Mathew Barney at the Serpentine

Before the craziness of Friday evening, I finally managed to drag myself down to the Serpentine for the Mathew Barney exhibition. In preparation I had watched “The Order”, the only commercially available part of his Cremaster Cycle, both without and then with Barney’s commentary. Finally I all but finished the excellent A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism by Christopher Butler. Barney is not an artist you can approach without doing your homework (this I suspect is not a small part of the reason why he is considered so significant).

In the Serpentine were…

some faint but impressive drawings, close drawn lines of metamorphosising humans, often with a fishy theme, or depicting his three stage analysis of the artistic process, Situation, Condition and Production, Situation being symbolized by ingestion, Production by excretion (an apt metaphor some might say);

videos of his work, often him attempting to draw under conditions of physical difficulty, such as using a trampoline to make marks on a ceiling;

objects, some small, some large scale, particularly those used in the Drawing Restraint 9 film;

a central room, with foot and hand holds built into the corners, and markings on the ceilings above those corners, and in the centre, the restraints used to hold him back whilst attempting to make those markings.

Barney’s voice-over in The Order gave me the best path into understanding his work; despite the masculine/physical posturing of the work, all that stuff about hypertrophy training etc, in speech here was all the weasely anxiety of classic postmodernism, talk of gestures, interventions. I lost track of the number of times he said “I wanted to think about…” without ever telling us what it was that he actually thought about. The other classic symptom of chronic postmodernism is here too, art about making art.

But there is something more here as well, which explains why he is feted by sections of the art world. Most postmodernist work is weasely in content as well as idea – often reductivist, minimalist, posing a trite question with a single banal or obvious answer – take the crack at the Tate – its about, says the artist, the haves and the have nots. How tedious say I. It is as though the artists of postmodernism have lost the ability, or the confidence, to say anything other than the very simple and the very trite. But Barney produces work which is complex, multi-dimensional, large in scale – big budget films, huge sculptures, a prodigious outpouring of the stuff, about the act of making art, the materials of art, the process of production, the quest for metaphor.

But ultimately it is work which is cold and for me does not satisfactorily repay the effort required to get a foothold on the greasy slippy vaseline coated self lubricating slope of understanding. The postmodernists say art doesn’t have to do anything, but for most of us, it does. I still prefer aesthetic art, but am happy with purely conceptual art if the concept excites or stimulates. Ultimately, very little of Barney’s output stimulates me in any way, other than to admire the sheer intensity of his world.

Outside the Serpentine Olafur Eliasson (the man who did the wonderful shimmering sun thing at the Tate a few years ago) and Kjetil Thorsen have built this year’s temporary pavilion and what a wonderful thing it is too. You go round and round a ramp, before realising that by some optical magic, on the way up the string supports are open, but on the way down they are closed. Weird lights seem to hover inside and outside the building. It is a wonderful stimulating space, in sharp contrast to the stuff inside the gallery next door.