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Mathew Barney and Joseph Beuys: For and Against Mythology

정연심 1

1Fashion Institute of Technology

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the exhibition entitled “Barney and Beuys: All in the Present Must be Transformed,” which was organized at the Guggenheim Museums in Berlin and Venice in 2007 by Nancy Spector, I determined to examine not only the underlying philosophical questions on the use of myth but also the fundamental differences of the two distinguished contemporary artists, Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys. The first point is closely related to the intrinsic involvement of myth and the use of newly concerned materials such as fat and petroleum jelly (Vaseline) that the two artists retrospectively employed. Their works and writings seem to testify to the fact that Barney and Beuys are constructing and deconstructing myth that is already dead in our time. The highly esoteric and freemasonic narratives that Barney unfolds in the five series of his Cremaster Cycle embody his own longing for the death of mythology. Yet his construction of Cremaster paradoxically engenders a fresh way of looking at the individual, society and the world as a different entity, which we ordinarily think of as enduringly consistent, ordered and interwoven, or as M. Foucault would say, “discursive.” To a certain degree, Barney's gestures and performances extend cryptic symbolism to a socio-cultural realm, because the body and gender he brings to life in his performances negates the Oedipal complex, inviting a new gender of “Body without Organs,” as in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This is best exemplified in Barney's MILE HIGH Threshold: FIGHT with the ANAL SADISTIC WARRIOR and BLIND PERINEUM, in which he uses his own body as a visual field emblem, sealing his orifices with Vaselin. In Fornication with the Fabric of Space, the artist exposes the interlocked relationship between sports, muscle, resistance and sexual desire in the use of non-phallic images. While Beuys's social activism is characterized best in his perception and practice of “Social Sculpture,” Barney’s Cremaster Cycle interjects personally invented mythology in the realm of psychological situation and condition in his work. My paper also looks at the way in which both artists, representing different generations and nationalities, directly respond to the social, political and cultural strata in which their works are created, and in which political and ecological agendas are highly charged. Dialectically, these idiosyncratic performers can be placed vis-à-vis each other. The intersecting element of these two artists is that, in spite of their differences in concepts and ideas, they engage in a constant and metaphoric search of the philosopher's stone by which ancient scholars happened to discover alchemy and science. Equally, the same initiation of shamanistic ceremonies and performative diverts these two artists as far as they can go. The media they embrace is quite different: Beuys uses theatrical means for his performance art whereas Barney has been reinventing new possibilities in the cinematic genre for his collaborations with professional actors, as well as people on the street. Walter Benjamin’s Aura is to be challenged and reinterpreted in the new guise of an authentic, esoteric, lingering remembrance of theatricality in Barney's oeuvre.

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