Matthew Barney is an American artist whose work spans sculpture, photography, drawing, and film. His early pieces featured sculptural installations integrated with performance and video. Between 1994 and 2002, he produced the "Cremaster Cycle," a series of five feature films lauded as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema."
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 explores Matthew Barney's seven-year project, an odyssey of death and its mythologies. It documents the ambitious new work, the first major series since the Cremaster cycle. Inspired by Norman Mailer's Egyptian novel, the project chronicles a narrator's journey through death and reincarnation. Through unique live performances, massive sculptures, and a marathon-length opera in cinematic form, created with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney constructs a complex universe where mythology, iconography, narrative, sex, and death intertwine. Organized by the film's narrative structure, the book features sculptures made from elemental materials like iron, sulfur, bronze, lead, salt, and copper, alongside drawings, stills from film and live performances, storyboards, and original scores by Bepler. A comprehensive essay by Okwui Enwezor provides an overview of the exhibition and film project. Additionally, contributions from literary theorist Homi K. Bhabha and critic Hilton Als enrich the text, while facsimiles of playbills from related performances offer further context. This volume encapsulates the depth and complexity of Barney's latest artistic endeavor.
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.