The drawings of Matthew Barney

I remember first coming across Matthew Barney as a performance artist. He seemed to be pitting his body against the art spaces he found himself in. He was climbing walls, trying to get into inaccessible spaces, jumping, running and variously challenging us in his exhibitions to think about the athleticism of a human body in action, rather than providing static works for the traditional contemplative spaces that art galleries were thought of being. These actions in gallery spaces were titled 'Drawing Restraints' and they followed the implications of something I was writing about recently when thinking about 'curves'. The drawing of a line is when drawn by a hand held implement, a drawing that demonstrates a particular set of restraints. An arm is only so long, a body so flexible, fingers only capable of holding things of a certain size and weight etc. Barney seemed to push at all the boundaries, taking his pervious experience as an athlete who had to test his body to its limits and using this to make us aware that all human made drawings are physical exercises of one sort or another. 

Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraints

However he quickly moved on and the next time I came across his work was as a series of films. The Cremaster Cycle was a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books.

Film stills from 'The Cremaster Cycle'

Cremaster 1

The Cremaster Cycle had materials such as fat or vaseline as a sort of visual glue that was used to hold things into a sort of gooey suspension. As scenes moved from one to another we were reminded of metamorphosis as a very physical transformation. Some of his drawings for the time were embedded in resin, others suggestive of machines becoming organic or people melting into animals as if arriving from ancient myths.

Matthew Barney

Storyboards are central to Barney's practice, however they are not like the ones we normally associate with artists' plans for films. They are images and objects set out in a sequence and then when exhibited they are presented as vitrines filled with specific objects, drawings, books, and photographs. Rather than drawing two-dimensional sequential images of action, he plans his projects via a strategy of building relationships between things. These storyboards are more like collages of visual relationships. 

Matthew Barney: Storyboard for a film

Matthew Barney is a very useful artist to explore if you are thinking about how a drawing led practice can unfold into performance, video, sculpture and installation work. Drawings driven by the possibilities of the body, material invention and collage are approaches to practice that in Barney's work morph into each other. Drawing is like life, sometimes we get stuck into the physicality of existence, but at other times we escape from reality into a fantasy world. 

See also: 

Drawing and film

Cinematic drawing

Between sculpture and drawing

Performance drawing

Drawing it all together