Matthew Barney transforms underground biblioteque de Nationale de France François Mitterrand, Paris, into a place of Osirian initiation

Matthew Barney transforms underground the bibliotheque Nationale de France François Mitterrand in Paris into a place of Osirian initiation

Image from exhibition Subliming Vessel by Matthew Barney

Today I went to see 'Subliming Vessel: The drawings of Matthew Barney'.  At the end of at a long corridor under the ground, were Matthew Barney’s drawings.  On first entrance, I snooped my way through a glass covered cabinet and tiny pencil drawings, and like Goldilocks, nosed my way into the glass like a peeping Tom at curiosities, private scenes and freak pictures:  an anus excreting, an erotic Japanese print of a couple having sex, a man putting his penis into a car exhaust pipe…. A hermaphrodite with a beehive body, a murderer, a corset, Equis, an Anubis being born, a goat portrait and man with goat shaped face, a Masonic pentagon, a Norman Mailer book, extraordinary feats of Houdini, a bloody chopped off penis ….

My first sensation was visceral.  My senses were stimulated by the sights of these images.  Drawings were made with chemicals : oxidised iron powder, petroleum jelly, smelted metal, ground topaz, brimstone, sulphuric acid.  Sights and oddities, incongruous and strange contradictions : a bull-fight and a whale catcher ; a ravine of snow and a butterfly bush…. Sounds of bagpipes and the noises of whales…. Tartan fabric and delicately coloured papyrus paper.

Yet as I continued my journey, recurrant images embellished the first sightings, creating a thematic rhythm, highlighting their importance as exquisite as any outlining in any drawing.  The bagpipes and the tartan, the pan pipes and satyrs, the contemporary myth and the old myth, making the cohesion happen, making sense.  I travelled further into the mind via this vehical of drawing.  The images began to take on a sensible cohesion, and I felt I had entered the artist’s mind and understood his creative process and his method of gathering his ideas and recording his intuitive connections.

The exhibition is a sketchbook and includes 80 drawings, very delicate, almost pointillists studies, carefully reconciling the contradictory nature of ideas, some used for his films such as the Cremaster Cycles.  Gradually, the recurrance of repeated images from myth and dream and architypes begin to draw the mind into more of a timeless state, where suddenly you are reminded that a modern icon : a Marilyn Monroe or the Chrysler building or a free mason’s pentagon are just reoccuring mythologies and that the humans involved in them are heroes of our time.  The Chrysler building is the Djed of Osiris, god of the afterlife, and a civilisation transforms into myth in order to civilise its people and yet inside the order of a myth is the creation of the myth, the inside from the outside and here we see the inside of the myth and its alchemical powers before it has been galvanised and hardened into an external myth.

Beautifully, the frames of the outer are made of prosthetic plastic… to express this inner and outer state of things. Further trance-like meditation happens through study of the tiny graphs showing the invisible state and balance of rest and intake in which resistance is produced, a necessary state in which “self-imposed resistance placed upon an organic body is a prerequisite for development and a vehicle for creativity…..” and metaphors, such as a photo of the Ise Shrine, re-built every 20 years to symbolise the impermanance of things while ensuring the transmission of building techniques for one generation to the next….  Show the ressurection of physical form in different forms.

Such ideas carry the mind further into this underground chamber.  Like rites of initiation, each metaphor and idea transforms the mind from being images of a constrained civilisation to where the exhibition itself transmutes these so that we feel the artist’s own initiation and his own self-mastery of mankind’s animal nature creating the integration on show, the initiated being.  Trance aroused by film, pipes, sensual liquids, this show is a hidden underworld of secrets… secrets of a French cultural heritage and secrets of an artist’s own personal mythology.

The intoxication of this vat of image, physical or spiritual, the initiate recovers the intensity of feeling which prudence often destroys and I walked out of that place feeling the world full of delight and beauty, and my imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of everyday preoccupations. Matthew Barney’s ritual produced 'enthusiasm',  a god entered me down there in that underground Library…..