Trottman’s main argument is that both Beuys and Barney use space and time to create their own realities. In order to understand the importance of the work of these artists, we must first understand Barney’s investment as a student of modern physics, “Beuys felt that time and space rested on a continuum that it was his duty to exploit”(145). Barney’s work continued Beuys’ investigations but complemented Beuys by reworking the relationship between action and object. Barney’s work uses performance and objects shown in video format, so we understand everything about the space, what we question is the temporal, or when it all happened. Bueys performances occur only once and his sculptural objects left behind are the residue of his actions transmitting meaning through space and time (148). What I found interesting is the material decisions that each artist made to create a convincing argument about the importance of their respective spatial and temporal arguments. For example, Beuys used fat in Fat Room, initially lining the room with fat, marking his ritualized space, and then performing an action, placing the fat under his knee and leaving a cast of the negative of his knee pit, creating sculptural objects that were made through action. Barney’s material decisions were ephemeral in the sense that they clearly referenced his actions, like in Field Dressing when he used petroleum jelly, inserted into his orifices, which support and exaggerate his actions but act less as independent sculptural objects.
Spector’s essay contains more descriptions of each project, how they compare and compliment each other on a much more obsessive scale. Spector also clearly identifies that both artist’s work is autobiographical yet the action is Beuys work occurs in the public performed and Barney’s occurs in the private preformed. Spector’s explanation of Beuys’s Fat Room and Mathew Barney’s Field Dressing, from material choice to metaphor are necessary in understanding each work. The material choice Beuys’s Fat Room, fat and felt, are personal symbols for the concept of renewal. Fat can be liquid or solid and is easily transformed between the two. Felt is composed of recycled animal fibers, and have commonly had a previous life. Spector explains that Beuys uses these materials to “expand from the idea of personal rebirth to that of worldwide political and social awakening”(16-17). Barney’s material choices in Field Dressing are particularly interesting because they reinforce his personal analysis of the functioning of the internal organs in the human body. He breaks this functioning down to three main components, “’Situation,’ contains unadulterated, raw drive. In this state, energy is unorganized and essentially useless but ripe with potential. ‘Condition,’…is a disciplinary structure that processes this crude and random energy…’Production,’ makes this force manifest to the world via anal and oral channels”(25). After defining these conditions, Barney’s video installation of Field Dressing shows Barney naked and harnessed in climbing equipment, raising and lowering himself from a tub of petroleum jelly. On another screen we see a close up of him filling his orifices with the jelly, in effect altering the production components of the body, in an attempt to create a “hermetically sealed, but potentially explosive vessel”(25). Spector’s assertion of each of the artist’s work is that Beuys is attempting to come to a resolution exploiting his personal metaphors while Barney is creating chaos after defining his theory of the production system.
I have to say, I am not particularly interested in the depth of this work. I find the material choices and relationship to the body interesting, because each of the artists have specific, personal reasons for utilizing these materials but the extent of which these critics accept the metaphors as effectively communicating their ideas is a stretch. I see this work for its shock value, and I find the reasons behind some of the actions far fetched and confusing. I accept and agree that this work is avant-garde and pushing the limits of conceptual art while also questioning itself. However, I find that it is hard to understand without a long explanation, which makes me question its effectiveness.
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