Matthew Barney established his reputation with a video installation at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in 1991. It featured the artist, naked save for a climbing harness, working his way up the wall and across the ceiling of the gallery, supported by titanium ice screws. This manoeuvre ended with some further ritualistic activity in a refrigerated compartment. Bizarre and eye-catching, with an emphasis on athletic prowess and accoutrements, the event pretty much set the tone for his subsequent career. Then as now, he was drawing on his own background. At Yale, he switched from medicine to arts, was on the college football team and worked as a fashion model.
Still in his early 30s, much of his time and energy throughout the present decade have been devoted to completing a series of Cremaster films, and tomorrow evening Temple Bar Properties are staging an open-air screening of his most ambitious production to date, Cremaster 5 in Meeting House Square. The work is a bizarre, visually luscious piece of filmed opera. Against the ornate settings of the Hungarian State Opera House and a thermal baths in Budapest, Ursula Andress, as the Queen of Chain, muses on her relationship with a magician in the course of a long, melancholy aria - sung in Hungarian. Barney plays the magician and the other two main male characters, a diva whose star turn is to climb around the proscenium arch, and a lugubrious giant. The film additionally features a chorus of water sprites, two attendants for the Queen and a number of Jacobin pigeons. On several occasions over the course of its 55 minutes, Cremaster 5 lulls you into thinking that it's just about to make narrative sense, but then doesn't.
Or rather, within Barney's proclaimed, wider scheme of things, the hints of conventional narrative coherence, such as doomed romance and tragic sacrifice, are red herrings. His project's overall title, Cremaster, derives, he says, from the cremaster muscle that controls the rise and fall of the testes. So it would seem that the crux of the film is some obscure business involving the giant's scrotum, the bevy of water sprites, ribbons and the Jacobin pigeons, all of which somehow relates to a desire to regain the early foetal state of undifferentiated sexuality. All clear so far? Everything else in the film, including baroque levels of ornamentation, obsessive love and insane feats of strength and endurance, is significant only insofar as it is determined by sexual identity.
Barney's sense of decor has a trademark note of trashy opulence. He has a liking for vulgar visual surrealism, tacky plastic props and horror-movie make-up. Yet though the whole thing constantly teeters on the edge of camp, it never falls over. And while it borrows extensively from various narrative and visual conventions, neither is it an exercise in cool, post-modern irony. An earnest, almost naive quality, and an air of autodidactic mania, suggest rather a very elaborate, very expensive home movie (one that, incidentally, boasts an excellent score by Jonathan Bepler). It's the first time Barney's work will be shown publicly in Ireland and, love it or loathe it, it is well worth seeing. Don't miss it.
THE titles of Sinead Aldridge's paintings at the Sligo Art Gallery are littered with references to landscape and other subject matter. Looking at them we see what could well be fragments of landscape that have been progressively edited down by incursions of opaque expanses of flat, neutral colours. Her work has developed significantly over the last few years. Where, previously, she has displayed an interest in the combination of accident and design that contributes to the making of a picture, now she is much more in command of her language. There was a chance that she would get too carried away with incidentals, becoming involved in the complications of the surface for their own sake, but she has become instead much more focused.
She sees the radical disparity in surface quality in individual compositions as indicative of different kinds of space, such as interior and exterior, urban and rural, even physical and mental. There is also an effect of simultaneously suggesting and thwarting painting's seductive, illusionistic potential, of both opening up vistas and dragging us back to the hear and now of the surface. The logical culmination of this is the juxtaposition of a large and a small canvas in Infanta (Diptych). It's logical, but it stands so far as an interesting but inconclusive experiment in which, significantly, the question of the relationship between the two canvases as physical objects isn't really addressed. This problem simply doesn't arise in the single panel paintings, in which she is comfortably in tune with her materials. She makes great capital out of the interplay between flat, irregular spaces and the deeper, ambiguous spaces. In fact the combined effect is more than the sum of the parts and the pictures keep the eye - and the mind - guessing in a way that altogether justifies the show's title.
SARA Horgan's prints, at the Original Print Gallery, are subtle and elegant. Working in what seems to be pretty much her own medium of lino etching, she creates scarred, evocative surfaces, beautifully textured, weathered grounds that suggest accumulations of time. Cracked, ragged lines snake unsteadily across the spaces, like the lines on the palm of your hand. Against this rich context she deploys just two basic geometric forms, square and circle, that serve to concentrate the energies of each rectangle, but these too she uses in a nice, understated, fragmentary way. Many of the pieces are called Ghost, and there is a ghostly, spectral quality to the way tone and colour (if that's not too strong a word) are gently, almost imperceptibly intimated. These are fine works, suffused with feeling, beautifully judged and formally very assured.
Matthew Barney's Cremaster 5 will be screened in Meeting House Square tomorrow night at 9.15 p.m. Tickets are available free of charge from Temple Bar Properties at 18 Eustace street. Depending on demand, a second screening may follow. Sinead Aldridge's The Light Sleep of Space is at the Sligo Art Gallery until May 1st, Sara Horgan's New Works are at the Original Print Gallery until May 5th.
