The Mythology of Matthew Barney
The celebrated artist Matthew Barney, who works across sculpture, photography, drawing and film, has created something of his own visual language – intriguing, at times inscrutable, always unforgettable. His 2018 film Redoubt, set in the wilderness of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains with a cast of real endangered wolves and hunters, expands his complex visual universe. The film stars the artist as the character of The Engraver, recording the sublime landscape while he too is hunted. Like Drawing Restraint (1987–), The Cremaster Cycle series (1994–2002) and River of Fundament (2014) before it, Redoubt is an epic masterpiece rich in art historical and mythological detail that cements Barney’s reputation as one of the most intriguing artists of our time.
VAULT spoke to Barney about mythology, American history, trauma and choreography.
Image credit: Installation view
Matthew Barney,
Basin Creek Burn, 2018,
cast and machined brass, cast copper, cast lead and cast polycaprolactone
84.5 x 1,154.4 x 309.9 cm,
in Matthew Barney: Redoubt, 2021,
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London.
Photo: Mark Blower
Thank you Matthew, for your time. It’s a great honour to speak to you, specifically about Redoubt (a full-length feature set in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain range that follows a wolf hunt in a snowy landscape over several days), which is accompanied by a series of sculptures objects and etchings, specifically burnt trees found in the aftermath of a fire. I’m interested in what comes first, the film or the sculptural objects that accompany it?
I think Redoubt belongs to the tradition of portraiture much more than other work I’ve made. I set out to make a portrait of a place that I knew quite well, but I wanted to explore it in a deeper way. And so, in the way that I often start with place, I went to look at the locations and spent time around the region and in the burnt forests trying to figure out how I could bring a production into these locations, which would be hard to reach in the winter. There was a pragmatic aspect to it, but a pretty strong desire to foreground that landscape. It really started as an exercise of location scouting – being around those trees and looking at them and thinking about them, as a backdrop for the film but also as objects in their own right. And I think I wondered, while I was shooting, whether some of those trees could be brought back to the studio and worked with. I worried initially that the sense of trauma the trees have when ...Subscribe to read this article in full
