Matthew Barney : The Semiotic Sculptural Body

Matthew Barney often referred to his artistic practice involving heterogeneous media and materials − from film to photography, from installations to petroleum jelly artefacts − as sculpture. The sculptural status of his artistic practice resides in its capability to shape a common conceptual root in different material forms, beyond any hierarchical classification of artistic mediums or genres. The paper approaches Matthew Barney’s sculpture through the relationship between such a heterogeneous family of forms, figures and materials and the much more abstract diagrammatic semantic core by which it is generated. That is why in Barney’s sculptural system abstraction plays a prominent role, both in the usual meaning of non-figurative quality and as a characteristic of the abstracts general conceptual categories he has been constantly going back to in the ensemble of his work and that were drawn from the semantic domain of sport and biology.