MATTHEW BARNEY – CROWN ZINC
2014-11-10Barney’s sculptures translate motifs from River of Fundament into autonomous works of art, bearing witness to these set-piece performances while recasting their themes of decay, regeneration and alchemical metamorphosis. Crown Victoria is a zinc cast of the third vehicle’s undercarriage, the prototype for which was created in an elaborate hieratic ceremony, BA (performed in New York in 2013). Sprawling and skeletal, it emanates the melancholic grandeur of an abandoned ruin or sarcophagus. Loops of corrugated tubing, arrayed like ribs along the chassis, evoke mummified remains; a large coiling pump speaks simultaneously of biological systems and insensate machinery. Marooned on blocks, the object stands both as a decimated vehicle and a body undergoing reincarnation: deposits of salt crystals at the two ‘poles’ of the sculpture seemingly presage a new transmutation.
In Crown Zinc a smaller fragment of the same vehicle has been cast in zinc and plated with gold. It is modelled on the grill from the Crown Victoria – an object that travels and transfigures over the course of River of Fundament. After being removed from the police car, it becomes the crown for which the Egyptian deities Set and Horus ritualistically compete. At several points in River of Fundament, a vehicle part is melted to produce a molten cast of an Egyptian Djed column (the symbol for Osiris’s spine, related to the Egyptian hieroglyph representing eternity and stability). This symbol finds a subtle manifestation in the mottled gold ‘pillar’ that clings like a shrunken fist or arcane seal to the immaculate plated surface of Crown Zinc.
Exhibition runs through to December 13th, 2014
Sadie Cole
62 Kingly Street
London
W1B 5QN
