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The Matthew Barney installation
Barry X Ball Mexican onyx, stainless steel, gold, rhodium, polyurethane, wood After 3-1/2 years in-the-making the portrait installation of Matthew Barney will be exhibited at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York from mid January through May 2004. The Matthew Barney installation is the latest, largest, and most-complex portrait sculpture I have realized. After making and exhibiting a very different kind of art (none of it figurative) for over 2 decades, I began work on my portrait sculpture project 7 years ago. Since that time, I have worked exclusively on this endeavor. The project has gone through many formal and conceptual changes since its inception. The completed works vary greatly in form, scale, and materials, although for the last few years, all the heads have been carved from stone. A description of my working process follows. I invite my portrait subjects to pose for me. (To-date, I have not accepted portrait commissions.) My subjects are primarily drawn from the art world. Visual artists predominate, although there are also collectors, curators, musicians, and family members. I choose my subjects because of who they are, what they do, and how they look. I am currently working on, or have already completed, portraits of the following individuals (in alphabetical order): Barry X Ball (sculptor) An alginate/plaster mold is made of my subjects' heads and necks at my studio. I also take a series of reference photographs at that time (full "head shots" as well as 'details' of cranial/facial features). The casting/photographing procedure takes about 2 hours. For the next 2-3 years (the average time to complete a portrait), I usually have little-to-no interaction with my subjects. Such is the case with Matthew Barney. He generously agreed to pose for me in early 2000 and was cast/photographed at my studio in June of that year. Since that time, I have had no contact with Matthew. Now that his portrait is complete (it was finished in early November), I will alert him to its impending exhibition at PS1. Immediately after life-casting, a polymer-modified plaster 'positive' is derived from the initial head/neck mold. The positive cast is typically quite "rough" when it emerges from the mold and requires extensive hand-carving to be transformed into an accurate facsimile of the subject. Sometimes, as in the Matthew Barney piece, the plaster eyes are carved 'open'. (The subjects have their eyes closed when they are cast.) Most of my portraits have an effusive, invented neck structure appended to the head. For Matthew Barney, this appendage was pushed to an extreme. First Matthew's modeled plaster neck was shorn of most of its athletic musculature. Next, a distended, layered swag of flayed skin and viscera was modeled in clay and draped from the emaciated neck stub. The top of his head was also extensively clay-modified. Finally the entire plaster / clay assemblage was cast in plaster again and then detailed, polymer sealed, and sandblasted to create a unified model centered around a vertical impalement-bore axis. To transform my completed models into stone, they are first digitized via cylindrical 3-dimensional laser scanning on the Scantech ST600 scanner. The resultant "virtual" models may be digitally manipulated or left as-is. The Matthew Barney scan was vertically stretched to 150% of life-size. Next, a scanned Victorian Baroque relief pattern was digitally "shrink-wrapped" around portions of Matthew's distended virtual head so as to comprise a dense layer of decorative armor corresponding to the outermost surface of his multi-layer flayed skin. The entire virtual construction was then globally scaled to 85% of life-size before being converted into machine language. The initial stone shaping is accomplished on computer-controlled (CNC) milling machines running Scantech Carso software. In the case of my Matthew Barney portrait, the stone selected was from a 3000-pound boulder of rare, exuberantly-pitted/fissured/veined translucent onyx from Baja California (Mexico). After diamond wire-saw and bridge-saw sizing, the trimmed block was diamond core-drilled to again establish the axis (corresponding to that of the model) that would eventually become the sculpture's impalement wound. Next followed many days of glacially-slow computer-controlled carving, with multiple passes by progressively finer tooling, on a 3-axis CNC lathe. The final milling passes were specified so that the figure is encircled with a dense, diagonal web of parallel micro-flutes. Months of hand carving/polishing followed the CNC milling. The stone was finally masked, sandblasted, and oil-impregnated. The golden shaft was CAD-designed and CNC-machined from stainless steel, then it was centerless-ground, hand-polished, and 24K gold-plated. The turnbuckle anchors were similarly custom-fabricated from stainless steel. The cables are thread-thin, 7x7 strand stainless steel. The aircraft turnbuckles that tension the cables are made of polished stainless steel and rhodium-plated brass. The ceiling array presents a panoply of historical decorative styles culminating in a large, perforated, cherubic-fringed central medallion. The cast polyurethane decorative elements are supported by an elaborate, 8-spoked, modular wooden construction of graduated posts and tiered disks which, in-turn, anchor the tapering funnel of cables that suspends the impaled sculpture. The installation is symmetrically ceiling-lit from its periphery with 8+ high-intensity halogen lamps. The resultant radiating floral pattern of shadows cast by the stone/shaft assembly echoes, on the floor, the composition of the decorative ceiling "octopus".
Barry X Ball Studio tel +1 (718) 782-2319 |
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