“It is so very hard to become a man. . .Everything threatens to beat us down, to strip us of our biological birthright, to destroy us simply for asserting our essential, metaphysical manliness.” – Roger D. Hodge, Onan the Magnificent: The Triumph of the Testicle in Contemporary Art (2000)

Today, Matthew Barney will receive the prestigious Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award during the San Francisco International Film Festival, a prize whose past winners include filmmaker Errol Morris, Robert Frank and Kenneth Anger. The award recognizes unconventional methods in filmmaking; Barney, who often does away with narrative altogether in his films, is a perfect fit.

The POV award will honor Barney’s ongoing, twenty-four-year-old project, DRAWING RESTRAINT. The earliest incarnations of the series, begun in 1987 when Barney was a twenty-year-old Yale undergrad, feature the young artist alone in his studio. Having set up a several video cameras on tripods to film the action, Barney respectively jumped, reached, and lunged against various self-restraint systems. Holding a homemade drawing tool, Barney pushed against that which that held him back (either a physical blockade or a strapped harness system) in an effort to make a pencil mark on a far wall.  The wild, graphic lines left behind on the wall are the evidence of his repeated, near-futile efforts to overcome hindrance.

Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 2 (1998). Documentary photography by Matthew Barney. Copyright Matthew Barney.

This early work was strikingly simple, ambitious, and desperate. The young Barney, who had been a star quarterback throughout high school, tapped an athletic vocabulary that had by then become part of his parasympathetic nervous system. The results—forms generated through the properties of repetition, physicality, and failure—held as true in his studio as they had on the playing field. Part video, part performance, Barney has continued to semi-autobiographically probe the body’s relationship to gravity, strength, architecture and desire.

The DRAWING RESTRAINT series had a profound effect on me, as it continues to have on many. For a long time I considered it to be an inquiry into masculinity, in part because of Barney’s own athletic history (football is supposedly not a sport for girls), not to mention Barney’s use of his own physically fit, distinctively male body. Barney’s heroes— including Richard Serra and former Oakland Raider’s football player Jim Otto, each of whom he has directly employed or referenced in his art—broadcast an aura of testosterone in their own work. Otto, in particular, is famous for his toughness in the face of pain. In fifteen years, he never missed a game, and that includes post- and preseason games and injuries.

Matthew Barney, Video still from DRAWING RESTRAINT 3 (1988). Video by Randolph Huff. Image courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York. Copyright Matthew Barney.

As Barney’s stock grew in the art world (exponentially, as it turned out), the artist continued to shape and evolve DRAWING RESTRAINT. While he is best known for his lush, sprawling Cremaster Cycle films (1994–2008), Barney never stopped pushing his earliest series forward. While still minding the original thematic considerations, the last few projects have been more and more complex in narrative and production. The most well-known and ambitious of the series, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9—itself a feature length film starring Barney and his real-life partner Bjork as lovers aboard a Japanese whaling vessel—was released in 2005. Though not all of the later iterations of DRAWING RESTRAINT are as elaborate or expensive as DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, every evolution seems to result in a slicker and more sophisticated product.

All of which leads me to wonder: what happens when underdog athlete triumphs? Do we still root for him?  How does his style of play shift with the burden of expectation? Ironically, the market success that allowed Barney the platform and financial backing to expand upon the series is the very force which problematizes its condition; I can’t help but feel that the later work has lost the immediacy and fragile bluntness that made the early work so appealing.

Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 10 (2005). Documentary Photography by Reggi Shiobara. Image courtesy of Schaulager. Copyright Matthew Barney.

Concurrent with the film festival award, DRAWING RESTRAINT 17, one of Barney’s most recent works, will be screened here in San Francisco in the Kabuki Theater in Japantown. For the first time, he is not the protagonist of the series. Rather, in a split screen projection, a young blonde woman is shown scaling the sharp, modernist edges of the interior walls of the Schaulager Museum in Basel, Switzerland. The action echoes several earlier iterations of the DRAWING RESTRAINT series, in which Barney scaled museum walls (particularly, DRAWING RESTRAINT 11 and 12). This new work also recalls Barney’s video, Blind Perineum (1991), in which the artist scaled the walls of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, wearing nothing but the harness to secure his climb.

The presence of a female lead prompts new possibilities in Drawing Restraint, or at least, new questions. While Barney’s Cremaster Cycle films are often considered in relation to masculine and feminine differentiation and performance (the title refers directly to the thin muscle which raises and lowers testicles in accordance with temperature, fear, or stimulation), the DRAWING RESTRAINT series is consistently described in terms of a gender-neutral “body” as it confronts resistance in space. The presence of the young, athletic woman in DRAWING RESTRAINT 17 is an unexpected shift, and one that illuminates our refusal to see Barney’s maleness in the first place, at least in the case of the DRAWING RESTRAINT project.  Why is it that we notice the implications of gender only when a female is the body is in question, and how do the stakes of the project change along with the sex of its protagonist?  Whether or not Barney deliberately calls this issue into question with his use of a female heroine is almost beside the point. The choice cannot, and should not, go overlooked; just like that, a series that has recently risked becoming formulaic awakens to change.

Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 17 (2011). Photograph by Hugh Glendinning. Image courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York. Copyright Matthew Barney.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Lorna Simpson, "1957–2009 Interiors #3," 2009

Human Nature is the remarkably, almost assaultingly, immense title of Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s current exhibition of art from its contemporary collection. But a walk through the galleries will quickly show you that immensity is actually far from the point. Unlike past exhibitions with similar sounding names—The Family of Man, MoMA’s 1955 paean to unity, comes to mind–the point of this show is categories. The images and objects in it, all made since ’68, are almost too tightly grouped. There’s body-centered, identity-searching work by Hannah Wilke, Carlee Fernandez and Ana Mendieta all in a row; a nostalgic assemblage by Betye Saar right across from an equally history-heavy sculpture by Saar’s daughter, Alison; pithy, politically charged text pieces by Mel Bochner, Glenn Ligon and John Baldessari hang together in the same room as Bruce Nauman’s neon pinwheel of weighty adjectives, also called Human Nature and the loosely the inspiration for this show.

When I visited the exhibition a week ago, I spent a particularly long time with a series of vintage portraits by agile, conscientious Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson. The portraits dealt with categories in a way that seemed more compelling, and more human, then the show on the whole. They captured the amazing ability people have to become what they see in the world—to tailor themselves to categories—without making this proclivity for fitting in seem any less mystifying then it really is.

Daniela Comani, "Happy Marriage #02," Edition of 5, Archival pigment print, 20 x 24 inches.

Daniela Comani, "Happy Marriage," Installation view, Archival pigment prints. Courtesy Charlie James Gallery.

A few years ago, Simpson discovered some photographs from 1957, most of a woman, and some of a man. The couple posed in ways that recalled Hollywood pin-ups despite their modest domicile. Simpson restaged the images, playing the roles and adopting the poses of both man and woman herself. The resulting photos, on view at LACMA  and efficiently titled 1957–2009 Interiors #3, show the artist beside a chess board or wielding a guitar, wearing a plaid suit, an Elvis-worthy white shirt and rolled up slacks, or a cleavage-stressing blouse with tight black shorts and black heels to match. The “couple” looks like the mingling of sleek gorgeousness that could have resulted had Nat King Cole and Lena Horne become a thing. Hung interspersed with the originals, Simpson’s restaged photos don’t “reveal” anything about their subjects. Instead, they drive home just how posed and idiosyncrasy-free home-made images can be.

I thought of Simpson when, last Saturday, I saw Berlin-based artist Daniela Comani’s Happy Marriage project, a series of staged photographs on view at Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown. Like Simpson, Comani plays both male and female roles in digitally altered portraits of a marriage that, though cliché to extreme, feels wholly believable. If Simpson’s series channels 50s pin-ups, Comani’s channels present-day Bohemia. The couple reads classics in bed, wears plaid, buys wine and cheese and, I suspect, recycles religiously. That they are both women who have uncannily similar features is a surprisingly easy detail to overlook. Comani plays husband and wife so comfortably that what should be subversive—this happy marriage isn’t just queer, but practically incestuous in its self-involvement—instead feels perfectly predictable.

Alice B. Toklas (rear) and her lover, Gertrude Stein, in Venice, Italy, in 1908.

The fabulously mannish writer Gertrude Stein and her more-or-less wife Alice B. Toklas, delicate and domestic despite her thin black mustache, had a marriage that, by most apparent measures, should have been deviant or at least unconventional. But they didn’t see it that way.

When a young journalist named Robert Duncan asked Toklas whether she and Stein ever felt “set apart” (he was referring to their Jewishness, but Toklas’ response can safely be extrapolated), she replied, “Never. We never had any feeling of any minority. We weren’t the minority. We represented America.” And so they did, Alice with her French cooking tips (The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook preceded Julia Child’s first by seven years), Stein with her by-the-bootstraps wealth and both with their pioneering sense of intellectual entitlement.

Neither Comani’s nor Simpson’s projects feature “the minority” either. They portray people who, at least in the way the pose themselves, live at the center of cultural convention.

What happens when language fails? Madness.

'The Object' in Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse, 2010. Image courtesy of the Artist; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam; Matt's Gallery, London and MONITOR, Rome.

In a crumbling estate in the English countryside, ‘The Object’ descends upon a peculiar liberal upper class family. No one recognises him as human. As he mechanically and menacingly eats their books and expels them, language, meaning, places and perception deteriorate into obscurity.

This is the premise of British artist Nathaniel Mellors’ work ‘Ourhouse‘ – an absurdist dramatic series now on show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. ‘Ourhouse’ tells the story of the Maddox-Wilson’s – an unconventional and idiosyncratic bohemian family whose lives malfunction when a large white-haired man in a track suit descends upon their house.

The hip head of the patriarchal structure, ‘Daddy’ is married to ‘Babydoll’ who is not much older than his son from a previous marriage, Truson, and adopted son, Faxon. Alcoholic Uncle Tommy who is at times contained within a television set, and gardener ‘Bobby Jobby’ who Babydoll uses as a childish plaything, round out this strange and eclectic cast of characters.

'Bobby Jobby and Babydoll' in Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse, 2010. Image courtesy of the Artist; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam; Matt's Gallery, London and MONITOR, Rome.

When ‘The Object’ arrives at the end of Episode 1, no one can quite figure out what it is – or if ‘it’ is even and ‘it.’ Perhaps it is an ‘is’, or a skittle, an hourglass, a reaper. It seems to affect speech, vision and auditory sensations – Truson is overwhelmed by the ‘sound of death‘ and Babydoll complains of the wind inside the house. After an increasingly nonsensical Beckett-like argument it is eventually deemed a ‘Thingy’ and everyone goes off to the great British institutions – the pub.

'Uncle Tommy' in Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse, 2010. Image courtesy of the Artist; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam; Matt's Gallery, London and MONITOR, Rome.

At the pub, a place where every round of drinks costs 50 pence, the obscurity increases. Uncle Tommy takes his place within the television set on the bar and Daddy and Babydoll’s mannerisms, dress and speech transform to take on a working class affect. Is this a purposely adopted, a guise taken on for the good old British pub, or is this the influence of ‘The Object’?

'Daddy and Babydoll' in Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse, 2010. Image courtesy of the Artist; Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam; Matt's Gallery, London and MONITOR, Rome.

Mellors’ ongoing series examines the relationships between language and meaning. When language is lost, as in the case of Bobby Jobby who loses the ability to articulate his thoughts, so does all meaning. Without language he cannot communicate, even visually. Asked to draw his thoughts, they come out as a series of shapes and colours, completely disconnected from what he is desperately trying to convey. It is clear that whoever controls language, controls meaning in the world.

The impeccably shot drama progresses almost indistinguishably from a television series – and I’m hooked. Like a TV junkie, I eagerly await the completion of Episode 3 (Episode 4 is also on view, however never being one to skip ahead I cannot bring myself to watch it quite yet). A peek at the script raises both excitement and curiosity at how Mellors is going to translate a stream of consciousness visualised inside the body of ‘The Object’ onto the screen – it will require a vision of madness indeed.

Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest

In a former life, Walead Beshty may have rubbed elbows with Patti Smith. Flaunting her contemptuous disregard for the cautionary advice of her peers, Smith famously denounced words as mere “rules and regulations” in her rendition of Van Morrison’s “Gloria.” In one unruly, titillating performance, Smith flipped the good ol’ boys’ fraternity of rock and roll on its ear by lampooning the muffled sexism of the music industry, exposing the frivolous laws that command its economy. In other words, let’s not shy away from the fact that sex sells in this game, kiddo.  Similarly, the art world has its own rulebook.  And Beshty has a shredder.

The first rule of art market is you do not talk about art market. The vernacular of commodity is strictly verboten, seductive aesthetics are ill-advised, and materiality is secondary to concept. The clandestine, operational logistics of the art world are something of an urban legend—on which Beshty shines an astute light. In a 2009 interview with BOMB Magazine, the artist acknowledged this hush-hush stigma, stating: “Any art effect people don’t like, or find alienating, is ascribed to the market. In this, and in all other aspects of art making, I think transparency is the only way to destabilize the mythologies of the art market, and of art in general.” In his current exhibition at Regen Projects (Los Angeles, CA), PROCESSCOLORFIELD, Beshty takes a wily swipe at the absurdity of the art world’s covertness with more than twenty-five new works, ranging from photograms to readymades to the mulched remains of works “unfit for exhibition.” He deftly navigates the precinct between improvisation and calculation, as well as object and material, while subverting the rules that govern each model.

With a discerning hand, Beshty manipulates the analog qualities of film in his “Black Curl” photogram series. Perhaps a tangential nod to his 2006 “Picture Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light” works, which were the result of a roll of film’s unintentional exposure to an airport X-ray machine, Beshty’s most recent photograms hypostatize fluke relationships between photo paper and color structures into electrified bands of twilight hues.  Austere blocks of black and white border sherbet-colored ribbons of pink and orange, as if we were peeking at the garish Los Angeles sunset through a haphazard set of blinds.

Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Brian Forrest

Reflecting the vibrant patterning of the photograms are Beshty’s “Copper Surrogates,” whose polished surfaces are tarnished with alarmingly prevalent fingerprints, smears and coffee mug rings. To the seasoned gallery-goer, the constellation of blemishes on the works’ surface is cause for stifled panic, as art-viewing policy is built upon a longstanding empire of “Don’t Touch.” This is Beshty’s guerrilla erosion of one of art’s most fortified rules.  Literally used as workspace for the duration of a prior exhibition, the sullied copper counters display traces of conversations past, meetings adjourned and infrastructures built—empirical evidence that alludes to the presence of the industry, the gallerist and the collector.

Finally, in a tongue-in-cheek intimation of the sway of institutions, Beshty’s “Selected Works” reframe the notion of artistic failure, unearthing the unseen practice behind the tradition of curating and contextualization. Shredding his self-declared “unsuccessful works,” Beshty turned the refused scraps and slivers of photos and paintings into reconstituted mulch, displaying the literal and conceptual debris of exploratory authorship in an unconventionally candid manifestation. In his forthright acknowledgement of the tensions between the material and the visual, as well as between posturing and actuality, Beshty bends the rules with dexterous maneuvering and a covert smidge of sensory seduction. The art market never saw it coming.

PROCESSCOLORFIELD is on view through May 14, 2011.

The notion of visibility often has a reaction that incites the magnetic forces of attraction or repulsion. The impulse to highlight or hide visual indications of ideologies is at the core of the separate solo shows of artists Cinthia Marcelle and Nicolás Robbio. Although billed as two separate exhibitions in the admittedly large Galeria Vermelho, it’s quite impossible to resist conceptual association of the two shows. Marcelle’s project makes visible societal structures that are complicated, messy, and hard to visualize while Robbio pulls apart the precise visual symbology of power codes.

Cinthia Marcelle, Confronto, 2005

The notion of financial crisis is at the crux of Marcelle’s work; her photographs, video, and sculptures reveal an invented residue of economic structures. Marcelle has become known for her video works which make visible the circuits of economics and social structures through performative actions or vehicles that create, or are based on, a geometrical form. These futile and subtly absurd enactments produce a contradictory sense of becoming through their repetition of form. It is from this video work that Marcelle recently won the significant 2010 Pinchuk Art Centre’s Future Generation Art Prize.

Cinthia Marcelle, Economia, 2011

The installation, Zero de Conduta expands this project with sculpture and photography. Economia, is a sculptural form suspended between the first and second levels of the gallery, a visual manifestation of the invisible air currents that flow through the space. The most poignant works in the show are the photographic diptychs on the second level of the gallery; these formally staged images of poetic acts have a gravity that Economia is unable to capture in its frozen metal ribbons.

Cinthia Marcelle, O Cosmopolita, 2011, courtesy Galeria Vermelho

Nestled upstairs in an exhibition space, Robbio’s installation Bandeira em Branco Não É Bandeira Branca recalls display techniques of a poorly funded museum. His source materials are insignia found within the architecture of Recife, Brazil.

Nicolás Ribbio, untitled, 2011

The antiquated practice of heraldry as a means to identify status and authority has evolved into an ornamentation whose visibility is absorbed by the city. Robbio takes the visual cues of a system deeply rooted in the symbology of power, deconstructs them, and develops a new idiosyncratic visual system of drawings and objects. Ribbio has created an artistic practice that takes existing structures and subverts their framework to build new systems, enabling possibility within rigidness. Isolating and disrupting these emblematic signs uncloaks a repertoire of signifiers of masculinity turned on their head, depraved of power, and transformed into curious, wry gestures.

Nicolas Ribbio, untitled, 2011, courtesy Galeria Vermelho

The neighboring shows generate an architecture of structures in a constant state of scaffolding and crumbling, an edifice that sways between construction and deconstruction.

Zero de Conduta and Bandeira em Branco Não É Bandeira Branca will run through May 21st at Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo, Brazil.

For this edition of Fan Mail, Stephanie Liner has been selected from a group of worthy submissions.  If you would like to be considered, please submit to info@dailyserving.com a link to your website with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line.  Two artists are featured each month – the next one could be you!

Looking at Stephanie Liner’s Orbs, I immediately think of the panoramic sugar egg that had a place in the Easter baskets of my childhood.  Both are egg-shaped and feature a window opening into an interior vignette.  In fact, the panoramic egg is a product of the Victorian age as is the Queen Anne style, which is a source of inspiration for the artist.  Yet there the similarities end, for while decorative, Liner’s life-sized Orbs are created with a decidedly more subversive intention.

Liner is inspired by interiors of the historic southern United States and, in particular, the Queen Anne style – elements of which she believes contain latent meaning about the societies that created them.  The aforementioned Orb, a part of her Momentos of a Doomed Construct series, is defined by decorative and corporeal elements much like Liner’s entire practice.  Constructed of plywood and typically covered in a floral textile skin, Liner’s Orbs are occupied by a seated, self-contained female figure with billowing skirts.  In another part of the series, the artist connects the female form to furniture in a more literal way.  The figure stands with hands on hips to combine with a sculptural element set on cabriole legs in mimic of a Queen Anne wing-back chair.  Through each piece, Liner seeks to create a crafts-based visual language to address historic gender roles that she believes are perpetuated today.

The physicality of Liner’s work and its real world subject matter lends itself easily to performance, which typically accompanies her installations.  The 2009 performance for Memories of a Doomed Construct exhibit at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh gallery encouraged interaction between visitor and model.  Peering into an Orb, the viewer was met with the stare of a live female model from within – creating an uncomfortable, voyeuristic experience.  Carefully staged moments of gazing and objectification are intended to make us think critically about gender.

Liner holds a Master of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin at Madison as well as a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Design at North Carolina State University.  Look for Liner’s Mementos of a Doomed Construct in Out of Fashion, a group show debuting this November at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art that will address ‘the histories of fashion as vessels of time, nature and memory’.  In July 2012, Liner’s work will join 40 Under 40 at the Renwick Gallery for decorative arts and crafts in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

This Sunday, From the DS Archives brings you avant-garde Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, who has recent paintings and sculptures up now through May 7th at Gagosian Gallery in Rome. A significant retrospective of the artist opens at the Reina Sofia, Madrid on May 10th; the exhibition will then travel to the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York through 2012.

This article was originally written by Rebekah Drysdale on April 27, 2009.

Gagosian Gallery is presenting two major exhibitions in New York and Beverly Hills to celebrate Yayoi Kusama’s eightieth year. The artist, born in Japan in 1929, started painting with polka dots and nets as motifs around the age of ten. She moved to the United States in 1957, where she showed large scale paintings, soft sculptures, and environmental installations using electric lights and mirrors. From 1998-1999, a major retrospective opened at theLos Angeles County Museum of Art and traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

The exhibition in New York, which opened on April 16th, features a large yellow pumpkin sculpture with black spots in a specifically designed space at the front of the gallery. This piece is based on a similar work Kusama showed at the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993 – a mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures in which the artist resided in color-coordinated attire. The pumpkin, made of fiberglass and reinforced plastic, represents a type of self portrait or alter ego for the artist, whose compulsive covering of surfaces and infinite repetition of dots, patterns, and forms is characteristic of her entire body of work.

For the back of the gallery, Kusama has constructed a hypnotic optical environment, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity (2009), featuring the infinite interactions between lights, mirrors, and water. Viewers step into a dark chamber that is softly lit by several gleaming golden lights, closing the door behind them. Standing on a platform surrounded by water, the viewer is reflected in this “infinity room” by walls of mirrors. This experiential encounter with oneself represents the artist’s “preoccupation with mortality, as well as with enlightenment, solitude, nothingness, and the mysteries of the physical and metaphysical universe,” as stated in the press release.

The exhibition in California will open on May 30th and last until July 17th. The exhibition in New York will remain at the gallery’s location on West 24th Street until June 27th.

Yayoi Kusama currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.