| Barney’s De Lama Lamina, which translates roughly from the Portuguese to “of mud a blade,” was shot in real time against the backdrop of the annual Carnavale de Salvador, near the old center of Salvador, Brazil. The film follows a procession led by a colossal tree that seems to have been scooped up like ice cream and plopped atop a large, mud-drenched logging truck, which doubles as a functioning mobile amplification system and stage for the American-Brazilian musician Arto Lindsay. Throughout the film Lindsay plays rhythmic Brazilian ballads chosen from a traditional, local repertoire, and improvises within them. |
|
Taylor Dietrich on Matthew Barney’s De Lama Lamina
Barney’s De Lama Lamina, which translates roughly from the Portuguese to “of mud a blade,” was shot in real time against the backdrop of the annual Carnavale de Salvador, near the old center of Salvador, Brazil. The film follows a procession led by a colossal tree that seems to have been scooped up like ice cream and plopped atop a large, mud-drenched logging truck, which doubles as a functioning mobile amplification system and stage for the American-Brazilian musician Arto Lindsay. Throughout the film Lindsay plays rhythmic Brazilian ballads chosen from a traditional, local repertoire, and improvises within them. The carefully rendered imagery integrates elements of Candoble religion (the deities of which are called oraxis and represent forces of nature) with eco-activism and machine-fetishism to produce a suggestive, piecemeal myth about the conflation of desecration and rebirth.
The film’s main characters Ogun and Ossain—god of war and spirit of plants, respectively—aren’t present specifically within the film. Instead Barney draws parallels between the dialectic of Ogun, with his power to craft iron capable of clearing the path toward civilization as well as clearing the civilized of their heads, and the conservatism inherent in Ossain’s production of healing herbal remedies alongside narcotic poisons. He expresses this through the creation of a “hybrid-oraxis” formed by the conjunction of two contrary characters.
Greenman, the character who most evidently expresses this combination Ogun/Ossain, played by Barney, is at the center of De Lama Lamina’s narrative structure. The float, the vehicle is actually a float within Carnivale, maps opposing, impenetrable regions suggesting coexistence without cohabitation of the terrestrial world and a hidden, subterranean field. The camera repeatedly pans to the vehicle’s nether-region where Greenman—a dirt-covered hybrid man-beast with vegetation growing from his armpits, groin, and mouth—hangs from the wheel casing and slowly coats the truck’s rotary driveshaft in petroleum jelly and masturbates against it. Near the middle of the film, this character uses the feces of a golden lion tamarin monkey to lubricate the driveshaft further. A lesser character, representing eco-activist Julia Butterfly Hill (who lived in a California Great Redwood for two years to prevent its felling), interacts only with the uppermost sections of the tree’s branches.
Barney’s use of pervasive cultural elements—from his absorption of theatrical genres including baroque opera, vaudeville, 1930’s Hollywood musicals, Western rodeo, carnival pageantry, and Kabuki to his evocation of the diverse religious/mythical systems of Celtic folklore, Masonic ritual, and Shinto ceremony—are expanded in this recent work. By choosing a specific location, equipped with a recognizable geography and psychogeography, Barney has outfitted his film with an adaptable meaning, and given this meaning a secondary source that’s less remote than his usual personal myth systems. Other real-world referents include the slash in the tree-prop’s trunk, representing the slash made by angry loggers a year after eco-activist Hill descended from her perch, and the tamarin’s excrement, which is crucial to the production of certain antibiotics in Brazilian folk culture.
But Barney remains an artist who professes no interest in the concrete, rather all his symbols interrelate to form complex systems of meaning, in conjunction with the real-world elements so apparent in De Lama Lamina.
