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 matthew barney
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Vaseline and whales at Barney’s UK debut. People were literally queuing round the block to catch a glimpse of Matthew Barney’s new show at London’s Serpentine when it opened last week. But then the American artist has some of the most inventive, personal imagery ever used in art; his films are visceral, surreal, fluid and brilliantly bizarre.This, surprisingly, is his first solo show in a major British gallery and it’s a tight fit – arguably, he should have had a giant space to screen all the accompanying films. Some pieces in the exhibition are very little, some exceptionally large. His tiny pencil drawings play with the same themes as his films – hybrids, death, physicality, metamorphosis. They are framed in opaque plastic or resin frames like chunky chopping boards. The central room houses the remnants of a performance Barney gave in private before the show’s opening, involving climbing around the space, vats of Vaseline and drawing on the ceiling. The real draw, however, are the two enormous sculptural works. One resembles a giant whale turd made from dead prawns, lying against a room-sized slab of petroleum jelly and near a rejected spinal chord. Another space has whale-size barnacles, discarded furniture and again lots of Vaseline. It’s the materials that make these sculptures so interesting. Who else could make self-lubricating plastic their own? Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint is at the Serpentine Gallery, London, until 11 November 07.
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