Matthew Barney’s 2007 Armory Show

Looking down from atop New York’s 2007 art fair season was a work by Matthew Barney that inverted his usual auto-iconographic mythical world by exploding, and subverting an already existing microcosm of existence. This target was the Armory Show, generally the blasé meat market of the year, hocking the wares of an art world spinning upward and outward of any sense of restraint and control, in financial responsibility anyway. Barney, as the story goes, was approached by the fair’s organizers to make a commissioned work for the show’s duration, and in classic mega-style, he came back with an offer to make The Armory Show, a synthesized replica of the show in motion, each possible point of happenstance crafted by Barney and his team of crack magicians.

My pilgrimage through winter’s cold grasp to that foreign wasteland of Pier 97 (Midtown West) really set the stage for Barney’s magnum opus, an epic crawling maze of heat, money, and Logic’s grand breakdown. Temperature control was definitely a first notice of Mr. Barney’s heavy hand as my companion and I stared around the vaulted aluminum corridor plotting out moves and deciding a wager to see who could spot the most Barney extras. That is to say, M.B. in his efforts for detailed verisimilitude hired two thousand actors to inhabit the art as life roles of run-of-the-mill fair attendees, big buck collectors, exhibitors and their peons. This immersive subversion left us delirious with paranoia, never nearly clear on who was who, and what was what. At my best count I figured two out of every three people were playing for the other team.

Those not well versed in Barney’s repository of ruinic-ly undecipherable sets of symbols (a la Joseph Beuys - online resources ) seemed to be having two mountain sized hurdles when navigating the fair at prime cruising speed, or any speed actually. One: “The Truman Show ” syndrome, of a person rapidly coming to terms with the idea that what they are existing inside of is not the unvarnished reality that it may seem ( an idea that has a massive ripple effect for the “real” fair, and world we live in anyway [Wag the Dog ] Media War , Internet Media Control , Media Control- Noam Chomsky [apologize for the amazon link] ). And Two: if the idea of having the whole art fair replaced by a work of art of an art fair flies over your head (deciphering the aforementioned undecipherable), then why does nothing make sense, and why are there so many goddamn video cameras watching my every move. Perhaps one would think all of the dark alcoves with locked doors would tip a hand to where Mr. Barney was hiding out, watching the ebb and flow of his actors, the scripted sales transactions using fake “Barney Bucks”, environmental controls, and ambient noise generators to strengthen the ever-present din of background chatter about where the party is, or who sold what for more money than heaven itself is worth.

And this might be the most interesting cog in M.B.’s ever-complicating machine; the bounds of the event don’t limit his scope, the actors are engaged for the entire vive en mechanique weekend period, twenty-four hours a day, some even paid a special fee to engage overnight relations with an unsuspecting fair attendee. Not only this, but every work in the fair, sold through staged transactions, and in real ones by the collectors who knew no better, or cared no less, was a piece of art ultimately with Barney’s signature on it. And so the ever-tight lipped Mr. Barney stretched his wings and demonstrated an almost clairvoyant ability to select artists to commission works for his fair who are on the cutting edge of market trends. Obviously the “art” shown in his piece could be a major tip-off point for the real attendees, if there were seams in the quality of production, or the deftness of the hand’s virtuosity in the replicated artists’ works. But M.B. had a solution for this; he just commissioned all of the artists he wanted to include to create pieces that for an additional fee he would retain full ownership and rights over the work, to the point where he signed, and sold the work as his own through the fake fair’s hands.

Not wanting to disappoint, all of the artists created super polished works, very handsome and professional, seemingly with aspirations to reach Mr. Barney’s excellent level of production value, and there are countless pieces that held his proxy stamp with a gold seal from me, but a few in particular raised my eyebrows. 2007 seems to be a year for the revival and strengthening of feminist art’s history, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles The Social Mirror (1983), a regal mirror covered New York City dump truck served as the sculptural lighthouse beacon in the midst of the fair. Placed as a poignant piece for self-reflection, M.B. in a relatively straightforward manner, showed his cards by letting the attendees have a moment to examine their position in the circus maximus. Another heavy hitter that Barney tapped, possibly for his environment building from a database of real world, yet often horrific iconography was Thomas Hirschhorn whose works of massive brown shipping tape, cancerous growths on the earth and people, spoke highly of critique to man’s destruction of itself and nature. The Armory Show has served as an incredible mirror into the mind of Mr. Barney, one that gives so much more as to how he perceives the contemporary world of art, but never lessens his own personal mystique. He interestingly did not include any of his expressly own work in the fair, but did not once shy away from including work that didactically butt heads with his own. For instance, the recently deceased Jason Rhoades graced a small corner of David Zwirner’s booth with a sculpture that loosely resembles a Dan Flavin as janitor’s bucket. There seems to be some west coast vs. east coast tension in the semi-hidden location of this piece, and the lack of weight of Rhoades’s inclusion in the Show, but after sitting with it a moment it reveals itself to be much more of a memorial to the colorful man. Conversely, Folkert De Jong’s memorializing through color and foam (The Death March: Drummer, Piper, Dancer) honors nothing of history’s heroes, but instead distorts, mutates, and reconfigures the past into his own version of epic narrative.(midway down )

Mr. Barney’s attempt was overwhelming, decadent, sweaty, and in my opinion one of his best works in years. I can only hope that this trend takes off like a rocket and in the years to come our heads get twisted three hundred sixty degrees round and round by artists the world over without a blink of their eyes.

New York Times 2007 Armory Show Review
Art Fag City Review
Supertouch Pictures from the Fair
Art Forum … um ok