective of art history of the past twenty years.