The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary

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Diana Chiorean had her degree in 2005 in Theatre Studies at the Theatre and Television Faculty of Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, and had also one year of grant at Bremen University in Germany. Now she is a Master of Arts student at Bremen. The case study she proposed here is focused on the works of one of the most interesting European photo and video artists today. Since the beginning of the 90’s, Matthew Barney entered the art world to almost instant controversy and success. As a formal sign of his ars poetica of plurality, he displays a multi-dimensional body of work, extended through both space and time. His practice encompasses all media, without any hierarchy, just like the sequence of his “Cycle” is claiming total defiance towards any mimesis or tribute to linearity. Drawings, photographs and sculptures convey the films as autonomous material entities. The axes of Barney’s iconography vary from an impeccable American imagery - sports, Broadway culture - to European mysticism, the cult of the museum included. This attempt, as spectacular as it gets, resembles the oxymoronic spirit of collage between the romantic idea of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) and its inevitable fall into its entropy, the postmodern pattern of schizophrenia, or the effect of its hubris.

Keywords: Matthew Barney, drawing, phorography, sculpture