Matthew Barney

SADIE COLES HQ
69 South Audley Street
January 27–March 6

View of "Matthew Barney," 2010.

Norman Mailer’s writings were a linchpin for Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle, 1995–2002. Now, Barney has returned to the late author’s work, transforming Mailer’s version of ancient Egypt, as imagined in his much-maligned 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, into an alchemical vision of modern-day Detroit.

This exhibition includes several vitrines filled with storyboards for past and future Barney performances, which are structured around an ancient Egyptian belief that the soul passes through seven stages after death. The storyboards are full of references to Mailer and Motor City, as are the drawings and sculptures that make up the rest of the show. For example, there are broken badges from Chrysler Imperials and toy Pontiac Firebirds, alongside worn paperback copies of Ancient Evenings and portraits of Mailer emblazoned with gold and silver phoenixes. Mailer’s mentor Ernest Hemingway, who spent numerous summers in Michigan, features prominently, too—in photos, and more morbidly, in references to his shotgun suicide. Mailer’s link to Detroit isn’t immediately clear, though one possible tie can be found in Barney’s film Cremaster 2, 1999, in which Mailer plays the escapologist Harry Houdini (Houdini died in Detroit on Halloween of 1926). Barney also adds another Michigan specter to his masculine cosmology here—the late performance artist and Detroit native James Lee Byars. Byars takes several forms throughout the exhibition, fulfilling a role similar to that of Richard Serra in Cremaster 3, 2002: that of a pastiche “father” whom Barney simultaneously embraces and usurps. Thus Barney positions himself as the heir to a tradition of American performance art stretching back through Byars to Houdini’s escape acts.

Barney’s resurrection of Houdini, Byars, Mailer, and Hemingway is characteristic: Hubris and the cheating of death have always been essential elements in his work. Ultimately, this exhibition’s significance is as a preface to what lies ahead. It paves the way for the next stage of Barney’s American epic, which looks like it will be every bit as complex and controversial as the “Cremaster” cycle.

— Anthony Byrt

Nicholas Byrne

VILMA GOLD
6 Minerva Street,
January 16–March 7

Nicholas Byrne, Sailor, 2009, oil on linen, 43 x 24".

The list of works for Nicholas Byrne’s first solo exhibition at this gallery resembles something from the script of a fin de siècle operetta. There are paintings with names such as Dresser, Hosier, Sailor, and Barber, and others titled Plume, Garland, and Fan after their rococo, curvilinear theme.

The artist’s compositions, drawn on linen, copper, and now Plexiglas, have previously adopted marbled patterns from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and the harlequin motif associated with commedia dell’arte in their layered assemblage. Byrne paints, scrapes away, overpaints, and scores at the pigment for a quick glance at the surface underneath; his work involves a multitude of styles that often refer to another age. Made as composite images, they become objects of historical narrative, relics by design.

His new works are less polymorphous in character, less concerned with symmetry and repeated ornament, and are more autonomous and fluid, each dominated by a single color different from the last. While traces of fleshy impasto and florid brushwork imply notions of artistic heritage, the loopy outlines, brilliant hue, and wickerwork texture of the paintings look beyond art to a more general and recent experience of fashion and style. These abstract hybrids are attuned to the details of passing cyclists, hairstyles, and earrings and seem less shaped by the chapters of painting sampled in previous work. Byrne’s subjects appear more integral and familiar; they have become jocund in character, a bit brassy, perhaps.

— Michelle Cotton

“I shake you by the hand, comrade Bacon: British Art Abroad”

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
December 19–March 14

Barbara Hepworth, Maquette for a Winged Figure, 1957, brass, 23 x 8”.

Taking its title from a visitor’s register at Francis Bacon’s landmark 1988 exhibition in Moscow (at the height of Glasnost), this small exhibition examines the rapports between British modernism and UK identity abroad. Through the poignant prism of a handful of case studies, the show explores the efforts of the British Council, over the past seventy-five years, to export the country’s culture––not always to entirely triumphant, or even measurable, ends. As the sun finally began to set on the seemingly eternal British Empire, artworks served, in some instances, as a new form of diplomacy, with strikingly varied results.

Barbara Hepworth’s Maquette for a Winged Figure, 1957, was exhibited in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004. The proposed exhibition of David Hockney’s prints illustrating Constantin Cavafy’s notably homoerotic poetry not only stirred up anxiety on behalf of Mexican officials in 1968 but also led the British Council to reconsider its own plans. The cultural attaché wrote back to London, remarking that the works’ exhibition in the Mexican provinces might draw “queens and beatniks” and was thus perhaps best aborted. Francis Bacon’s exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow seemed to confirm various perceptions of Western art, whether of dissolution or of emancipation. An adjoining room contains relevant archival documents, including the translated book of Russian visitors to Bacon’s show––which constitutes in its own right a compendium of cultural consciousness and culture shock. “Our civilization is a rotting corpse,” wrote one twenty-one-year-old student somewhat elusively, perhaps finding in Bacon’s images a reflection of Soviet decline, or else testament to a general decadence. A sixteen-year-old saw things differently: “[This] is not art. The only feeling is one of bewilderment.”

— Ara H. Merjian