Matthew Barney's 39 at present. he did burst onto the art scene when he was super young. Drawing Restraint 1 is from 1987; he was 20 then.

you actually can't see much of Barney's work on video, except for bootleg copies. there's a 30-minute segment from Cremaster 3 out on official dvd, called 'The Order'. i presume Drawing Restraint 9 will get a dvd release at some point, since it was released through IFC Film and everything.

i go back and forth on my opinion of Matthew Barney's... method of distribution, or whatever you'd call it. reportedly, the major reason he doesn't release his films on video/dvd is to 'force' people into art houses and museums/galleries to see them. it's cool and not cool. i like the fact that he supports those spaces [and they've served him super-well, been very good to him etc, so his approach certainly makes sense]. at the same time, it's not an especially pop/ulist take on the art world. so yeah, i'm not sure.

viewing the bootleg Cremaster dvds is hmmm. you definitely get a sense of the pure weirdness of his work, but since they're dubs off a telecine or something, the bootlegs look much, much more 'video' than the prints do. well, i mean, basically they look like bootlegs. for me the visual beauty of his films is just overwhelming when you see them in-theatre, but that aspect doesn't really come across on the bootlegs, which are more about just absorbing the plot, characters, and particular symbolic logic. the short excerpt from Cremaster 3 that you can get on regular dvd, that's a good indication of what his films look like in a theatre.

i should think the bootleg dvds would be fairly easy to find in London, but if you have trouble Ollie, i could mail you dvd-r's, no prob.

in contrast to Barney, Fassbinder-on-dvd is absolutely endless. there's, god, maybe 20-25 films out on dvd so far? and more coming. obviously, Fassbinder was never a gallery/museum artist, just a filmmaker and stage dude. in a lot of ways they could hardly be more different, actually. queer/straight, fast/slow, rapid-German-talking/almost-no-dialogue, etc.

if you ever get the chance to check out a Matthew Barney exhibit at a museum [whether it includes film screenings or not], i totally recommend it. it's always a party. just insane Rockstar Shit for everyone to gape at. all Barney's work is essentially about [1] the evolution of form, [2] the artist as an athlete and vice-versa, and [3] competitions and trials [sort-of a subset of 2]. like his hero Harry Houdini, he basically works in the medium of feats. he's constantly climbing museums, which i find brilliant: the idea is the scale; the idea is to scale. he's my favorite living American museum-artist and a big current obsession of mine, so you can expect gobs of posts about him here.

speaking of him being hot, i found this picture from his J Crew modeling days. he sure went on to pursue a very different kind of aesthetic and image of masculinity.

xox, math+