Destruction + Creation
Two of the art world’s most debated figures are making space for new works in New Haven. One interprets mythology through brutal imagery, the other interrupts a national conversation with a marching band’s clang.
An alchemist of worldbuilding, Matthew Barney’s latest hyperlinked system of cinema, sculpture, and electroplated copper is on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. Riffing on the Roman myth of hunter-goddess Diana and voyeur Actaeon, Barney’s wordless film Redoubt (2019) is set in Idaho’s remote Sawtooth Mountains. The location’s name triggers larger themes: saw tooth, two tools or weapons, equal parts mechanical and wild.
Barney’s modern Diana wields firearms and is played by NRA long-range shooting champion Anette Wachter. The artist portrays Actaeon, stalking his muse through stark landscapes and capturing images by scratching metal plates. He pays for his gaze. It’s a film of dangerous beauty: guns patterned with Kryptek camo, a wolf carcass staining blue-shadowed snow. Related engravings, scarred from gunshots and electroshocks, are a record of the performance, as are massive sculptures cast from dead trees. One metallic husk is cradled by a milky plastic rifle stand, eerily referencing 3D-printed “ghost guns.”
Guns and their ghosts echo in work being developed at the Yale School of Art. Through a fellowship, filmmaker Hito Steyerl partnered with student musicians in the Yale Precision Marching Band to craft Drill (2019), which premieres at the Park Avenue Armory this summer. For an artist concerned with the subtext of visuals in digital life, this project rings a loud new tone. Steyerl and the band sonify gun violence, composing through statistics: increases in US mass shootings since 1999, higher death tolls, a rise in arms manufacturing. Data-driven dirges blare tragic logic as fatalities rack up and the melodies spin faster, frenzied. The Armory’s history as the NRA’s birthplace, and the military roots of marching music, add extra layers. Steyerl’s feelings on her own activist art? “Mesmerized and scared.”
While Barney makes—and takes—images through destruction, Steyerl demands it stops. Two distinct American stories of violent delights and violent ends.
4/4/2019