In The Eye of The Spectacle: A Barney for a Beuys and the whole world’s blind
Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 14:49Last nite we went to see Matthew Barney present films for a program entitled All in the Present Must Be Transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys at the aptly named theater Babylon Mitte. Barney is in town for a new exhibition called Heal the Knive that Cuts the Wound: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys opening this weekend at the Deustche Guggenheim, which equals Deutsche Bank + Guggenheim Museum attempting to get radical and naughty with the superstar of fin de siecle cinema and “plastic shamanics” and art infiltrations, but what does it actually look like to poke oneself in The Eye of The Spectacle? We will have to come back for a vivesection of the artworld as we see fit, but it will take a bit of a longer assessment. We left the theater a little overwhelmed by the unpleasant and startling experience, which may have the potency of having swallowed a large dose of something unexpectedly xtra-terrestrial and with unmarked ingredients, that is, worth deeper analyses. Yet that heavily resonating question arises as to whether art without praxis is just another blind excursion into fetishized belly button lint.
For now, if you read german, here’s a taste of Barney worlds, keep in mind the logo above the article and beware the heavy synthetics contained therein:
hmmm, and rather eerie to see this already onlíne, but here it is, an entirely transcribed Q+A from the evening… check out Barney’s answer as to why Julia Butterfly appears in his film De Lama Lamina:
excellent. thanks.
…
“When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society. Clark Kerr, one of the foremost ideologues of this tendency, has calculated that the complex process of production, distribution and consumption of knowledge already gets 29% of the yearly national product in the United States; and he predicts that in the second half of this century culture will be the driving force in the development of the economy, a role played by the automobile in the first half of this century, and by railroads in the second half of the previous century.”
Written in 1967 by Guy Debord… anyone care to tabulate what percentage we are at NOW with culture as the twin engines of economy, now that IT and the entertainment industry are at the constant irreal flood levels?
to be cont.