Both
artists approach their art with lofty expectations and heavy risk. But Barney’s
productions are expensive and difficult to execute, Friedman makes compulsive
personal sacrifices with his time and devotion to make objects “which can never
be.” The epitome of this was 1000 Hours of Stare
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, where Friedman’s
"labor" involved looking at a white sheet of paper for 1000 hours. In
Cremaster 1, Barney had to choreograph and orchestrate a complex and convoluted
production which took place in a football stadium and included two Goodyear
blimps. In start contrast to this, another of Friedman’s works consists of a
mere speck of his balled-up feces, and another, simply a spell. Friedman’s
pieces are self-constructed from objects with little or no useful value (and in
the case of Hot Balls (1992) he shop-lifted the balls, so they had absolutely no
monetary value).
Both
artists overcome these implausible challenges by way of brute potential. In Cremaster
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, Barney’s brutishness is reflected
through numerous commanding and visceral manifestations: Norman Mailer slings
molten Vaseline against the descending spiral ramps of the Guggenheim, or a
mock demolition derby takes place in the basement of the Chrysler building.
Friedman’s energy coils in his sheer dedication to iteration and repetition.
They both share the will and devotion necessary to overcome the speculative
obstacles and execute what others might dream of, but never carry through to
completion.
Barney
reigns as supreme creative master of his domain, characterized by his exclusive
ability to climb between symbolic levels and be the sole contestant in a self-created
competition to overcome self-imposed obstacles. In Friedman’s laboratory, the
artist plays “both the scientist and the experimental subject.
class=MsoFootnoteReference> [1]”
Friedman’s is a lonely and painstaking world of prolonged and solitary staring,
whereas Barney surrounds himself with supermodels, condemned murderers,
motorcycle races, sky scrapers, punk bands, and famous actors. There is no lack
of entertainment value in Barney’s work, but little by way of humor. Many
consider Friedman’s work to be comedic, but at times (when stripped up of its
context) sensually sterile.
The theme
of transformation prevails in the work of both artists. For Barney this entails
“moving backward in order to escape one’s destiny.” In Cremaster 2, the
character of condemned killer Gary Gilmore, played by Barney, seeks to free
himself, like his alleged grandfather Houdini, from his fate by choosing
execution. Friedman’s transformations typically involve deconstruction and
rebirth as well, such as in Untitled, 2001, a self-portrait comprised of an out-of-focus
mosaic of the original image. Friedman’s tendency is to transform the ordinary
into the unexpected, whereas Barney amalgamates and distills the extraordinary
down to the primal. He mutates abstraction down to minimal literation (in all of
the Cremaster series– there are only 12 lines of dialogue– whereas Friedman
transforms the literal into the abstract (for example, in Everything,
1992-1995, he
painstakingly writes every word of the dictionary onto one sheet of paper).
Both extremes blur the boundary between object and absence of object.
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Both
Barney and Friedman are retaliating to living in an artistic period where all
possible materials and media have been saturated. Barney employs artificial
materials (Vaseline, plastics, blue Astroturf, hired actors) to represent
functional biological metaphors. Friedman uses regular household products (duct
tape, tooth picks, cereal boxes, soap) and biological by-products (chewed gum,
feces, pubic hair) and puts them on a pedestal. In the end, both exploit
biological function to create fantastic forms, and “transcend biology [to]
exist in a pure state of symmetry.
One is a
self-proclaimed hero and the other an anti-hero, but both are true living
heroes. Of course, both are unabashed egomaniacs who cast themselves into their
own work of self-induced aesthetic confinement in the name of exploring
primitive creative processes. Friedman’s works spark “a complex system of
references,” whereas Barney takes an infinitely complex and seemingly unrelated
system of suggestive metaphors and equates them to one common goal: the male
cremaster muscle, symbolic of the creation process. The big bang could be an
implosion or an explosion. Both Friedman and Barney go through extreme measures
of transformation by way of self-deprecation; they are committed to challenging
the vicarious observer, and they want to conquer– or, at least, prolong–
mortality. |
