Annotated Bibliography: Matthew Barney

Gioni, Massimiliano. Mathew Barney: Super Contemporary, Electa, Milan, c.2007.

This text provided a general exploration of the themes, motifs and aesthetics of Matthew Barney's work. The author's engagement with the artist is on the whole non-critical and the piece is written as more of a glossy accolade than an academic assessment. Citation of sources like the New York Times indicates that the text is engaging with mainstream opinion rather than art-historical discourse. This said, the work definitely provided a comprehensive compilation of Barney's work thus far, particularly pictorially (with full-page, coloured photo-prints).

Keller, Alexander & Ward, Frazer. Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant Garde Blockbuster, Cinema Journal, Vol. 45, No.2 (Winter, 2006), pp. 3-16

This article engages with the work of Matthew Barney critically, focusing particularly on its relation to the historical and cultural contexts in which it arguably sits. Keller and Ward primarily concern themselves with Barneys conflicting fusion of the blockbuster genre and performance art, and the socio-political implications of this act. Although it is useful to engage with critical perspectives when researching a subject, at times the tone of the article is unnecessarily condescending and the language overly verbose. It is important to acknowledge as both a strength and a limitation, that the criticisms made are mainly political and the work is largely silent in the sphere of aesthetic analysis. Thus the article was more useful in situating the artist and his work in an art-historical, ideological realm, and less useful as a piece of visual analysis.


Raizada, Kristen. Dominant Discourses and Social Fictions: Matthew Barney Plays the Body to Becoming-Woman, M.A. diss., 2007, California State University, Long Beach, In Dissertations & Theses: Full Text [database on-line]; available from http://www.proquest.com (publication number AAT 1448166; accessed April 26, 2010)

An intellectually engaged document, Raizada makes a balanced, well thought out argument, considering both the criticisms and praise of Barney equally and then forging her own path through these dominant discourses to bring new light to the subject. She argues that criticisms of Barney's engagement with gender and identity politics reveals that the white, heterosexual male artist is also restrained by a gendered art criticism. For Raizada, the importance is on shedding codification and engaging with the act of becoming. The work is extensively researched, citing a sweeping range of secondary material, reflecting an engagement with the full body of criticism on the topic at hand. This provided an extremely useful summary of the critical arguments surrounding Barney's practice but again was less useful in the realm of visual analysis.