No pain, no gain?

What's primary about Matthew Barney's SECONDARY

- Ross Simonini

When I first became addicted to aspiration, I began to fear failure. This was especially true for making art. When I started aiming for greatness, I wanted a direct path to my goal and considered any deviation a mistake. This desire made for a painful process, but it’s the game you play when you play with ambition; suffer in the face of this chaotic reality or find energy within the failure that is inevitably, relentlessly to come.

I heard about Matthew Barney’s work before I saw it in person. Among young artists I knew, he was spoken of as a symbol of greatness, who made big sculpture, epic films and athletic performances. I saw him on a 2001 episode of Art21 (2001–), an American documentary series on contemporary art. There, Barney’s father talked about his son’s early interest in becoming a plastic surgeon. He said, “[Matthew] just goes out and does things. I don’t know what it is… he doesn’t seem to have the fears that the rest of us do. He just seems to go straight at it and find a way to do it.”

My first physical encounter came a few years later, with DRAWING RESTRAINT 14 (2006) at my hometown museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This was part of a retrospective of Barney’s multimedia DRAWING RESTRAINT series (1987–), many of the components of which involve him pulling, leaping, lifting or dragging while attempting to draw. The finished product is usually tentative, smeared and strained marks. Like many goal-addicted artists, Barney seemed to be inventing absurd obstacles for himself, to manufacture the pleasure of achievement.