Who gets more visceral than Matthew Barney.
Matthew Barney ‘Cremaster’
I went to hear him in conversation with Jonathan Bepler. Together they are developing a new film project ‘River of Fundament’.
River of Fundament
The starting point for this project is Norman Mailers 1983 novel ‘Ancient Evenings’ which tells stories of reincarnation, mythology, violent and hyper sexual gods from the age of the pharaohs in Egypt. I haven’t read this book but it is described by readers as anything from a literary masterpiece of astounding brilliance, the greatest gay love story ever told though to disgusting grotesque violence and simply masturbating shit onto the page.
Matthew Barney, Ancient Evenings: Ba Libretto, 2009, Ink, graphite and gold leaf on paperback copy of Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer, on carved salt base
Matthew Barney always appears so serious and deliberating. He doesn’t give the impression that the work he will produce will be messy and sticky and barely possible to look at.
Unphased by a question from the audience about his feelings regarding an afterlife he replied in the same thoughtful manner giving respect to an off the wall interjection from someone recently bereaved.
We were shown unedited film excerpts from the work so far. They get under your skin.
There is beauty and majesty in shots filmed at a steel foundry and there are the basest bodily functions performed as ritual celebrations. It is operatic in conception and mixes the filming of live performance with more choreographed staging a scene to be filmed.
His response to why he chose such a character as Norman Mailer as inspiration is that he prefers to work with a subject that repels as well as attracts him.
He believes this dichotomy of feelings gives his work an edge, a challenge – like the artist Andrew Salgado explained when asked why he chose to paint a serial killer.
Don’t make it easy.
Those feelings are translated in to the work and the audience becomes challenged too.
Matthew Barney ‘Cremaster’
The definition of visceral – relating to deep inner feelings rather than the intellect.
So a deep spiritual experience could be visceral but not unsettling.
I think ‘River of Fundament’ will be intellectually challenging and visceral and quite unsettling.
There will also be moments of wonder that will be the reward for having to watch some of it squinting through your fingers.
Also as part of The Manchester International Festival was a Tino Sehgal performance piece ‘This Variation’ which tapped into the visceral.
Mayfield Depot
Directed into a dark space of the Mayfield Depot the first reaction is to reach out – when these tentative approaches touch another body the reaction is to pull back.
The lighting level is so low that on entering the space the new participant is blind. In the space are an unknown number of performers beat boxing, singing, or calling out questions.
In the pitch black I decided the best policy was to remain immobile. Voices chanted and bodies began to move, dancing and stamping and sweeping past so close the air was alive, brushing my body so close while I stood, not believing they could see me, waiting for a major impact. I imagined I had been captured in the forest and was at the mercy of a wild and uncontrolled people, unable to escape. It went on long enough to worry how I would ever get out but eventually my eyes or the light levels adjusted and I was able to witness more people stumbling into the space before I left feeling I had truly been transported elsewhere.
In Venice at the Biennale there were more artists who delivered work that also had a visceral impact.
The most unsettling was perhaps at the pavilion of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva was ‘exploring the effects of the silk route and how mobility can spread disease as well as commerce.
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva ‘Silentio Pathologia’
A route through the pavilion was mapped out in curtains made from the flayed skins of albino rats and the woven cocoons of silk worms.
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva ‘Silentio Pathologia’
It was the smell that was most powerful and also the sight of some live rats in wire cages trapped amid the stench of the death of their own kind.
Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva ‘Silentio Pathologia’
Another but very different bodily impact came from Poland.
Konrad Smolenski created a sound installation which was so loud as to be unbearable to approach.
Konrad Smolenski ‘Everything was forever, Until it was no more’
Kimsooja in the Korean Pavilion also plunged the visitors into darkness but it was not a threatening space, aware of the other people who had entered the small space alongside you by number system it was not isolated or long enough to develop any real sense of displacement.
Korean Pavilion
The entrance however was a more alarming experience, supposedly a kaleidoscopic light diffraction experience it was in fact an embarrassing realisation that the mirror flooring showed right up your skirt.
Petrit Halilaj for Kosovo used memory to dig into the psyche of everyone who grew up able to dig and play in the soil.
Petrit Halilaj
He created an earth tunnel inspired by memories of a rural childhood before displacement, destruction and exodus reshaped his world.
Petrit Halilaj
Able to enter this dark space sprouting with twigs and roots like the lair of some large beast I was glad to exit without encountering some living thing to make me shriek.
I might have had a rural childhood too but now I am firmly urban and terrified of those tiny creatures that inhabit the wild.
Ali Kazma for Turkey explored the reactions we have to our own body in his video installation ‘Resistance’.
Ali Kazma ‘Resistance’
A line of body builders flex their muscles on the giant screen; a group of young girls in the audience squirm in disgust.
Ali Kazma ‘Resistence’
Not sure how I would bring these sorts of feelings into my own work but it is an interesting exercise to think about.
These feelings which are so fundamental, so deep within that to stir them is to feel alive, be conscious of mortality.
work in progress
Susan Eyre 