Re-Master

GUEST BLOGGER: Kate Robinson, PERFORMA

Mathew Barney to present DE LAMA LAMINA and Other Short Films
Wednesday, June 20 at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets: $15 (Adults) $5 (Members)
IFC CENTER
323 Avenue of the Americas (West Third Street)
(212) 924-7771
http://www.ifccenter.com/event?eventid=999834

See the artist Mathew Barney tonight! See the art of Mathew Barney tonight, too. The artist will be at IFC tonight to present three of his rarely-screened short films, spanning a decade of his work.

The screening will begin with ‘De Lama Lamina’ (2004) ‘ leave it to Barney to begin in the middle, at least chronologically speaking. Set in Brazil, this performance-film, which is a collaboration with the musician Arto Lindsay, explores the culture and religion of the Afro-Brazilian spectacle of Carnaval and the geography of place.

‘Scab Action,’ (1998) the artists first video work, captures the esthetic of physical strain and pain. As viewers are subjected to nauseating, prolonged close-ups of a facial blemish (Barney’s own), the artist subjects himself to surgery by razor, needles and nose-pliers. (Obviously there is a conscious allusion to ‘ 70s body art here, the grand gestures of self-laceration in all of their psycho-symbolic meaning, but Barney’s interest seems to be less about the effect of the action on the subject than his own child-like fixation with the grotesque and its effect on the viewer.

The screening will conclude with Barney’s most recent film-performance, ‘Drawing Restraint 13′ (2007), which is part of an on-going series of ‘Drawing Restraint’ projects, in which the athletic artists hooks himself up to various encumbering apparatuses in an attempt at free-expression. In ‘Drawing Restraint 13′ Barney emerges from a large crate dressed as General MacArthur, walks across a platform, and then falls into a vat of petroleum jelly. Executed behind closed doors at New York’s Barbara Gladstone Gallery, which at the time was exhibiting work of Barney’s from ‘Drawing Restraint 9,’ the production of ‘Drawing Restraint 13′ conflates the two works to show that the new is always made in the free-limitation of the past.

Don’t expect the expected. What you see is what you see.

Posted by Guest Blogger | Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 | Leave a Response