Matthew Barney: Redoubt

From September 28 through December 15, 2019, UCCA will present “Matthew Barney: Redoubt,” a major new body of work realized between 2016 and 2019 that will mark the artist’s first solo exhibition in China. The exhibition includes a two-hour film, four monumental sculptures, more than forty engravings and electroplated copper plates, and an artist-conceived catalogue. The exhibition is currently on view at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 16, 2019. After its run at UCCA, it will travel to the Hayward Gallery in London where it will be on view from March 4 to May 10, 2020. The new artworks in “Redoubt” continue the artist’s notable shift in materials over the past decade, from the plastic and petroleum jelly of his early works to the cast metals that figured prominently in River of Fundament. With “Redoubt,” Matthew Barney (b. 1967, San Francisco, lives and works in New York) has combined traditional casting methods and new digital technologies with unprecedented techniques to create artworks of formal and material complexity and narrative density. The five monumental sculptures in the exhibition, for instance, derive from trees harvested from a burned forest in the Sawtooth Mountains of northern Idaho, near the artist’s childhood home. Molten copper and brass were poured through the trees, creating a unique cast of the core as the metal flowed inside. Each sculpture is a literal vestige of Idaho, with the remains of the tree being subsumed into the artwork. The exhibition also includes engravings on copper plate that Barney made during the filming of Redoubt, as well as a series of electroplated copper reliefs that feature imagery from the film, such as the landscape of the Sawtooth Mountains or a wolf among the trees. The electroplates were made using a technique that Barney developed during production of the film, which he then refined and expanded in the studio. In this experimental method, an image was engraved into a copper plate coated with asphalt. The plate was immersed in an acid and copper solution and was subjected to an electrical current, causing copper growths to form out of the engraved lines. By altering the conditions in the electroplating tank—including current, heat, and chemical concentrations—the artist produced unique variations on each image. On the plates that were left longest in the electroplating bath, the copper accretions overtake the drawing, transforming the engravings into abstract reliefs and almost completely obscuring the image. Redoubt was filmed in Idaho’s rugged Sawtooth Mountains and continues Barney’s longstanding preoccupation with landscape as both a setting and subject in his films. By layering classical, cosmological, and American myths about humanity’s place in the natural world, Redoubt forms a complex portrait of the central Idaho region. Like most of Barney’s previous films, Redoubt is without dialogue; but in a marked shift, Barney has more fully incorporated dance into the narrative of the film, allowing the
characters to communicate choreographically. Throughout the film, the characters’ movements are formalized into choreographies that echo, foreshadow, and interpret their encounters
with wildlife. Eleanor Bauer, who also worked with Barney
on River of Fundament, both performed in and choreographed Redoubt, in collaboration with K. J. Holmes, Sandra Lamouche, and Laura Stokes. All of the dance passages were filmed on location, and the relationship between site and movement is a recurring theme. Structured as a series of six hunts that unfold over
seven days and nights, Redoubt loosely adapts the myth of
Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Actaeon, a hunter who accidentally trespasses on her and is punished. The Diana of Redoubt
(Anette Wachter) is both the protector of the natural world
and a predator in it—a present-day sharpshooter in the frigid Idaho wilderness. Accompanied by her attendants, the Calling
Virgin (Eleanor Bauer) and the Tracking Virgin (Laura Stokes), Diana traverses the mountainous terrain in pursuit of the elusive wolf. The Engraver (Matthew Barney) happens upon the hunting outfit in the forest and begins stalking the trio, furtively documenting their actions in a series of copper engravings. He brings his plates to a remote trailer housing a rudimentary laboratory, where the Electroplater (K. J. Holmes) subjects them to an electrochemical transformation. In a pivotal scene near the end of the film, the Engraver encounters a sixth character, the Hoop Dancer (Sandra Lamouche, Bigstone Cree Nation), who rehearses a Native American dance in a nearby town. Her complex movement sequence unites her with the other characters across time and space, as the film progresses to a climactic moment of cosmic and terrestrial reversal. Barney is among the most ambitious and provocative artists of our time, known for epic projects such as the “CREMASTER Cycle” (1994–2002). Both “Redoubt” and its related publication—which features essays by leading scholars of art history, dance theory, and environmental studies—speak
to the artist’s expansive interests. Exhibition curator Pamela Franks, Class of 1956 Director at the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and former Senior Deputy Director and Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, says, “Barney’s intellectual and aesthetic frames of reference are wide-ranging: classical mythology as well as myths of the American West, modern choreography as well as contemporary Native American hoop dance, environmental science as well as wildlife biology, art history, cosmology, electrochemistry, and alchemy. The artist is equally adventurous in his approaches to materials and art making, with both casting and electroplating methods newly invented for Redoubt.”