Barney and Hamilton

Matthew Barney is an artist whose work is hard to decipher. The meaning behind his work is hard to characterize and there are many levels of meaning that are lofty. He was an athlete and a model before becoming an artist and so is very in tune with the body. He has a strange manifestation of format to get the result of what he wants. His movies all titled "Cremaster" are not in numerical order of when they were made. His movies are about body and journey and his characters have a journey that they must undertake, and in this journey there is a sense of conflict. Barney has both an artistic side and a business side. The movies are about physicality not a mattered performance. Violence and passion is sublimated into form in his works and that is the central theme of the movies. The movies have a repetitious look to them in which there is a biomorphic and organic look to them. Ann Hamilton is another artist whose art is of a combined nature in which there is video, installation art, and performance art and other characteristics of art. Hamilton's art is a connection between the thread of sewing and fabric and the line of writing. She feels like there is a social metaphor between the art of cloth and what we wear. She takes this idea in one of her pieces of art in which she has a grey man's suit covered in tooth picks to make him look like a porcupine. She works with words as materials and you can see the theme of a constant tie of thread and writing. In her installation work she feels that people must reach out of what they are expecting to see, and must allow the things that are there but aren't visible to make for experience. Both of these artists have different themes in their work, but have some similarities in the sense that they cross the boundaries of process and theme in their work and have metaphorical underlying messages in all their work. They make what they want as art and do what they have to, in order to achieve their goal. There is a progression of development and they don't plan on making a piece of art, they have an idea come to them and this gets worked into the medium in which they are arriving at.