"A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted"
About this Quote
Matthew Barney is describing a bait-and-switch: he borrows the visual grammar of broadcast sports not because his work is “about sports,” but because sports TV is one of the last widely shared languages of looking. Those angles - the sideline tracking shot, the authoritative overhead, the clean “you are here” establishing frame - are trust signals. They tell viewers: this is real-time, rule-bound, legible. You don’t need an art history degree; you just need the muscle memory of Sunday afternoons and highlight reels.
The intent is strategic anchoring. Barney wants the audience to enter on familiar rails, to accept the camera as a neutral witness. Once the scene is “normalized,” he can start bending it: action turns ritualistic, bodies become symbols, and space slips from arena into dream logic. The sports aesthetic functions like a stabilizer on a handheld shot; it calms the viewer long enough for the work to destabilize them.
The subtext is slyly critical. Broadcast sports doesn’t merely record events; it manufactures meaning through framing, repetition, and instant analysis. By mimicking those angles, Barney exposes how quickly we mistake a camera’s confidence for truth. When the image “becomes abstracted,” the viewer confronts their own complicity: the desire to be guided, to have spectacle explained, to have ambiguity edited out.
Context matters: Barney’s project has long fused athletic exertion, myth, and industrial pageantry into high-production spectacle. Using sports coverage as a gateway makes the avant-garde feel less like a private club and more like a mass broadcast - right up until it stops playing by the rules.
The intent is strategic anchoring. Barney wants the audience to enter on familiar rails, to accept the camera as a neutral witness. Once the scene is “normalized,” he can start bending it: action turns ritualistic, bodies become symbols, and space slips from arena into dream logic. The sports aesthetic functions like a stabilizer on a handheld shot; it calms the viewer long enough for the work to destabilize them.
The subtext is slyly critical. Broadcast sports doesn’t merely record events; it manufactures meaning through framing, repetition, and instant analysis. By mimicking those angles, Barney exposes how quickly we mistake a camera’s confidence for truth. When the image “becomes abstracted,” the viewer confronts their own complicity: the desire to be guided, to have spectacle explained, to have ambiguity edited out.
Context matters: Barney’s project has long fused athletic exertion, myth, and industrial pageantry into high-production spectacle. Using sports coverage as a gateway makes the avant-garde feel less like a private club and more like a mass broadcast - right up until it stops playing by the rules.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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